Los Piqueteros:
Horizontal Autonomist Organisation in Argentina
by Robert Allen
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The Argentina Autonomist Project
Neka and Graciela are bringing a message of hope out of the
economic catastrophe in Argentina.
Neka belongs to the unemployed workers of the Anibal Verón
Co-ordination, part of the piqueteros movement - their name
coming from their tactic of picketing or blockading roads
and highways. She is coming to share her experience of the
vast movement of occupations and grassroots organising and
resistance that has swept Argentina.
Graciela will give a unique puppet show portraying how
workers have gone from regular jobs to picking up cardboard
from the streets of Buenos Aires every night to sell it for
a few pence. The show - which has already toured the two
Americas with great success - tells of the local social
movements that have grown to create a near insurrection. It
uses a variety of puppet styles, some acting and simple
singing. It involves the audience; she says, "I will ask
them to clap and sing with me." The content is about
Argentine history and social movements in Argentina. The
main character is a woman, who used to be a worker and is
now picking up cardboard from the streets of Buenos Aires
every night to sell it for a few cents. The message is
about organizing and struggling.
autonomista.org
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June 26, 2002, another day of mass mobilization, another
blockade - and yet another demand for food, jobs, education
and healthcare. Four weeks after the piquetero movement had
blocked 1,000 highways, bridges, roads and railway lines
throughout Argentina, another blockade, this time to stop
the flow of commerce into Buenos Aires, was being mobilized
for the major arteries into the city. But this time the
Argentinean state under the presidency of Eduardo Duhalde
was ready.
The editorial group of Argentina Indymedia describe what
happened next.
"At La Noria Bridge, police armed for war
confronted the demonstrators. There they blocked them off
and did not let them join the mobilization. At Alsina
Bridge, those crossing the bridge were stopped and they
forced demonstrators to return towards the capital. On the
Panamericana Highway, they cut the passage of unemployed
people. The same happened in Liniers, where protesters were
not allowed to advance towards the Ministry of Social
Action."
And at Pueyrredón Bridge, the gateway into Buenos Aires,
where 5000 people had mobilized themselves, it became clear
that among the tear gas and the rubber bullets the police
also had an agenda, to hunt down and shoot piqueteros. At
Lanús Station, Darío Santillán, an unemployed organizer,
went to the aid of Maximiliano Costeki, an artist, who had
been shot in the chest. Santillán was shot in the back at
close range. It was an assassination. See Nadir.
It was, said the Indymedia collective, a wild repression.
"In Lanús Station one of the companions was assassinated,
his body left in the middle of the platform with several
others wounded by lead bullets. The unemployed
organizations have counted six hurt from bullets, but they
do not disregard that there are more. The images are
heart-breaking, almost of a civil war; men and women
defended themselves as they could, against weapons, bullets
and gasses. The wounded at Fiorito Hospital was 90, of
which 17 remained interned there. There were 189 stopped in
the Avellanda police station. Most of them were stopped in
a witch hunt, caught like the inquisition of the middle
ages. After one hour of the repression, it was still
difficult to breathe in the area," they reported
immediately after the event, an event Eduardo Duhalde's
police claimed was not of their making. Indymedia saw it
differently.
"We know that it is a lie. We have bullets
that we gathered off the floor ourselves. We saw when they
killed our friends. We have film and photograph
testimonies. We accuse the government of Argentina and its
police, before the whole world, of murder."
Darío Santillán
and Maximiliano Costeki had become the first victims of a
Peronist regime that claimed it was the last hope for
Argentina. Thousands marched to the Plaza De Mayo to
protest the murders of the young piqueteros - they were
both in their twenties, growing to an estimated 50,000
within two days. Resignations followed and the police
involved in the murders were jailed but Duhalde had failed.
The popular movement he had attempted to crush was stronger
than ever and the support for the piqueteros was
unquenched.
Graciela Monteagudo arrived back in Buenos Aires three
weeks after the assassination of the two piqueteros.
"The
neighborhood assemblies - horizontal, grassroots,
pot-banging organizations created spontaneously during the
December uprising - were taking over buildings and empty
lots, including two abandoned banks and an abandoned
clinic," she recalled.
"The unemployed autonomist
organization Anibal Verón, to which Darío and Maxi were
linked, was now preparing for a day of street protest
against state-sponsored terrorism. We all got together with
people from the assemblies to create a giant puppet street
theater piece. Sharing our meals and sometimes spending the
night with [the people of] the Anibal Verón affected me
tremendously. I could not get out of my mind the picture of
Darío Santillán, agonizing, being dragged out of the train
station by the same cops that executed him. I felt I had to
commit more time to the social movement in Argentina and
help establish links between the Argentinean activists and
the anti-corporate globalization movement."
Graciela was born and raised in Argentina. In 1994 she
moved to the US to work with Bread and Puppet Theater,
leaving
"a country with a huge middle class, full access to
education, public healthcare, high nutrition standards and
low infant mortality". But the Argentine government's
privatization of the economy imposed by the International
Monetary Fund changed everything. Nine years later the
Argentinean economy is shot to pieces, according to
Graciela,
"even worse than it was in 2001, when it
collapsed". Since December 2001, when people rose in
response to the government’s implementation of martial law,
three out of five of the population now lives under the
poverty line, while one in five are unemployed. That
response is the creation, says Graciela,
"of the most
inspiring movement since the Zapatista uprising in 1984".
The image of the piquetero movement in the popular mind is
associated with an August day in 2001 when 100,000
unemployed piqueteros organized the piquete (picket or
blockage) of 300 roads. Thousands were arrested and five
were killed, but it left the economy paralyzed. It was a
tactic started in 1993 but it was developed into a national
movement in 1995 after the privatization of the State Oil
company put four out of five workers in Cutral Có and Plaza
Huincul, two Patagonia company towns, out of work.
Gradually unemployed workers began to organize throughout
the county to form the Movimiento de Trabajadores
Desocupados (MTD). Organizing locally - Darío Santillán was
an organizer with MTD Lanús and Maximiliano Costeki with
MTD Pte. Peron - they affiliated to a larger co-ordinator
group; these martyred piqueteros were part of the
Coordinadora Anibal Verón in Buenos Aires. The idea of
blocking roads to prevent the flow of commodities became a
powerful tool.
"We see that the way capitalism operates is
through the circulation of goods," explained Alejandro, a
young piquetera.
"Obstructing the highways is the way to hurt the capitalist
the most. Therefore, we who have nothing - our way to make
them pay the costs and show that we will not give up and
die for their ambitions, is to create difficulties by
obstructing the large routes of distribution. We block the
streets. We make that part of the streets ours. We use
wood, tires, and petrol to burn. We do it like this because
it is the only way they acknowledge us. If we stood
protesting on the sidewalk, they would trample all over
us."
Since the mid-1990s this autonomous movement has blocked
roads all over the country while demanding the withdrawal
of police, the repudiation of state repression, the release
of jailed comrades, unemployment benefits, food, health
facilities, and demands for jobs and unemployment subsidies
called 'work plans', which are paid in Lecops - a national
parallel currency or bond. Some autonomous collectives,
like Anibal Verón, demand that the state send its officials
to meet them at the piquete, a tactic that prevents the
individualization of the piqueteras and keeps the politics
rooted in the community and based on autonomous assembly.
It is one that the state has been unable to counter, so
much that when Duhalde, in February 2002, declared that
there would be a universal subsidy of 150 Lecops per
family, the response from the piqueteros was to set up more
mobilizations. The Coordinadora Anibal Verón make use of
the work plans to set up projects, such as bakeries, metal
and wood workshops, schools and organic vegetable plots, as
well as running workshops on all the issues that affect the
community. But it would be wrong to state that the
piqueteros, the community assemblies and the movement of
the unemployed are simply about road blocks and community
projects.
When the Anibal Verón Co-ordination was set up in 1997 it
was 90 per cent women, now is 50:50 men and women and
the issues that dominate are those that characterize
Argentinean society - the power relations between men and
women, between the state and the powerless, and the
oppression that exists in a society that uses political
clientism to reward those who are loyal to the state.
Neka Jara, a piquetera of Anibal Verón, sees positive
change through the
"everyday work in the neighborhood"
that is challenging Peronism, capitalism, globalization and
the moralistic and societal rules people have been
subjected to for years.
"Many things have changed," she says.
"The most important is the sense of community. We are
changing the relationships we have with each other and the
relationship with oppression. Groups who work and live
through different relationships change that relationship
with oppression. We realize that we are happy and take
pleasure in what we do. We have regained our dignity.
Social change is something that we live with now, today. We
do not need to wait for a revolution. We are struggling for
social change from the spaces where we work, and the
valuable thing is the experience of working together."
This has led to over 200 factories under workers control,
more than 300 cooperatives organized by unemployed women
and men, countless neighborhood assemblies and autonomous
initiatives. And a response from the state that somehow all
this activity is linked to outside influence.
"In the
piqueteros movement we believe that there is a part of
authentic protest which is becoming smaller... and another
part financed by extremist groups," Duhalde announced when
he was trying to discredit the movement.
"We have been told
that the finances [for the piqueteros in Salta, north of
Argentina] may come from the FARC of Colombia, or in other
words, from narco-trafficking." This reveals an ignorance
of the piqueteros not unusual among ruling elites who try
to understand grassroots social movement. It is as if they
cannot see the soup kitchens, the feeding of children at
daycare centers, the building of bricks for the community
and the growing of food - all activities that are indeed a
threat to capitalism because they are local, autonomous and
free of political oppression.
"We can equate direct action with our activities," Neka says, but,
she adds, it is the growing politicization of the communities that
is making a difference.
"To understand why we need to work on our
organic gardens we also needed to understand who controls
the food system. And this has to do with education and
living with different logics. The person has to change, and
we also have to change ourselves."
More significantly the piqueteros are realizing that they can control their own lives and that this is the real threat to those who would seek to fill the power vacuum in Argentine politics.
"The biggest
change is the disruption of this clientism," she says,
adding that people, particularly women, are realizing that
it is over.
"We are now thinking for ourselves, what kind
of health care we want, what kind of education; we are
talking about permanent change. There is a different
alternative construction taking place. Now we don't need
anyone to tell us what to do. We don't need to be told what
our problems are or how to solve them in our everyday
lives. People do see the change." And perhaps more
significantly the process is not seen as a struggle.
"Although we have to go out and confront oppression on the
streets, we also have fun. Once a month we come together to
resolve our conflicts but we also celebrate what we are
doing."
And like the Zapatistas the piqueteros are not changing
their societies in isolation from the rest of the world.
"We want to build a real resistance and a real alternative
to globalization. In every part of the world we want human
beings to be happy. The question is how do we destroy the
things that are against our happiness and build something
new - the real life, not money or consumerism? That is why
this is personal and why we must live what we dream of."
-
–
Robert Allen
FURTHER READING:
Picket and pot-banger together: Class re-composition in
Argentina? http://www.geocities.com/aufheben2/auf_arg.html
Argentina's Popular Rebellion Que Se Vayan Todos!
SEE ALSO: Argentina Indymedia
THE TOUR
Dublin: June 27, 9 pm, Teachers' Club, 36 Parnell Sq.
West.
Dublin: June 28, 6.30 pm, Teachers' Club, 36 Parnell Sq.
West.
Glasgow: July 1: 7.30pm, Alex Thompson Hotel, 320 Argyle
St.
Edinburgh: July 2: 2pm, Forest Café, Westport, Edinburgh +
7.30 pm Muirhouse Millenium Centre, 7 Muirhouse Medway.
Edinburgh: July 3: 7.30pm, CWU 15 Brunswick St.
Lancaster: July 5: 8.30pm, Gregson Centre, Moor Lane.
Bradford: July 7: 7pm, 1in12 Club, 21-23 Albion St.
Leeds: July 8: 7pm, Woodhouse Community Centre.
Manchester: July 9: 8:00pm, Mumbo Arts Centre/Gramby, 86
Princess St
Liverpool: July 10: 7.30pm, Merseyside Trade Union Centre,
Hardman Street.
[Other dates and venues to follow]
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