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NEWS & LETTERS,
January-February 2002
Column: Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and
Mary Holmes
Anti-government unrest sweeps Argentina
Anti-government demonstrations
have swept Argentina on an almost daily basis since December, when thousands of
poor, hungry and unemployed people expropriated food and household necessities
from supermarkets, instead of scavenging in trash cans and dumps for something
to eat. The food protests erupted in
over 20 cities and towns in northern Argentina. When they subsided, 31
people were dead, thousands injured, and over 2,000 arrested. Whole
families turned out to liberate the goods they had no money to buy. A father in
line at a soup kitchen with his family said, "There are millions like me,
who have come from the interior and end up eating from garbage cans because
there is no work. The government created this situation, not the ordinary
people, but the people are suffering, and all the government can think to do is
declare a state of siege." Former President de la Rua was
forced to release $7 million in food aid. But his last presidential act, to
declare a 30 day "state of siege" (martial law) in order to halt the
demonstrations, brought out fresh protests. On Dec. 20, de la Rua was forced to
resign along with his hated finance minister, Domingo Cavallo. As one
commentator said, "This is a political situation that has grown into an
economic situation." There is no doubt that the
currency crisis in Argentina contributed to the upheaval. Under a different
political regime, Cavallo had engineered in 1991 the "dollarization"
of the currency, tying the peso to the U.S. dollar. While the Argentine economy
grew through 1997, the fixed currency exacerbated the economic decline of the
last four years of recession. Argentinians are saddled with a debt now pegged at
$141 billion! The International Monetary Fund (IMF) threw gasoline on the fire
when it denied Argentina its next $1.3 billion loan installment on the grounds
that the government failed to meet IMF-dictated deficit reduction targets. The
government limited withdrawals from, and then froze, bank accounts. In a desperate move, de la Rua
raided $3.5 billion in pension funds, along with public employees salaries, to
come up with its next debt service payment. But his coalition did not budge from
the neoliberal economic model instituted by his Peronist predecessor, Carlos
Menem. After a series of five presidents in two weeks, the Peronist party
senator, Eduardo Duhalde, has been appointed president. One unifying element in all the
demonstrations has been backed up by opinion polls, and that is total
rejection of the "political class." As one woman demonstrator
put it, "The Peronists just don't seem to understand that the target of the
initial protests wasn't only de la Rua but the whole rotten political apparatus
that they are a big part of. They're all a bunch of thieves, those politicians,
the whole lot of them, and we want to see them all gone." One study shows that 2,000
Argentinians fall below the poverty line every day. Unemployment at the end of
2001 was pushing above 18%. The unemployed have been among the most militant in
the demonstrations, demanding jobs, a living wage, and debt cancellation. On Jan. 3, the Duhalde
government skipped a $28 million debt payment, thus formally going into default.
Then dollarization was ended, and the peso devalued 30% "officially."
This has brought more misery to the people, as merchants withhold goods,
expecting prices to rise. It is a life and death situation for those needing
drugs and medical supplies which are nearly impossible to find. The Duhalde government has
expressed its hostility to demonstrators, saying the protests are at the
"limit of the tolerable." This has not stopped the protests. On
Jan. 16, as Duhalde spoke with the foreign press, some 2,000 unemployed marched
in Buenos Aires demanding jobs. Several thousand unemployed blocked a dozen
highways around the country. In Santa Fe and Jujuy provinces, protesters
attacked banks and the utility offices that have been privatized and sold to
foreign investors. One slogan sprayed on the sidewalk outside the Casa
Rosada, the presidential palace, sums up the current situation: "We are
going to keep on coming. Signed, The People." |
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