Materialien für einen neuen Antiimperialismus: Argentinien

Letter from Spanish ZNet about Argentinas events

By Cristina Feijoó and Lucio Salas

Translated by José Luna and reviewed by Alfred Sola

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, many of them full of
fondness which we do not deserve, and so we start by calming you; yes we
are fine, as fine as one can be under the current circumstances.

 

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, as everybody here knows that we
have not been exactly Gandhian, which yields us some respect, we have
preached for restraint during the clashes. In this regard, a message from
Michael Albert some months ago was very useful, as he simply and truthfully
asserted that violence can be utilitarian only under certain circumstances,
and that confronting the repressive power of the State can just
occasionally be fruitful: for they are the specialists in death, and we are
for life. Naturally, for another form and condition of life.

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 summarise 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 purporting 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 people that went out to work in changas, such as
cardboard pickers, street vendors, dog-walkers, electricians, plumbers,
etc., in other words, the workers who were not dependent on a steady job
lost their scarce income.

 

The "middle classes" (forget all Marxist categories: 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 with supermarket trolleys or changüitos searching
for food, clothes and diapers in the waste. These groups of the poor - some
of them organised, with an origin in the piquetera practice (to cut off
roads and motorways to demand some coins) - 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 subsistence incomes, which
resulted in criticism from the "righteous thinkers" and the tragic battle
of the poor against the poor. The Biblical morale keeps working and common
people plainly reject the idea of outright robbery and tend to condemn what
they consider to be vandalism (both the "Church priests" and our gaucho
tradition justify the seizure of food, but the condemnation subsists if
that limit is trespassed).

 

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 defencelessness of
the poor, the robberies express on the one hand, the anger of citizens long
withheld who were deprived of their basic rights. They also express their
right to have access to goods considered "sumptuous" and that are obscenely
flaunted on TV; goods to which they could never aspire. The system is here
more schizophrenic than in other latitudes for it constantly urges not only
to a consumption that renders stupidity but also to an impossible one.

 

With regards to repression, the same weakness of the government saved many
lives: the Argentinean military, always ready to massacre their own people,
this time categorically refused to participate. The majority of the deaths
(estimated at more than 30) occurred on Thursday 21st, the day following
the great popular uprising. The day before, Wednesday 20th, 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.
The minister resigned, but the pusillanimous criminal president wished to
stay and gave a speech that was interpreted as a provocation. That was the
spark that started the fire.

 

The "middle classes" 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 H.I.J.O.S. - 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 death
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.

 

With regards to the new government, the current president is a governor
suspected of illicit wealth acquisition, conservative, authoritarian, a
populist caudillo with a good image within its province. The initial
speech, obviously, promised to abandon the present economic model: no one
could have tolerated anything less. He announced demagogic measures without
stating how those would be implemented, and he surrounded himself of
peronists. He avoided to call for a "national salvation government"
(obviously capitalist, lets not ask for miracles, but at least not a
neoliberal one), leaving aside groups of economists that had been working
in serious alternative proposals. Hitherto, he seems to get support in the
so-called "productive group", which is formed by large industrialists (the
few that remain) and the unionised bureaucracies whilst the privatised
public service sector and the international banking system maintain a
"respectful silence" partly because their buttocks have not been touched
and partly because the spirits are running high: no one doubts that if food
is not handed out immediately and jobs are created (they have promised one
million jobs in a month), this will start to burn again.

 

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. A few months ago when we met with German [Translator note: German
Leyens, another member of Spanish ZNet] in Buenos Aires, he told us he
could not comprehend why the Argentineans had not rebelled against one of
the most vicious neoliberal experiments on earth: well, that rebellion has
now taken place. As we say here, "people do not chew nails": the general
feeling is of distrust towards these new rulers that went along with this
plan of true plundering of a nation - 150 billion US dollars were
transferred out of the country, the same amount that Argentina owes to her
creditors - and now have turned around their rhetoric to accommodate the
demands of those uprising.

 

The lessons are many, for the failure of neoliberalism is no more than the
failure of the old rotten capitalism in its predominant form. Maybe due to
the unbearable "navel-ism" characteristic of Argentineans we think that our
case is exemplary. 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 industrialisation 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 centres. With the last dictatorship the disaster started with
privatisations 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 organiser of social life.

 

The responsibility of the Argentinean left is large and complex, but the
Argentinean left is weak, highly fragmented and stupid, 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: the piqueteros of whom we have already spoken, a new
union organisation (the CTA, Central de Trabajadores Argentinos, largely
State employees) and a new latinamericanist 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, we now end this excessive note. 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 Che Guevara said, "if the present is of struggle,
the future is ours".

 

Cristina y Lucio