Freedom Socialist • Vol. 23, No. 3 • October-December 2002
As Argentina's economy dives,
by Monica Hill
workers seize factories and defy repressionLast December, for the first time in their history, Argentines demanded and got the resignation of a democratically elected president. They had good reason.
In his 1999 electoral campaign, Fernando de la Rúa promised to relieve the poverty and despair that came from more than a decade of austerity imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Instead, he slashed pensions and salaries by 13 percent and forced wages to be paid through the banks. Then he limited the amount of money that individuals could withdraw and froze savings accounts.
When protesters took to the streets, de la Rúa declared a murderous state of siege. But rather than stemming the tide of opposition, this provoked employed and unemployed workers, students, shopkeepers and retirees into unstoppable motion. The Argentine economy reeled, and the government defaulted on its $141 billion foreign debt.
Nine months and four presidents later, the economy, in its fifth year of recession, continues to plummet. So does the credibility of Argentina's politicians and bankers, who are following the dictates of U.S.-dominated international financiers.
Unemployment, which officially stands at more than 30 percent, is actually much higher. A 70 percent devaluation of the peso has stripped savings accounts of more than $66 billion Ñ one-half the gross national product.
Discontent and protest remain intense. Highway blockades, strikes, factory takeovers and pot-banging demonstrations, or cacerolazos, light up the landscape of this vast Latin American nation, ripe for revolutionary change and grappling with how to pursue it.
Demand for jobs met with premeditated cop violence. On June 26 this year, the piquetero movement of unemployed workers peacefully mounted twelve roadblocks on the main access routes and bridges to Buenos Aires, the capital. They wanted jobs and social benefits for the jobless.
But before the demonstrations that were to accompany these roadblocks even started, police provocateurs, disguised as piqueteros, started a riot. They fired tear gas and rubber bullets, smashed windows, looted shops, burned a bus Ñ and then they murdered two young piquetero leaders at the train station in the town of Avellaneda. More than 90 people were injured and 160 arrested. That same day, the gendarmes raided the offices of two leftist groups in Avellaneda. The goal was to intimidate protesters into silence after months of roiling dissent and to isolate the piquetero movement, which has been in the forefront of the rebellion, from the rest of the angry people of Argentina.
Police and government sources, faithfully parroted by the Argentine mainstream media, immediately reported that the deaths of Darío Santillán and Maximiliano Costequi that day were the result of fights between different groups of piqueteros, and that these groups were also responsible for the looting.
No one believed them. Instead of dampening militancy, the murders sparked more.
In a massive display of solidarity, 50,000 outraged workers and students and housewives and retirees marched the next day, shouting, "We are all piqueteros!" Within 24 hours, the press was forced to release photos and videos of the police executions. The government then beat a hasty retreat and suspended the cops for their "atrocious manhunt."
But President Duhalde, who was widely held responsible for the killings, knew he could never survive politically to the scheduled elections in late 2003. He was forced to move elections forward to the spring.
The U.S. has remained unmoved by Argentina's dire economic straits. Said Otto Reich of the State Department, "We're going to help Argentina, but first it is important for the country to resolve its economic fundamentals and arrive at an accord with the IMF." That "accord" depends on such things as carving still more deeply into public spending by laying off additional numbers of public workers and cutting wages.
Argentina has already paid off the principal of its initial loans. The emergency bailout Duhalde is forced to beg for would go toward mounting interest payments. Whatever money he eventually gets from the IMF will never reach the pockets of Argentina's desperate, but will be used to repay the IMF and other creditors.
Not a day without protest. Retirees march weekly to protest the disappearance of their benefits. Popular assemblies organize demonstrations and devise makeshift neighborhood survival mechanisms. Piqueteros, the majority of whom are women, routinely block highways. Strikes for back pay and sane working conditions erupt regularly, waged by everyone from transport and atomic energy workers to farmers, public employees and bingo parlor workers.
Stunning factory occupations are exposing the weaknesses of business owners and managers while promising further leaps in the political assuredness of workers. Best known are the takeovers of the Zanón factory in Neuquén, 700 miles from Buenos Aires, and the Brukman garment factory, just outside the capital.
The Brukman workers, all women and many of them immigrants, took over their factory in December after their bosses abandoned the building. They now run the factory through workers' committees. The women's blue overalls have become a familiar presence in demonstrations as they strive to teach about workers' control.
Company seizures now number more than 70, and at least 1,200 factories, bakeries, hospitals and clinics are operating under some form of workers' self-management. When police break in to retake a building, they are run off by supportive piqueteros and members of the popular assemblies.
The First National Conference of Plants and Factories Occupied and in Struggle took place on August 25. One thousand delegates at that time decided to hold a national march in support of occupied factories on September 10, to join upcoming piquetero marches and to participate in the next National Assembly of Employed and Unemployed Workers on September 28.
What next? Most of these bold actions are taken by workers in fledgling independent unions. In a few other cases, they receive the reluctant permission of one of the three labor federations tied to the Peronist party, which acts as a brake on labor militancy much like the Democratic Party does in the U.S. And with similarly disastrous results: today, only 20 percent of Argentina's working class is organized into unions. Ten years ago, it was 90 percent.
Those in the streets and occupied factories are still an advance contingent. Many more workers must be won to a fully conscious revolutionary perspective if the crisis is to be resolved Ñ other than through the complete crushing of the working class.
Argentina's Left can hasten this process by being the best fighters and organizers in the day-to-day struggles while continually promoting the need for workers and the oppressed to set a course completely independent of the capitalists and their parties — a course culminating in socialist revolution.
And that is the only realistic end point of the ferocious demand "All of them out!" which resonates across Argentina.
As Brukman occupation leader Celia Martinez says confidently, "We have shown we can run the factory, and we can run the country."
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