Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 223
During the socialist years before my arrival in Bolivia, the party rulers heavily promoted
a new form of corporate organization. It was called “cooperative” and it was modeled
after Franklin Roosevelt’s rural cooperatives. Its most essential provision requires that
voting rights be based on the concept of one vote per participant. It matters not how
many shares of the organization each participant acquired. Investment does not enter
into the equation of management control. The socialists loved this because they could
legally use the people’s money and retain control of the organizations by deftly
maneuvering the election of the cooperatives’ boards. They improved on FDR’s ability
to control the management of rural cooperatives.
The American school had existed for more than a decade as a non-incorporated group
of parents seeking to give their children the education they wanted. It had never owned
any real estate assets or other major property. With the advent of better times under
President Barrientos, we decided to build our new campus and become a permanent
institution. For this, we needed a legal organization. The laws of the country were very
archaic and we concluded that it would be worthwhile to use the socialists’ own tool to
organize ourselves. None of us was going to invest disproportionate amounts of money
nor were we going to receive any salaries or emoluments. Thus, incorporating as a
cooperative made sense and was easy to achieve. In 1967 we formed the
“Cochabamba Cooperative School” and I was elected to its board of directors in1968. In
1972 I was elected President of its board, a position in which I served for two years.
The years of my involvement were challenging but exhilarating. I was deeply involved in
the purchase of the land and the construction of our first and major classroom building.
The fact that we built a high brick fence around our seven or eight acres of land turned
out to be important in retaining it when things changed following President Barrientos’
death in 1969. The tract was a rock and thorn-bush covered sloping piece of the alluvial
plane on the north slopes of the valley. It had no green vegetation, access, electricity,
water or sewer. I arranged to drill a water well, route an access road and supply
electricity. We built a septic tank of adequate capacity. When I visited again in the late
1980s, I was very proud to see how the campus had improved. Most of the buildings
from the master plan had been completed, and even the palms, eucalyptus and other
native trees that I planted had grown. It was an oasis of greenery and learning. Those
parents who followed me deserve all the recognition for having given Cochabamba such
a fine institution.
Guessing, correctly as it turned out, that there was a market for our product, we set
school registration rates at fairly high levels. We also received a lot of in-kind help from
American contracting companies whose employees’ children attended the school. In
this manner we funded the construction without having to borrow money. The American
Embassy in La Paz helped us meet the payroll for all our expatriate teachers on an ongoing
basis. Such help removed a lot of control from our management authority, but we
could not have delivered the education we wanted without it.
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