In Argentina, more than half of the
people are living in poverty - and
they are now starting to fight back
Naomi Klein
Monday March 17, 2003
The Guardian
On a muddy piece of squatted land in the
outskirts of Buenos Aires, Florencia
Vespignani is planning her tour of the US,
where she will be speaking to students
and activists about Argentina's resistance
movements.
"I'm a bit scared," she confesses.
"Of the war?" I ask.
"No. Of the plane. We have wars here all
the time."
Vespignani, a 33-year-old mother and
community organiser, is a leader of the
Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados
(MTD), one of dozens of organisations of
unemployed workers, known as
piqueteros, that have emerged out of the
wreckage of Argentina's economy. When
Florencia describes life as war, it is not a
metaphor. In a country where more than
half the people are living in poverty and 27
children die of hunger each day, she has
learned that to stay alive, you have to fight
- for every piece of bread, for every
student's pencil, for every night's rest.
From the perspective of the International
Monetary Fund, the piqueteros are the
collateral damage of neoliberalism - a
fluke explosion that happened when
rapid-fire privatisation was mixed with
"shock" austerity. In the mid-90s,
hundreds of thousands of Argentinians
suddenly found themselves without pay
cheques, welfare cheques or pensions.
Rather than disappearing quietly into the
shanty towns that surround Buenos Aires,
they organised themselves into militant
neighbourhood-based unions. Highways
and bridges were blocked until the
government coughed up unemployment
benefits; abandoned land was squatted to
build homes; a hundred closed factories
were taken over by their employees and
put back to work. Direct action became
the alternative to theft and death. But
that's not why Vespignani describes life in
Argentina as a war.
The war is what happens next, after she
and her neighbours dare to survive: the
visits by armed thugs, the brutal evictions
from squatted land and occupied
factories, the assassinations of activists
by police, the portrayal of piqueteros as
terrorists.
Last month, Buenos Aires police used
tear gas and rubber bullets to clear 60
families out of an abandoned building near
the trendy Plaza Dorrego. It was the most
severe repression in the city since two
young leaders of the MTD were killed by
police during a road blockade last June.
The police said they were concerned
about the safety of the squat, but many
think the violent eviction was simply part
of the latest economic adjustment being
cooked up at the Sheraton Hotel, where
IMF delegations have been meeting
bankers and candidates in the upcoming
presidential election for weeks now.
The IMF hopes to assess whether
Argentina can be trusted with new loans:
whether it will pay off foreign debts while
continuing to cut social spending. But
there is another criterion, left unspoken,
that presidential aspirants must meet to
merit foreign capital: they must show that
they are willing to use force to control
those sectors hurt by such agreements.
S quatters, piqueteros and even the
cartoneros - the armies of scavengers who
comb through garbage looking for
cardboard to sell - are under siege.
According to the former owner of Buenos
Aires's largest privatised garbage
company, now running for mayor on a
platform of "Let's take back Buenos
Aires", garbage is private property and the
cartoneros are thieves.
That is the war Florencia is talking about,
and as she travels across the US, she will
have the difficult task of trying to make
that case to activists who are almost
exclusively focused on ending a different
kind of war - not daily brutality and mass
marginalisation.
Standing amid the torn-up cobblestones
outside the squat on the night the 60
families were evicted, with tear gas still
hanging in the air and dozens of people in
jail, I found myself thinking about the calls
for "peace" coming from Europe and North
America. The anti-war message resonates
forcefully here, and tens of thousands
participated in the global day of action on
February 15. But peace? What does
peace mean in a country where the right
that most needs defending is the right to
fight?
My friends in South Africa tell me that the
situation there is much the same: families
evicted from miserable shanty towns,
police and private security using bullets
and tear gas to force people from their
homes, and, last month, the suspicious
murder of Emily Nengolo, a 61-year-old
activist fighting water privatisation. Instead
of devoting their energy to securing food,
jobs and land, social movements around
the world are being forced to spend their
time fighting the low-level war against their
own criminalisation.
The great irony is that these movements
are actually waging the real war on
terrorism - not with law and order but by
providing alternatives to the fundamentalist
tendencies that exist wherever there is
true desperation. They are developing
tactics that allow some of the most
marginal people on earth to meet their
needs without using terror - by blockading
roads, squatting in buildings, occupying
land and resisting displacement.
February 15 was more than a
demonstration; it was a promise to build a
truly international anti-war movement. If
that is going to happen, North Americans
and Europeans will have to confront the
war on all its fronts: to oppose an attack
on Iraq and reject the branding of social
movements as terrorist. The use of force
to control Iraq's resources is only an
extreme version of the force used to keep
markets open and debt payments flowing
in countries such as Argentina and South
Africa. In places where daily life is like
war, the people who are militantly
confronting this brutality are the peace
activists. We all want peace. But let's
remember that it won't come without a
fight.
· A version of this article first appeared in
the Nation. Naomi Klein is the author of
Fences and Windows
www.nologo.org
guardian.co.uk |
