Rosario after the general strike

After Thursday's general strike, Rosario's taxi drivers met with the authorities and then decided to work normally during the weekend (the city will be full of visitors, so they can't lose that money) and suspend the night service starting on Monday. Political characters of various stripes latched onto the horrible murder that triggered this and took advantage of it to speak ill of the provincial and municipal governments.

While the initial response of the taxi union was understandable, the rest immediately seemed to me to be staged for political purposes. Yesterday evening, after the tense meeting with the authorities, the head of CGT Rosario, Néstor Ferrazza, was seen at Agustín Rossi's campaign launch meeting for the presidency of the Santa Fe Justicialist Party. It was Ferrazza who decreed the general strike with less than two hours notice, and it's Rossi who's been more active criticizing the new Socialist administration since his party lost the election here.

This kind of strike had been unheard of for years. Later Ferrazza called it "a Rosariazo against insecurity", which for people with some knowledge of history seems not only a exaggeration, but really dangerous speech. The Rosariazo was a series of protests against unpopular measures of the dictatorial government of Juan Carlos Onganía, during 1969, at a time when the whole country was in unrest. There were many wounded and dead, and the city turned into hell, because the government used as much violence as it could. Comparing it with last Thursday's strike is an insult. We the common citizens suffered great inconvenience, but the government tried to solve the situation with words. Everybody, except the ones blocking the streets, behaved democratically and as calmly as the awful situation allowed.

What's it about "insecurity"? After five years of economic growth at unprecedented rates conducted by a government that claims income redistribution as its main goal, poverty is still about 30% and income inequality is about the same as in the peak of the last crisis, while nothing has been done to improve education or to bring back the dream of upward social mobility. And then these filthy low-grade politicians disguised as speakers for the working class demand that insecurity be solved by a local government with no power to affect national policies, dictated by a president who's more concerned about how many people applaud her awful, divisive speeches than anything else.

Tomorrow's 198th anniversary of the creation of the first national government. The four agricultural organizations are going to have a mass gathering here in Rosario, at the Flag Memorial, while Cristina Kirchner will be speaking in Salta, far north, in a place where she doesn't have to fear opposition and where her paid supporters will be carried in large numbers. If all goes well, I'll be here taking pictures and contributing with my presence.

Transport strike!

Rough day today, and it's only 2 PM... Last night a taxi driver was murdered by two men in the north of Rosario. They boarded the taxi as passengers and, a few blocks later, they apparently tried to rob Sergio Oberto, the driver. He was stabbed several times, once in the throat. The attackers fled, leaving him there to die. The news spread quickly, and the taxi drivers' union took to the streets, blocking some and burning tires, to protest against insecurity. By early morning, the two streets that border the downtown area (Oroño Blvd. and Pellegrini Ave.) were almost completely blocked by taxis, forcing buses and private cars to take long detours. I got to work 15 minutes late. I thought that was going to be the biggest inconvenience.

At mid-morning I took one hour off work to go to a doctor's appointment. He was remarkably punctual, so I got back to my office quickly, but as soon as I'd returned, my father called me to warn me that a general transport strike had been declared — starting at noon. It was just past 11 AM. The people at the office were preparing to leave. I took care of my stuff and went to the bus stop. Five minutes later, a group of people coming from the south (where the nearest street blockade was) told me buses weren't entering downtown anymore. I started walking, since I'd seen some buses. I couldn't possibly walk home (well, I could — but it was going to be tough) and I couldn't ask anybody I knew for a car ride. After 10 minutes I decided I'd better try Marisa's house, 20-something blocks from where I was. My bus finally came, packed with people. I and twenty others somehow squeezed into it, and we began our slow progress back home.

When I left the office, the downtown streets were weirdly silent, only a few cars circulating, people with concerned faces speaking on their mobile phones. The cellphone grid collapsed almost immediately, leading me to think what would happen if this were a true catastrophe — everybody's only means of communication would fail at the most critical time! Soon afterward, however, the pupils from all the schools downtown were released by the teachers, everybody was alert, and the streets became chaotic, full of screaming kids wandering and running after buses, disoriented old ladies asking around for news, and cars trying to avoid collisions with the above.

Oberto's wife said the strike made no sense and would solve nothing, that it was disrespectful, and that nobody from the unions or the government had come to comfort her in this time of sorrow. The strike was launched by CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo), the "union of unions" of Peronist roots, allied with the national government. I think it has a clear political intention; the Justicialist Party has been trying to undermine the Socialist government of Rosario for ages, and even more after Peronism lost the provincial elections, and fake "grassroots" demonstrations against the local government on the issue of security have been orchestrated.

The obvious truth is that insecurity is solved by increasing the general standard of living and giving the poor more access to education, not by burning tires and paralyzing a city. I got home safely today. I imagine thousands didn't. Thousands of children missed a school lesson, thousands of people lost a day of work, thousands missed a doctor's appointment or a job interview. Countless innocent people, including mothers with small children, disabled people, old people who can't walk tens of block to get back to their homes, were left to their own devices by leaders who used the understandable rage of their followers to their advantage.

I'm with the farmers, or, see what happens while I'm away

Marisa and I came back from our Easter weekend vacations today. It all went terrific, except the countryside was burning (figuratively) while we were away, and reality eventually caught up with us when we headed back for Rosario. As you must know, agricultural producers are on strike because of the latest increase of the export taxes.

What's happening now is more important than the story of my vacations, so I'll put that off for today and begin by the end. We left Córdoba City on schedule, at 01:30 PM, with only a bit of concern for what we heard on TV about the road blockades put up by the farmers on strike. We headed southeast along the highway and National Route 9, and around 03:00 PM we were stopped near a town called Oliva. Farmers had blocked the way with harvesters and only a trickle of vehicles was allowed through.

We were cleared a few minutes later, and thought it was going to alright from then on. One hour later we arrived in Villa María, our first major stop. The driver got off and announced "We're stopping here for fifteen minutes!" so everybody could get off the bus, stretch their legs, go to the toilet, or whatever. We stayed beside the bus and waited. Twenty-five minutes later the driver came back and told us, "We're not moving from here until further notice." There was a road block that wouldn't allow anybody through, and several buses were held on the road already. Moreover, there seemed to be some tension developing between the farmers and the drivers of the cargo trucks detained by the block. It seemed safer to stay in the bus terminal, where we had basic facilities, rather than in the middle of nowhere outside town.

Some time afterward, someone said the president was going to give a speech on national TV, hopefully to untangle the mess, put forward some promise, some ideas for compromise, some hint of appeasement that could bring the farmers to dialogue. We waited.

Sure enough, at about 06:20 PM Presidenta Cristina K appeared. What followed was both the finest piece of oratory and the crappiest piece of diplomacy I'd ever seen. After angering the farmers, then going away on vacation as if nothing happened, she re-appeared and dumped this load of senseless vitriol on them. No sense of humility, no intention to fix the trouble, appease or compromise, no change at all from the standard Kirchnerist babble — self-exaltation of their achievements, denial of their faults, offensive defense, confrontation. What you could expect from an activist, an ideologue, or a legislator defending her party line — certainly not from a president of a country where major roads of the most populated and most productive provinces are being blocked by protesters.

Cristina was surrounded by the usual host of cronies and opportunists, including the governors of two provinces. The ones most involved, however, were not present: Schiaretti of Córdoba and Binner of Santa Fe. Schiaretti, a fervorous Kirchnerist, was being pressed by the local authorities of all the municipalities in the province, some of then openly in favour of the strike. And Binner, a Socialist, had already, if cautiously, established Santa Fe's official stance beside the farmers.

The question is not whether the farmers earn enough, not enough, or too much (whatever that means) . The question is: we produce a lot, the federal government takes a big chunk of it, and none of that money returns. It's used to finance federal spending, a lot of which goes to pay for pseudo-welfare: piquetero organizations affiliated with the government, who serve as shock troops and political meeting filler as appropriate.

Back to Villa María... After Cristina's speech people were extremely upset. I'd let my parents know I was going to be late; now I text-messaged them again, and also my co-workers, since I was supposed to be back at the office at 7 AM the next day. The General Urquiza bus company was a model of bad PR — the drivers didn't notify us properly on their intended course of action, and nobody offered to buy us all a meal, which was the least they could do. So we had something to eat on our own, and got on the bus again.

Other passengers came telling there was a demonstration and cacerolazo in Buenos Aires, and soon we learned the protest had spread. Thousands of people were banging pots and pans and honking their horns in Rosario near the Flag Memorial, and people other than farmers were joining the strike and the protests in Entre Ríos, La Rioja, Mendoza, and even Santa Cruz. The north of Córdoba was practically isolated by multiple road blocks. A group of demonstrators had come close to clashing with Gendarmería at the Hernandarias Tunnel below the Paraná River (between Santa Fe City and Paraná, Entre Ríos).

At the same time we heard of the Kirchnerist piqueteros in Buenos Aires, led by Luis D'Elía, violently assaulting and driving back the peaceful demonstrators at Plaza de Mayo, and a similar incident in Rosario involving a Kirchnerist movement called Libres del Sur. Although they claimed they went there on their own, it's obvious they were sent by the government, which now says they'll use force to remove the pickets if necessary.

In the 1950s, President Juan Domingo Perón co-opted the large unions, organized a corporatist model with control of the heavy industries, attacked the dissident press and the "oligarchy" of the old countryside landowners, and allowed the extreme factions of his multi-faced Justicialist movement to turn into militias, which could be put to use as needed. To this day historians hesitate whether to call this fascism, but we know Perón brought those ideas in after a visit to Mussolini's Italy. The Kirchners have been revisiting that sad story all this time. They haven't managed to silence the press or lead intellectuals into exile, like 20th century Peronism did. But we now know for sure that plain citizens won't be allowed to demonstrate peacefully against government policies in the large cities — not as long as busloads of indoctrinated lumpen and paid-for thugs can be brought in to dissuade them. The Kirchners don't tolerate dissent — you must like them and love them no matter what, or you become automatically the Enemy.

I stayed in the bus listening to the radio, feeling rather gloomy about the general state of the country, and fell asleep late. I woke up a couple of times to false alarms. We left at 7:15 AM, as the first light of dawn appeared.

We had an uneventful trip. I slept on and off, and took pictures of the passing countryside landscape. It all seemed so peaceful! There were no pickets anywhere else, though occasionally you could see traffic stations full of trucks, and other trucks along the sides of the road. As we entered the last part of the highway, somebody volunteered music for the drivers to put on the bus speakers. Some people cheered as we arrived at the bus terminal, at 11:30, almost 22 hours after leaving Córdoba.

Carlos Fuentealba, half a year later

I couldn't believe it the other day when I heard it was going to be six months since the murder of Carlos Fuentealba. It seemed to me that only a couple months had passed. In the meantime things haven't been exactly nice throughout the country. Protests and demonstrations have continued, in many cases violently dispersed by the police, but not in places where the media care to look.

Carlos Fuentealba was a teacher who worked in Neuquén, a province in the northern edge of Patagonia. On April 4, the teachers' union was on strike and he was accompanying a protest march by car, when the provincial police came. A policeman called Daniel Poblete shot a can of tear gas into the car, hitting Fuentealba in the back of the neck almost at point blank. He died two days later in hospital.

Today, in order to commemorate Fuentealba's death but especially to demand justice for his murder, the teachers all throughout the country are on strike again, and massive demonstrations are planned. The only one arrested for the murder is Poblete, the judiciary of Neuquén is not independent, and the investigations are not advancing.

Jorge Sobisch, the governor of Neuquén who ordered the repression and justified it, is still campaigning for the presidency on a platform of public security, as if nothing had happened. But the large posters in the streets where he appears with a big smile are quickly covered by smaller, cheaper posters with Fuentealba's face and by graffiti that read ASESINO — murderer.

I have my personal take on the matter. First of all, I think teachers should've marched and protested outside school hours or during the weekend, so that the children don't lose more days of an already reduced class schedule. They could devote one hour today to explain what Fuentealba fought for, and why teachers who work in public schools have the right to earn good salaries, and explain to the children what happened. They could review the history of police brutality in Argentina and the history of state-sponsored repression of dissident views, in terms appropriate to the age and background of the students. But they chose to leave the classrooms empty. (In Argentina there are 180 days of classes per year, in theory, but due to strikes this is often reduced to 160 or less. Some developed countries have over 220 days/year.)

Second of all, the demonstrations and protest actions are organized by unions and organizations with a strong political component, in the heat of the presidential campaign. That just doesn't sound right. Sobisch accuses Hugo Yasky, the leader of the CTA union, of being secretly in league with President Kirchner, and says that the national government is financing a campaign against him, which is entirely possible. CTA is fighting to get official recognition as a major labour union and competes with CGT, the older and more traditional Peronist union that has a lot of influence within the government. Yasky is also accused by some of lending his influence to Kirchner and to Minister of Education Daniel Filmus to get approval of the brand-new Education Law by the teachers' union CTERA, even while the law is resisted by many teachers and was rather plainly made up to make Filmus look good at the time when he was campaigning for Chief of Government of Buenos Aires City.

Politics is dirty and the teachers are doing politics, instead of teaching the children how Carlos Fuentealba died and what they should know to avoid such things from happening ever again.

Neuquén and the country, for Carlos Fuentealba

Last Tuesday the teachers' union in Neuquén organized a demonstration to demand higher and better salaries. They marched peacefully along a road. The provincial police was sent to disband them so that they couldn't block the road. A policeman shot a tear gas canister into a car that was accompanying the march, hitting a teacher called Carlos Fuentealba in the back of the neck. Fuentealba was taken to hospital and stayed there in a coma; he died on the night of Thursday.

The policeman who shot Fuentealba, Sgt. Daniel Poblete, had been convicted of two crimes. He never spent time in jail, and his last sentence (two years for abuses of prisoners, passed last November) is until waiting for a court decission to become effective.

The governor of Neuquén, Jorge Sobisch, deplored the death of Fuentealba but justified the order to suffocate the protest. Neuquén is a common stage for social protests and violent repression. Sobisch belongs to a local party that opposes the Kirchner administration and was allied to Mauricio Macri's PRO, until Macri withdrew his support. Sobisch is one of the candidates of the right for the presidency; the surveys never gave him the slightest chance to win, but now his national career seems to have been buried for good.

There's a constant, if not very articulate, debate about what to do with protests that resort to road blockades and similar devices to make their point. The left calls them "social demand protests" and claims they should never be repressed, as the basic needs of those who protest (the unemployed, the poor, the badly paid, the abused) are above the more "middle-class rights" of the rest, namely the freedom to use your car to get to work (or back from work, or on vacations) without delays or discomfort. The right calls the protests "road blockades" and contend that, while causing some trouble to motorists here and there is justifiable, it shouldn't be allowed by the authorities, especially since freedom of circulation is a constitutional right.

What the non-moderates of both left and right do, in any case, is equating all types of protest. Being a moderate myself, I find that simplistic and deceitful.

Consider a demonstration here in Rosario protesting the raise of the bus fee. A tiny but well-organized group of leftist activists gathered their ranks, formed by a majority of poor young women and men, and including violent lumpen masked with kerchiefs and toting sticks and rocks, and they stormed the Deliberative Council, breaking windows, setting fire to a door, and keeping the councilors and the employees locked up inside. In the meantime, of course, they also blocked a couple of streets. The police did nothing, thank you.

Consider another protest, this time organized by the taxi drivers demanding a fee raise. They blocked the street before the Municipality, made some noise (they were few) and attacked other taxis, whose drivers or owners didn't support the protest. The police did nothing.

In Santa Fe City and in Rosario, during the terrible deluge in March, pickets were organized in several key avenues. They were poor citizens affected by the flood, demanding aid. In Santa Fe, the road blocks actually slowed the transport of food and clothing to the evacuation centers. The government complained that these pickets were politically motivated, staged to complicate the matter and make the ones in charge look bad... which is entirely plausible... but the police did nothing.

Of course, if you've lived in Buenos Aires, you know that road-blocking demonstrations of all sorts are an everyday treat, and violent, destructive protests are common as well.

The right thinks that the poor do not get organized by themselves; they're always gathered by political operators. Indeed, a common denominator of conservative people everywhere is that the people (especially the poor) mustn't do politics — political action, the shaping of societies, is for intellectuals, technocrats, leaders, not for the unwashed masses. The left thinks that the poor masses have the right and the duty to reclaim the public space from the hands of the elite, whose laws are void because they're made to favour the powerful, and who must be opposed automatically.

To many Argentinians, sending riot police to disperse a demonstration is quite correct, even if the police employ a bit of brutality. Some wounded are to be expected. To quite a few, specifically giving orders to a brutal police force to use force against peaceful demonstrators may be OK as well, if the demonstrators are breaking the law in the strict sense (blocking a road is technically against the constitutional right of free circulation of people and goods). A small subset of those wouldn't have had too much of a problem with the murder of Carlos Fuentealba if it had taken place twenty or even ten years ago.

We seem to have progressed a bit, though. Fuentealba was not an activist, a leader, a "political" man; he was a poor teacher, appreciated for his professional and personal qualities by his pupils and his community. No politician sponsored him, no politician spoke in favour of him, but after a couple of days, the whole country is mobilized. In Rosario, in Buenos Aires, and of course in Neuquén, thousands are striking and demonstrating. Governor Sobisch, who still hasn't demanded the resignation of his police chief or anyone in his cabinet, and who still justifies his orders to repress peaceful teachers by force, is facing impeachment and being asked to resign himself. The two workers' union confederation, CGT and CTA, have set their differences aside to support the cause of justice for Carlos Fuentealba.

As I said, the right would rather not have the masses speaking freely in the streets, and the left would rather co-opt those voices, but so far none of both have gotten their way. The response has been swift and authentic. We're changing.


PS: Ken from Un año sin Primavera is a teacher and went to the protest march in Buenos Aires. Read the inside story there. The BBC also featured a story about the protests, as did Reuters, and articles in English have also appeared in Infoshop, libcom.org, the Buenos Aires Herald, and UK Indymedia (the latter about the destruction of Jorge Sobisch's campaign offices in Buenos Aires by the far-left group Quebracho).

Countryside on strike

The agricultural producers of Argentina are on strike since last Sunday, and boy, the spits of venom are flying all over us. Minister Miceli gave a press conference calling the strike "ideological and political", and dismissed the claims of the producers regarding their contribution to the wellbeing of the country. The government has been intervening in (some would say interfering with) the beef market and, to a lesser extent, with the wheat-flour-bread markets, in order to keep prices from rising; and of course there are the retenciones, or export taxes, in place since the economic crisis exploded.

The economic juggling act is as follows:

1. Exporters take advantage of the high exchange rate (over 3 pesos/dollar) to sell at internationally competitive prices and gather a good profit. The ones most benefitted by this exchange rate are the agricultural producers.
   
2. The Central Bank sucks up the incoming dollars, keeping the exchange rate artificially high (over 3 pesos/dollar), so as to maintain the competitiveness of the exporters.
   
3. The government taxes exports, differently according to what exactly is being exported (some things are not taxed, others are taxed 20%). This is how it gets a sizable part of the total tax revenue.
4. The very success of the above strategy places it in danger, since the more competitive exports are, the more dollars enter the local market, thus pushing down the exchange rate.
5. Not only that, but the Central Bank has to emit pesos in order to buy dollars. This effectively devalues the peso and expands the monetary base, indirectly fueling inflation.

The problem arises from the fact that the producers would like to charge the same price internally than externally. Absent that possibility (since most Argentinians cannot afford dollar-priced goods while getting salaries in pesos), most producers prefer to export rather than selling within Argentina. The export tax is also an attempt to "convince" them, by making exporting less profitable, but in general, Argentine producers can still get almost 3 times more by leaving the internal market undersupplied and shipping their goods abroad.

The agricultural sector in Argentina, as a whole, has no reason to complain about profits. During the 1990s, when the exchange rate was fixed at 1:1, many invested in imported machines and increased their productivity, but then they went broke as their exports were uncompetitive. Now they have a government that keeps the exchange rate high for them, making it prohibitively expensive for most of us to get certain imported goods, but they still complain.

One of the points of contention is the government doesn't have a plan for the agricultural sector and doesn't help the smaller producers, who are being bought up by their larger fellows. Indeed, the soybean boom has created a depressing landscape in which a few hundred landowners with huge plantations employ sophisticated machinery and very few people to plant any available patch of dirt over millions of hectares with a transgenic monoculture, then to harvest it and sell it to China (mostly), while producers of less-favoured crops (including many regional specialties in the poorer parts of the country) are struggling to keep up, and falling back.

For some reason, the conservative wealthy elite of the countryside have managed to present this strike as a just cause, as the fight of the economic saviours of the country for a free, undistorted market. The truth, of course, is that if they had their way, the national budget would run a huge deficit and we'd be having milk, bread and beef at three times the current price -- those of us who could afford them, and even then, only as much as the producers did not manage to sell abroad (the EU, for example, buys quality Argentine beef at a very good price, but only a small fixed quota; and both the EU and the US burden their imports with tariffs and regulations to protect their own producers). The controversial Secretary of Internal Commerce, Guillermo Moreno (the price control czar, so to speak, of the Argentine government) put it bluntly: "We can't have food at international prices."

The last cause of anger for the countryside folks was the announced decission of the government to employ force should the roads be blocked by the strikers to prevent the traffic of grain and cattle from their sources to the markets (a threat the strikers have already made -- and they already blocked the Rosario-Buenos Aires Highway for a while). The opposition pounced on it, calling it a double standard (which it is), since the government refuses to clear the road blocks set up by the piqueteros in Buenos Aires and by the pulp mill protestors on the roads before the international bridges linking Argentina and Uruguay, which are arguably causing as much trouble, though of a different kind.

This certainly looks like it will be a rough year's end.