By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 31 2004 (IPS)

Small groups of far-left activists were at the core of Tuesday’s sometimes violent street demonstrations in the Argentine capital, held to protest the visit by International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing-Director Rodrigo Rato.

With few activists and limited funds, the ultra-leftist groups nevertheless pushed from centre-stage the much stronger movement of the unemployed or “piqueteros” with a wave of small bomb attacks, protests, threats, clashes with the police and the occupation of public and privately-owned buildings.

“These are groups that believe that social protest is in a state of latency and that the consciousness and the spirit of struggle must be kept alive to achieve the destruction of the country’s institutions,” political scientist Marcos Novaro, a professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, told IPS.

In his opinion, these “tiny” groups, with only a few dozen members at the most, are able to occupy the centre of the political stage “for just one day.”

He said the government response, which got the protests under control without a harsh crackdown, left the groups isolated and without any real margin of action.

President Néstor Kirchner received the IMF delegation headed by Rato Tuesday and said his government would not commit itself to achieving the fiscal surplus demanded by the international lender, nor improve on its offer of restructuring the debt owed to private creditors, which the Argentine state defaulted on during the December 2001 economic and financial meltdown.

The government has offered to pay the creditors around 40 percent of their Argentine bonds.

The centre-left Kirchner has taken a firmer, less flexible stance towards the IMF than his predecessors.

Nevertheless, protests against the multilateral lending institution, which many Argentines hold responsible for the economic crisis of 2001 and 2002, have intensified since Kirchner took office in May 2002.

Few protests were held in the 1990s, under president Carlos Menem (1989-1999), when the foreign debt rose threefold.

The radical leftist groups, which have virtually no ties to other political or social organisations, say they are “against imperialism and big capital”, reject participation in elections as a route of access to the government, and vindicate violent street protests.

They say they want to “provoke a crisis” by destabilising the government, to bring down “the regime”.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, a small explosive device shattered the glass facade of a Banco Francés branch in Buenos Aires, scattering pamphlets from the so-called “Darío Santillán Commando”, which contained phrases like “No to the Payment of the Foreign Debt” and “IMF Out of Argentina and Latin America”.

Darío Santillán was a young activist who belonged to the Anibal Verón Movement of Unemployed Workers (MTD), a group that organises the unemployed in work cooperatives.

He and another member of the MTD, Maximiliano Kosteki, died after they were shot at point-blank range by police in a June 2002 protest by the unemployed.

In a conversation with IPS, his father, Alberto Santillán, lamented that his son’s name was used to justify a violent action, “with aims that are not the ones he supported.”

Shortly afterwards, another small bomb was found outside of a McDonald’s fast food restaurant. The police detonated the home-made device, which also dispersed leaflets against the IMF and Rato’s visit that were signed by the previously unknown “Popular Liberation Brigade”.

After dawn, around 20 activists from the Martín Fierro organisation and another small group calling itself the Frente Barrial 19 de Diciembre occupied the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel, where they supposed Rato would be staying, to protest the IMF visit and the multilateral lender’s pressure on the Argentine government.

The activists then headed to the Central Bank, where Rato’s first meeting with government officials was expected to take place. The demonstrators stood on the steps and in the lobby, chanting slogans like “Fatherland Yes, Colony No”.

In the meantime, a bomb threat was reported at the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry.

But the highest profile event of the day was a demonstration outside of the Economy Ministry, where Rato and other members of the IMF delegation were meeting with Argentine government officials.

Activists belonging to the Quebracho Patriotic Revolutionary Movement burnt tires in front of the ministry, painted anti-IMF slogans on the entryway columns, and lobbed sticks and stones at the police.

The riot control police, who had strict orders from the president not to use firearms, fired tear gas and aimed water hoses at the protesters, nearly 100 of whom were arrested, including members of the Quebracho Movement and the Anibal Verón Coordinator – a tiny group that broke off from the Anibal Verón MTD.

One of the Quebracho Movement’s stated aims is to “bring together and unify those who struggle.”

But the appearance of the group’s activists, who had their faces covered and were carrying sticks and molotov cocktails, led to the departure of organisations of unemployed activists who were protesting the arrests of members of their piquetero movement.

According to the latest editorial in Quebracho’s bimonthly publication, its slogan this year is “provoke a crisis.”

“Today in Argentina the main task of our militants is still to provoke a crisis, destabilise the regime, make it impossible for it to continue governing,” says the editorial.

Another of the groups that took part in Tuesday’s protests, the Party for the Liberation of Argentina, says in its internal documents that in the country “the revolution is still alive” and “the offensive must be maintained” – a reference to the unrest that broke out during and after the December 2001 collapse of the government of Fernando de la Rúa.

Excerpt: