Carlos Danel and Carlos Labarthe turned a nonprofit that lent money to Mexico’s poor into one of the country’s most profitable banks.
Micaela Rivera Abendes with her cheese in her mother's kitchen. She receives a credit loan by Microfinance Institution Compartamos.
But rather than inspiring the admiration of colleagues in the world of microlending — so named for the tiny loans it grants — the co-executives of Compartamos are being villified as “pawnbrokers” and “money lenders.”
They are the center of a fractious debate: must microfinance become big business?
On one side stand traditional microlenders, like the economist Muhammad Yunus, founder of the most famous microlender, the Grameen Bank, and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. On the other side are the Two Carloses, as they are widely known in this tight-knit world that gave them their start as starry-eyed idealists.
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