When this small man enters a room, his quick eyes seem to capture the entire atmosphere in an instant. This is what might have saved Walden Bello’s life several times during the years of living underground, when he was persecuted by the henchmen of the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. His firm handshake tells us something about his determination and inner strength. That’s why today he is fighting against the growing power of the big corporations. And he does more than protesting. For the sake of freedom, Walden Bello has always been willing to push the boundaries. His biggest coup – the burglary of the World Bank – was over 20 years ago.

„We were dressed as managers with ties and the like and pretended to be returning from an important appointment. The security man was of good nature; he just waved us through and said, “Don’t worry about your IDs, just pass!” When we were inside, we went straight to the main office and opened the cabinets. And there, we found everything. This worked again and again. For two years, we went in and out and were good friends with the doorman. In the end, we had about 3000 pages of confidential documents about the collaboration between the World Bank and the Philippine dictator. Then we went up to the press and wrote a book which became an underground best seller. I’m very happy that it brought forward the fight against Marcos.”

Walden Bello must have been the only bank burglar who didn’t care about money. He wanted to disclose the secret deals with which Marcos sold his land to foreign corporations and made himself rich. The criminal energy of the dictator left him no other choice but to break the law himself.

“I think it is inevitable to infringe the rules, if you are resisting dangerous developments. This burglary and the theft of the documents just seemed necessary to us in order to get to know the truth. The conventional methods of research and analysis are often too limited. You need unconventional methods to get to the truth, even if you might have to go to prison. Actually, we didn’t think about this back then. But later, they told us, we could have ended up behind bars for 25 or 30 years. Luckily, we didn’t have to go!”

Today, Walden Bello doesn’t need to dress up in order to pass the security men of the World Bank, the WTO or the IMF. Even though he remains dangerous for the rulers of the world economy, they wait for him to come. For this lank man from South East Asia is a brilliant mind and a successful activist. It was partly the result of his work, that WTO-negotiations about the worldwide privatization in Cancun, Mexico, failed.

„I believe, the worldwide globalization is experiencing major difficulties and it is going through a deep crisis of legitimation.  Cancun was a setback just as the negotiations of Miami. We are offered the chance to change this process. The basic principle is obvious: Market and profit cannot be the guidelines for politics. Rather, society and its cultural values have to monitor the market and the companies so that the community can survive in a sustainable and just way. That’s why there is not only one, but several alternatives. And this is our problem: Both the bureaucratic socialism and the modern neo-liberalism have a model, which they want to realize worldwide. But you cannot force this basic model onto multifaceted societies. That will only turn into a disaster. Who wants to change the course of the world cannot take his time. An activist always checks his watch in front of him, so that he doesn’t get lost in all those pretty words about a different future.“