Few stop to observe the woman who is sitting next to the entrance door to a supermarket in the south of Quito. It is small, one and a half meters high; his hair is full of gray.
With his callused and wrinkled hands, he holds some onions and avocados. Throughout the day it sells between USD 10 and 15, he counted on Wednesday, March 17. When it rains, as in recent days, your sales they go down. Even so, she must collect the quota that she pays the chulco daily: between USD 2 and 3 a day.
At 78 years old, without a formal job and with an unfinished schooling, his only option to financing are the loans What a man she has known for three years does to her. “I am grateful, because that is how I have a job,” says the woman. Her eyes appear to have discolored, but she actually has glaucoma that could blind her in a few years.
The one who lends him money is Germán. Define your job as a “social service.” It handles economic terms such as “capital, risk, earnings, amortization and dynamizing the economy”. He is an eloquent, elegant and agile man. He is more than 70 years old and has a vitality that allows him to walk 7 kilometers a day to collect the fees of the illicit loans.
His “clients” are informal traders, women, the elderly and migrants. For Germán, loans They are “agreements between people of their word, to whom the doors are closed in the banks.”
The amounts delivered range from USD 50 to USD 500. The monthly interest is 15%, that is, around 10 times more expensive than a loan of consumption in a bank or 20 times more than a formal productive loan. It operates through networks, which consist of bringing together a group of merchants and offer them money. A member of the group is chosen by the sellers themselves as their representative and is the one who finally signs a document in which they agree to cancel the total amount of the disbursed amount. The transaction it happens outside the law.
On the morning of that Wednesday, Germán allows a journalistic team to accompany him to collect the installments of the credits delivered to a group of women who sell socks and fruits in a crowded street in Guamaní.
He, dressed in a blue jacket, cashmere trousers and a shirt, carries a leather-lined diary. There he keeps some small colored cardstock cards. Are printed papers where you write down the names of the borrowers. There is a grid where you write the date, the credit and the balance.
Upon arriving at the site, one of the women greets him seriously. Before handing over the quota, call another saleswoman and then another. There is a problem. One of them claims that it has already made one of the payments. Germán takes out his colored cards. They review how the amounts were entered and, after a few minutes, the Doubts are cleared. “You know that I support you to get ahead, but we all have to be responsible little people,” says Germán. If he was not paid, he says he should pursue a lawsuit against the saleswoman who signed for the group.
Why don’t they go to a bank? “I don’t know about those things,” a woman answers curtly. He does not know to read nor to write. This is evident when he asks his partner to read the label of the bus approaching.
Other chulqueros always look for the same profile: informal traders, older adults, market vendors, women and people with little education. They are people who do not have bank accounts and who, for the most part, would not qualify for loans in the bank.
According to the latest bank inclusion report of the central bankAs of September 2020, 74% of the adult population accesses a banking service. However, only 28% have a credit.
Germán says he has a network of older adults whom he “helps”. He has reached about 50 borrowers per month and earnings of up to $ 3,000.
– .
