ARGENTINA: A Country in Protest

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 9 2001 (IPS) - Thousands of Argentineans held roadblocks Tuesday and Wednesday to protest public spending cuts that included a reduction in the salaries of civil servants and pensions, and warned they would repeat the demonstrations next week – for 72 straight hours.

The demonstrators clamoured against the measures adopted by the government of Fernando de la Rúa in its attempt to slash the fiscal deficit and stave off default. So far, the cuts have led to a 13 percent decrease in the salaries of public employees and pensions above 500 dollars a month.

The unemployed are particularly afraid that the cutbacks will be applied to the public works programmes that provide them with meagre but essential stipends of 120 to 250 dollars a month.

The protesters also argue that the latest package of structural adjustment measures is a misguided attempt that will be unsuccessful in reactivating the depressed economy.

The main event of Wednesday’s protests was a march on the Plaza de Mayo, outside the seat of government in the capital. Similar demonstrations and roadblocks were held in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Corrientes, Córdoba, Entre Ríos, Jujuy, Misiones, Neuquén, Río Negro, Salta, Santa Fe and Tierra del Fuego.

Public and private sector workers, students, pensioners, farmers and the unemployed make up the protest movement that also staged a day of blockades of roads around the country last week.

The protesters manning the Tuesday and Wednesday roadblocks outnumbered last week’s demonstrators by the tens of thousands, according to the organisers.

Teachers and doctors who work in government hospitals explained that they were taking part in the demonstrations not only to protest the spending cuts and delayed paychecks, but to draw society’s attention to the difficulties facing the poor and the homeless.

“In the hospitals we do not even have the minimum basic materials needed to attend patients and operate, and we cannot carry out prevention efforts or treatment on people who can’t even afford to take a bus to our clinics,” said a doctor who took part in the roadblocks in the town of La Matanza on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

María Raigada, a teacher who spends three hours commuting to and from work, said the school “is the only thing most parents have left.”

The school is the only place the parents “make social contact with the outside world. It is the place where they come to offer their services or to find a job or have a meal,” said Raigada, vice-principal of the Virrey del Pino school in the province of Buenos Aires.

She added that when a student was injured and had to be taken to the hospital, the school not only informed the parents, but had to give them bus money to get to the hospital as well. “I cannot fathom how the families are even able to dress their children for school,” she said, to illustrate the level of poverty.

Raigada pointed out that after 20 years in the school system, she earned a salary of 900 dollars a month, which would now be cut 20 percent.

Furthermore, like the rest of the public employees in the province of Buenos Aires, Raigada will begin receiving part of her salary in vouchers this week, and it is not yet clear whether businesses will accept them at their full value.

Wednesday’s protests were organised by the Front Against Poverty and Unemployment, the umbrella group that held the “congress of unemployed” in July which scheduled weekly nationwide roadblocks for three weeks.

Last week, some 120,000 protesters cut off traffic at about 200 spots around the country, while at least 150,000 people took part in this week’s demonstrations, according to the organisers.

The protests have the backing of the Congress of Argentine Workers (CTA), one of the country’s three central trade unions and the one that is most critical of the government. The CTA represents public employees, teachers, legal system functionaries and doctors, who went on strike Wednesday.

Last year, the CTA proposed that unemployed heads of households receive 380-dollar monthly subsidies. The union said the measure would alleviate poverty, reactivate the internal market, and boost tax revenues.

But neither the De la Rúa administration nor the opposition took up the initiative.

The teachers’ union also declared an indefinite strike Wednesday to demand the payment of wage backlogs, which in some cases go all the way back to May.

The protests have been called by a new generation of community leaders and trade unionists in response to the successive waves of adjustment policies adopted by the government to reduce the fiscal deficit and attempt to get the economy back on its feet after more than three years of recession, and to fight unemployment, which has climbed to 16.4 percent of the economically active population.

The government, meanwhile, is still working hard to stave off the threat of a cessation of payments and a devaluation of the local currency, through new credits which this time must go towards replacing the foreign reserves that have been lost over the past few weeks.