A man of action

By Reyshimar Arguelles

They say we can learn much about a country by the way it treats its citizens. But it’s only when citizens begin to take matters into their own hands that a country shows its true face.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and people will do what they can to survive in a system that does not always work for the best of us. You can forage for food, you can take any obscure job, or you can sell a body part just to get by. But it’s one thing to subsist, and it’s another totally different thing to reclaim one’s dignity in the face of exploitation.

Indeed, the economic question includes the question of whether people should be treated as objects. And for sure, neither loyalty nor wages define who a person really is. We cannot help, however, to view exploitative conditions as necessary under an economic system that thrives on reproducing such conditions and makes people accept them regardless.

Yielding to these conditions leads to a refusal of that necessary element in a human being’s life: the potential to rebel.

In any case, rebellion constitutes an act of simultaneous assertion and refusal. But it also involves a process of becoming of the systems that maintain the exploitative nature of the economic order. When people start to take action against such systems, the situation becomes all the more clear. The system’s weaknesses are pulled into the open, scrutinized, and made to be reminders that the structures of control are fragile.

If that is the case, then we can learn a great deal about a recent 9-hour hostage-taking situation involving a former security guard at the V-Mall in the city of San Juan. Alchie Paray, who had been a security guard of the Safeguard Armor Security Corporation, held dozens of people at gunpoint and demanded an audience with the media.

Where once he had the task of protecting mall goers, he became the very threat every mall guard has to confront. But the irony cannot adequately explain how “disgruntled” he was, if the word itself would suffice to explain his actions.

Nonetheless, what he did was not merely out of a desire to sow terror or acquire financial gain. Paray’s demands manifested a need to not only overcome his material situation, but also to assert solidarity with his fellow guards. He did not intend to hurt anyone, and he could be just as guilty about and aware of the emotional trauma he caused. But clearly, he would not be led to such an act in the absence of a catalyst.

It was learned that Paray had numerous issues with both the management of the mall and the security agency that employed him. In his view, as with any other worker who suffers in the same shoes, he experienced injustice when a certain tenant had bribed his bosses to have him reassigned, a situation that entails inconvenience on the part of a security guard.

It may seem inconsequential to some, but there is no way of telling the actual extent of Paray’s exploitation that compelled him to take such a move that would have cost him his life.

What matters, ultimately, is that Paray had his bosses apologize for being horrible people. He also addressed his fellow security guards in an act of solidarity that had defined resistance movements in the past. For sure, it was a triumph not only for Paray, but also for the entire labor class that is still confronting its historical situation.

The incident ended. Paray was tackled and slapped with criminal charges for attempted murder and illegal firearms possession. But what is clear, however, is that people will always have a chance to change an entire system if they can only view their situations more closely.

We can only imagine then what people under such exploitative conditions are capable of. And unless those in power introduce a panacea to the ills that maintain this system, a restless yearning for rebellion will always exist.