Argentina 2002

Strategy for survival or struggle power?

"Through the movement's emails, websites, face to face gatherings, stories emerged of a land where polticianswere so discredited that they were ridiculed wherever they went, angry middle-class women smashed up banks, occupied factories were run by the workers, ordinary people held meetings to decide how to run their factories, and thousands of unemployed people blocked highways, demanding food and jobs. It sounded like France 1968, or Spain during the civil war, yet it was lasting for months across a country 11 times the size of the UK, in a state that until recently was one of the world's top 20 strongest economies ... It was happening in Argentina ...the noise of hundreds of thousands of voices calling for a new world as the government fled from office and people took control of their everyday lives... inspiring activists from as afar afield as South Africa, Italy, Thailand and Belgium to visit...to witness the reinvention of politics from the bottom up."

[John Jordan, UK anticapitalist actvist in the Guardian, 25 January 2003]

In the wake of the revolutionary days of 19-20 December 2001, new popular movements arose in Argentina and existing ones revitalised. The immense social and political catastrophe that befell the unemployed, working class and lower middle classes during the course of 2001 was the immediate reason. It was a crisis precipitated by the demands of the IMF for repayments on loans. President De la Rua imposed a freeze on bank withdrawals (the coralito) to stop a run on the banks and the collapse of the peso.

Strikes and demonstrations greeted this organised theft of people's savings. When De la Rua reacted by declaring a state of emergency, hundreds of thousands - maybe a million - demonstrators took to the streets in an unprecedented popular uprising.

Only when Eduardo Duhalde, a more traditional Peronist leader, with a record of verbal opposition to Menem and Dela Rua's neoliberalism...

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