debt collection | The Che Underground

Back in April, Ray Brandes introduced us to a novel Spanish debt-collection practice and intiated a conversation about the spiritual and physical debts we owe each other. (For me, this whole blog has been a way to express gratitude to all of you for shaping me and helping me realize potential I couldn’t have foreseen.)

I’d like to get a little more mundane, perhaps, and think about the actual objects we pooled and traded. Money wasn’t equally distributed among us, we know, but it seems everybody managed to contribute something to the economy: sharing cigarettes, giving cool boots or a coat to a friend, making a cassette that got handed around, maybe going in on ownership of a vehicle or an amp …

Unlike a straight-up purchase, there’s a social connection and a story behind every trade or gift we made. I’d like to hear some more of them!

Read moreGifts and barters

(Tell-Tale Heart/Town Crier Ray Brandes takes up a karmic collection with 25 years’ interest.)

In the cafés of Madrid, in the outdoor flea markets of Barcelona, and along the beaches of the southern coast of Spain, everyone is talking about “La Crisis.” The Spanish economy is now faltering badly, on the edge of a recession brought on by the collapse of a building boom; an average household debt 120 percent above the gross domestic product; and an unemployment rate of over 10 percent, the highest in Europe.

One company, however, which employs a curious and uniquely Spanish trade, has seen its business surge in this environment of unpaid bills. El Cobrador del Frac, the “debt collector in top hat and tails,” exists to humiliate debtors, playing on their sense of public shame. For a percentage of the collection, you can have your debtor’s footsteps dogged by a man conspicuously dressed like Fred Astaire and carrying a briefcase emblazoned with his trade. It is a shrewd and imaginative premise: that people are quick to repay the money they owe when their indebtedness is paraded in public.