SENTIENT TIMES Feb/Mar 2002

Letter From Argentina

Christina Feijoó and Lucio Salas

Dear friends, throughout these days we have received from you large amounts of solidarity messages for the Argentinean people and their undaunted struggle, as well as messages showing your concerns for our own situation. We deeply thank you all for those warm expressions.

We are participating from the rear as we are into our 50s, and also because we do not want to interfere too much with the struggles that new generations are staging. We have spent two days in the same anguish that we caused to our parents thirty years ago and have preached for restraint during the clashes.

Though we perceive that the majority of you have a fair degree of information concerning the past events—better than that of the majority of Argentineans, slaves of what it is “sold” to them by the mass media concentrated into two or three groups—we are going to tightly and somehow disorderly summarize the events and attempt to make a first interpretation.

The popular uprising that forced the government of the Alliance to resign started shortly after the last measures that restricted fund withdrawals to both business and people were announced by the Economy Minister. This measure may be reasonable in Europe or the US, but here it was preposterous, as the great majority of the population is entirely alien to the banking system: they do not have bank accounts or credit cards, etc. They did not do it out of rational considerations, but for the insistence—highly irrational—of purport-ing to continue paying the interest of an external debt of over 150 billion US dollars. This caused a huge cash scarcity and its immediate consequence was to instantly wipe out all the “informal” economic sector, which represented 40%–50% of all economic activity. Thus, in a couple of weeks poverty transformed into hunger—literally—as the workers who were not dependent on a steady job, such as cardboard pickers, street vendors, dog-walkers, electricians, plumbers, etc., lost their scarce income.

The “middle classes” (today in Argentina “middle class” means someone with a job) had to cope with 250 US dollars per week that was the limit allowed to withdraw from the banks; with that the “middle classes” hardly could eat and pay one or another bill from public services—privatised as the neoliberal dogma demands—that are the most expensive in the world. This provoked an immediate flood from the poorest, from those marginalized from the formal economy, who arrived to the city from the suburbs searching for food, clothes and diapers in the waste. These groups of the poor went to ask for food in the supermarkets forming long queues in the early hours of the morning. Some supermarkets gave away a few bags, others none and it was this situation that originated the raids. Poor people got into supermarkets and pocketed the food.

You may have seen the images and listened to the heartbreaking testimonies. This happened first during the week of the 10th to the 15th of December in the provinces of the country where poverty is worse. It happened in several provinces. The people intended to take the food away, something which was fairly pre-established: not to touch the cash tills, alcohol or items that were not of first need, and the target was the big supermarket chains (all of them owned by overseas conglomerates). Very soon these large supermarkets increased their armed security, some even provided their employees with clubs to scatter the poor. It was then that people started raiding small shops, many of them owned by Asian traders who lacked of any security. The raids gradually went out of control, as there is no leadership capable of containing millions of people in hunger. They started with food but soon after they took everything. The raids in some cases took place in modest shops owned by people also under sub-sistence incomes, which resulted in the tragic battle of the poor against the poor.

We do not wish to enter into a sociological analysis of this complex situation, but provide you with a personal opinion that we have not had the time to mature. As we can see, in these situations resulting from the vanishing of the State (that is, the disappearance of the welfare State and the permanence of the repressive State) and the sheer defenselessness of the poor, the robberies express the anger of citizens long withheld who were deprived of their basic rights.

The “middle classes” flooded the streets with their pots and pans; more than a million people (over 2.7 million people living in the city of Buenos Aires itself) peacefully taking over the city, demanding the resignation of the Economy minister, Cavallo (the not long past IMF hero) and of president de la Rúa. These people spontaneously went out to the streets, self-assembled—there were no placards from any political party or association—heading in large walking columns to the Plaza de Mayo, Congress and the presidential residence in Olivos. The Plaza de Mayo filled up and as the minister of Economy resigned, the people stayed there demanding the same from the president. The people stayed overnight at Plaza de Mayo; at that time many leftist activists had gathered, all of them unarmed and with a pacific spirit. The repression started around 3 am in order to vacate the Plaza de Mayo. Families with their children and elders left leaving behind the youngsters. At mid-morning on Thursday the fight for the Plaza, which was the Plaza of the Revolution, of our Independence, of October 17, 1945 when Peronism was born, the Plaza of the Mothers of the disappeared in the last dictatorship, in short, a space truly symbolic for the people, started to yield its first deaths. Deaths without reason as the president knew he had no other option but resigning.

That day six youngsters died in that Plaza. Four of them were motoqueros (people who work as couriers in their motorbikes and that recently formed a union encouraged by the association HIJOS—sons of the disappeared) who heroically resisted the charges of the cavalry and defended the families standing as they were being punished by the whips of the mounted police just as in scenes of slavery films. Simultaneously, the raids were repressed in the provinces, initially with rubber bullets, with live bullets afterwards. The number of casualties, names and ages of the dead have not been reported by the mass media. Only one TV camera broadcast scenes of a funeral and showed them once for a few minutes. Until today, those names are known through other sources. The media hardly acknowledge the number of casualties, which continue to increase, as there are still many seriously wounded. Hospitals have received orders not to give information to the press.

Amidst the tragedy of the youngsters shot dead, the interesting and heartening part of this process is that the people have reclaimed their role as citizens and with this, they have recovered some of their lost dignity.

The lessons are many, for the failure of neoliberalism is no more than the failure of the old rotten capitalism in its predominant form. We were a relatively important country; up until the middle of the 20th century, the Argentinean economy was as large as that of the rest of South America, including Brazil. Apart from grains and cattle, we reached a medium level of industrialization leading to imports substitution, which allowed us to start exporting manufactured goods. We had a solid social fabric with mutual health companies, unions, co-operatives and a highly literate population living in their majority in urban centers. With the last dictatorship the disaster started with privatizations and the indiscriminate opening of the national economy. And, most interesting, for the last ten years we were the exemplary student of the IMF, the one who followed all its recipes, the one who sent soldiers to the Persian Gulf, the “extra-Nato” ally of the US. Neoliberalism has failed with its fundamentalist recipes, but what is more, capitalism has failed as an organizer of social life.

The responsibility of the Argentinean left is large and complex, but the Argentinean left is weak, highly fragmented and tied to old dictates of “socialism” without defining what it means today or how it would solve the problems of the people. There are in fact some new actors much more inspiring: a new union organization and a new Latin Americanist university movement, which has ousted from the directorship of educational institutions the young officials associated with the previous government.

We, however, need much international solidarity, urgently. On the one hand, because those in more need require food now, therefore we need to put pressure on the Red Cross or whoever so they can be assisted. On the other, and this is the most important, we need clarity, ideas and that the “Argentinean case” is made known as it seems to us very illustrative.

Dear friends, share our pain for the fallen ones, but also our pride for the millions who stood up. In our old bodies nests a new spirit; as Ché Guevara said, “if the present is of struggle, the future is ours.”

From Spanish Znet, www.zmag.org.

SENTIENT TIMES
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