ARGENTINA: Activists, Law Experts in Novel Seminar on Rights of Unemployed

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 2 2004 (IPS) - A Supreme Court justice, jurists, and law students are taking part in a unique seminar in Argentina Thursday and Friday that was organised on the initiative of a group of unemployed workers, with the aim of discussing and raising awareness of their basic constitutional rights.

Law school students, attorneys and judicial functionaries are sharing their papers and views in the seminar taking place in the lecture halls of the University of Lomas de Zamora, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, with more than 300 members of the unemployed movement, known as ‘piqueteros’ for the ‘piquetes’ or roadblocks that have become their trademark protest strategy.

The proposal for the seminar came from the Teresa Rodríguez Movement (MTR), one of the groups of piqueteros active in the metropolitan area of the capital.

The idea immediately won the support of Supreme Court justice Eugenio Zaffaroni, and awakened the interest of jurists, lawyers and students.

The number of people who registered for the seminar exceeded the expectations of the organisers.

The novel academic forum has also attracted activists from other groups, including Barrios de Pie (roughly, Neighbourhoods Standing Firm), the 29 de Mayo Popular Unity Movement, the United Unemployed Workers Front, the Aníbal Verón Movement of Unemployed Workers, and the Classist and Combative Current.

"We wanted the judiciary to get involved in this debate, because it is the legal system that must guarantee respect for our basic rights," MTR leader Roberto Martino told IPS.

The activist said Argentina’s organised unemployed workers are seeking to shift the focus of the debate, currently centred on the right to protest, to the deeper underlying concerns of those who are demonstrating in the streets, and cutting off traffic along roads and bridges: their right to work, education, health care and housing.

The seminar took a close look at the experience of Brazil’s powerful Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), with which Zaffaroni is closely familiar.

The MST has broad experience in organising workshops on economic and social rights, and has even opened schools to train academics how to teach people about those rights.

Argentina’s piquetero organisations mushroomed and grew as unemployment began to soar in the second half of the 1990s. By 2002, the unemployment rate in Latin America’s third largest economy had climbed above 20 percent.

The official rate has now dropped to 14.4 percent, while 47.8 percent of the population of 37 million live below the poverty line.

But if the unemployed heads of household who merely receive a tiny government stipend of 50 dollars a month were included in the official unemployment rate, it would swell to 19.5 percent.

Ever since the piqueteros began to block roads to draw attention to their plight, the debate has focused on the legitimacy of that protest tactic, which causes chaos in traffic and upsets the public.

Several surveys have found that public support for the piqueteros has significantly fallen in the past few months, although it was initially high during the climate of widespread social discontent triggered by the late 2001 financial and political collapse.

The government, meanwhile, wavers between its stated policy of respecting the right to protest and listening to other sectors of society who complain that the right to freely circulate is stymied by the roadblocks, which they say should be harshly repressed by the police.

Nor has the left-leaning government of Néstor Kirchner taken part in what the piqueteros call an "in-depth discussion."

Sociologist Maristella Svampa, who has specialised in studying the new forms of social protest, told IPS that around 3,000 members of the unemployed movement are being prosecuted as a result of their activism.

One of them – Alberto Fernández, a former employee of the privatised state oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) – is facing charges in 76 different lawsuits.

Martino also pointed to a growing tendency in Argentine society "to criminalise social protest," because the debate focuses on the demonstrators’ tactics rather than on the rights of the unemployed, which are being violated and thus lead them to protest.

MTR lawyer Claudio Pandolfi, one of the seminar’s organisers, commented to IPS that "it is not enough for the state to guarantee the right to protest, because then a ‘protest-track’ could just be built, and the problem would be fixed," he said ironically.

"The right to protest is only a secondary issue here, and it is not subject to debate," he said. The underlying demand is for basic economic and social rights that the constitution guarantees and which are constantly violated without anyone even bothering to notice, he added.

"Violating human rights does not just mean torturing (suspects) in police stations," said Pandolfi. "Economic, social and labour rights are also essential, and if the state fails to guarantee them, then it is violating them."

The seminar, whose theme is "To demand rights, you must be familiar with them", was initially designed for members of the unemployed movement. But it ended up drawing a flood of law students and judicial functionaries.

Besides Judge Zaffaroni, the participants included the dean of the sociology department in the public University of Buenos Aires, Federico Schuster; Svampa; expert in constitutional law Roberto Gargarella; and Víctor Abramovich, the executive director of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies, a local human rights group.

Martino said the seminar would give the unemployed an opportunity to express and explain their concerns. She also suggested they could file legal injunctions en masse to get the courts to rule on whether or not the state is respecting their rights by paying a monthly stipend of just 150 pesos (50 dollars).

"If the state fails to guarantee the rights consecrated in the constitution, those who suffer the violation of those rights could ask ourselves whether we are obligated to submit ourselves to the laws and rules of that state," argued Martino.