[A-List] Report from Argentina

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Vicente Balvanera reporting from Buenos Aires (1)
June 12, 2002

The forced eviction yesterday of 250 families from their homes in
Lomas de Zamora, a working class suburb of Buenos Aires,
exemplifies the current situation in Argentina: a pitched battle,
fought hand to hand and disputing every inch of ground, fierce,
increasingly organized resistance against the direct pillaging of
the Argentine working class and people, their resources, land,
jobs, education, life savings, public health, at the hands of US
and European imperialism.

The scene televised nationally all through the day, on a par with
World Cup Soccer, was worthy of the West Bank in Palestine,
complete with rubber bullets, tear gas, attack dogs and bulldozed
dwellings. The TV was forced to show the proud resistance against
the eviction, as part of a growing level of organization: many of
these settlements are networked around organizations like the
Polo Obrero and the Bloque Piquetero Nacional, pooling legal and
other resources, organizing mutual solidarity.

In the Buenos Aires barrio of Almagro, just a couple of weeks
ago, the Neighborhood Assembly voted to stand with the neighbors
of Yatay Street against their eviction, in support of a call made
by the Polo Obrero. The march and rally, in the framework of the
growing and powerful unity of "pots and picketeers", successfully
prevented the eviction.

An interview with the neighbors of the Yatay Street building will
be published here in the next few days.

Let no-one be deceived by superficial appearances in Argentina:
there may be something of a reflux on the level of street
agitation; but the class war bubbles on many fronts every single
day, the uprising of December which toppled government after
government continues to pose the question of who holds power,
while a crumbling, lackey government is truly at the end of the
line: it cannot offer any solution to the crisis, nor can it
defeat the resistance of the working class and people. Trying to
appease an insatiable IMF, Duhalde fumblingly attempts to round
out the expropriation of the savings account holders, but knows
he cannot implement the new wave of structural adjustment in the
provinces, even if the governors, Radicals and Peronists alike,
have all lined up to sign the papers.

Last night several thousand savings account holders marched
through downtown Buenos Aires, shouting "thieves, thieves, give
back our money". Today a group is parked outside the house of a
banker, giving him no peace in his own home. No-one?s buying the
so-called solution of accepting worthless bonds at a fraction of
the face value of the expropriated savings accounts, and anger
mounts as inflation wears down, and hyperinflation threatens to
wipe away, even at that nominal amount.

The Buenos Aires newspaper Clarin reports that there were strikes
in no fewer than seven Argentine cities yesterday. In northern
Jujuy, for example, with six access points to the city blocked,
club wielding strikers broke through barriers and marched right
into the state legislature, demanding back pay and improvements
in health, education and public security. In Cordoba, for
example, several public employee unions marched in opposition to
wage cuts, and cuts in health, education and welfare. The workers
are planning, for example, to take over several public hospitals
in protest against cuts in public health, together with doctors,
nurses and hospital staff. And the government hasn?t even started
attempting to implement the new wave of lay-offs, wage cuts and
budget cuts, demanded by the US Treasury and IMF, yet.

In subsequent articles, I will be reporting on the real character
of the plans of US and European imperialism and their local
junior partners (completion of the expropriation of the savings
account holders, implementation of the new wave of structural
adjustment in the provinces, prostration of the working class in
general, and defeat of the revolutionary process opened last
December, crowned with a strongman unconditionally
pro-imperialist government installed either through "elections"
managed by the bosses and their media, or a coup d?etat,
expropriation of land and capital assets, etc.); on the way in
which the center-left and the democratizing left (supported by
the usual chorus of shrill and tiny sectarian groups) fall right
into line behind these plans, which include the emergence of a
popular front with which to stifle the revolutionary process; on
the growing level and forms of struggle, resistence and
organization, increasingly coordinated between the picketeers,
the neighborhood assemblies and the organized working class; on
the up-coming National Assembly of Employed and Unemployed
Workers; on the programs and resolutions for action voted, and
the manner in which they are carried out; on the perspectives for
the emergence of a revolutionary workers party; in short, on the
overall prospects for a working class solution to the crisis,
already spreading and erupting in neighboring Uruguay, Paraguay,
Bolivia and Brazil.

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