Jack Inirio works behind the glass at D’Manielly Express, on Atwells Avenue, in Providence, which transfers money for Western Union and sells cell phones and phone cards. The store gets about 200 people a week sending money abroad.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

PROVIDENCE — For five years, Paola Roca faithfully sent money in increments of $100 or $200 to her mother in Bolivia.

The Western Union she used in the Olneyville neighborhood has charged her as much as $25 per $100, she says. It was a big chunk of change for a person making $6.35 an hour at a jewelry factory, but she paid it.

Her mother was sick. Western Union was the only company that did money transfers in Warnes, Bolivia, where her mother lived. The money paid for her medications and medical expenses, and it paid for food and utilities. Western Union got the money there in minutes.

During those five years, Roca sent a total of $9,600. She paid Western Union $1,200.

“Think of what you could do with that kind of money,” she says wistfully.

Roca, like others across the United States, has been thinking about the amount of money that she and others have sent to their loved ones, and the companies that profit from the transaction.

Tomorrow, a group of Rhode Island immigrant-advocacy groups will launch a boycott of Western Union. When participants march from the Olneyville Neighborhood Association to a Western Union office in their neighborhood, they will join a nationwide boycott of Western Union started earlier this month in California by 157 groups demanding that the money-transfer giant lower its fees and invest some of its profit in the communities that have enriched it.

According to World Bank figures from 2005, people from around the world sent $205 billion abroad. Wire companies, Western Union chief among them, earned $30 billion from the exchange.

Given the billions sent abroad, people have to realize the economic clout they have, says Shanna Kurland, one of the organizers of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association, which serves as the local base for the Transnational Institute for Grassroots Research and Action, or TIGRA, which is leading the boycott.

Francis Calpotura, the founder and executive director of TIGRA, said he wants money-transfer companies to be held to standards outlined in the federal Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, and to commit to investing in the community. The Community Reinvestment Act is intended to encourage institutions to help communities where they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

“The question is, who is benefiting outside of the family? When they send money, what are the hidden costs when people lose from 6 to 15 percent of the total amount they send?” Calpotura said. “What is the responsibility of companies that benefit from this practice?”

In Rhode Island, TIGRA has surveyed more than 700 immigrants who send money abroad. Roca and Shana Kurland, organizers of the TIGRA initiative in Rhode Island, say that, according to the surveys, people send money to their homelands to pay for food, schooling, medical supplies, hospital bills and sometimes to pay off the agents known as coyotes who brought some of them across the border illegally.

“If we did not have debt, if we were not hungry, people would not come here to suffer in a foreign country,” says Roca.

The average person who sends money to family abroad is a low-wage immigrant who makes around $7 an hour and sends $300 a month, Roca said.

“Our goal is to make people aware. The companies live off of hard-working immigrants. It’s a multimillion-dollar corporation. They know they can take advantage of it. They know no other company can send money in three minutes. They have stores all over the place,” Kurland says.

Daniel Diaz, a spokesman for Western Union, said that his company offers prices competitive with other companies. “If you look at the industry, independent consumers have more options today. As a result of competition, you will find prices are competitive,” he said.

The company offers a same-day service that arrives in minutes for $14.99 per $100 and a next-day service for $9.99. The company has connections in more than 200 countries, he says.

Diaz said that Western Union has contributed to natural disaster relief in other countries and is empowering communities by contributing to nonprofit organizations around the world.

Nehemy Theodore, a Haitian minister who lives in Providence, attended one of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association’s first meetings about the money transfers known as remittances.

Theodore says the economy is terrible in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, with about 85 percent of the population not working. He sends $300 every three months to relatives. He encourages people in his homeland to start a small business. With about $400, you can start a small business selling food and other merchandise, he says. “Most of the people survive on the Holy Ghost,” he said.

Richard McIntyre, a professor of economics at the University of Rhode Island, said that although the cost of sending money is now much lower than in the late ’90s and the competition for business has grown, the rate of decline in fees has slowed down. The cost for sending money was around 15 percent in the 1990s and now is at about 7 to 9 percent, he said.

The Pew Hispanic Center says a substantial number of banks and credit unions in the United States have launched initiatives in remittance services, but they have managed to capture only a small fraction of the market dominated by the wire-transfer firms.

.

Manuel Inirio, the owner of D’Manielly Express, a store on Atwells Avenue that transfers money for Western Union, also sells cell phones and phone cards and arranges for the shipment of automobiles to the Dominican Republic.

Inirio said he gets about 200 people a week sending money abroad. He agrees that fees for sending money could be lower, but it is the company that sets the fees. He says the agents get very little of the money.

“That is why the majority of businesses cannot exist by just sending money grams,” he says.

tpina@projo.com