[Marxism] Argentina: The coup-plotting oligarchs are trying to paint themselves as the democrats. They will not succeed!

["Fred Fuentes" <fred.fuentes@xxxxxxxxx>]

Statement by Patria y Pueblo (Homeland and People), translated and
introduced by Federico Fuentes for Links International Journal of
Socialist Renewal

The bill to ratify the March 11 Ministerial Resolution 125, regarding
export tariffs ("retentions") on soya, was delivered to the Senate,
having been modified with exemplary liberality by the government
deputies to meet the demands of the small and medium soya growers from
the pampa húmeda [humid pampas region] and extrapampeanas [outside the
pampa] areas. But the senators, due to a deadlock and the negative
vote of the vice-president, rejected it.

None of the projects presented by opposition senators better
conciliated the interests of those affected with those of the country
as a whole than the one handed over by the house of deputies. Why then
the negative vote? Many senators gave an explicit response to this
question when they explained that this issue was no longer about
tariff policies, and had transformed itself into a debate over who
holds power in Argentina. While it is true that some of them focused
on the forms in which this power is exercised, the sedition led by the
Sociedad Rural Argentina[1] points towards a questioning of power
itself, beyond any eventual good intentions of those who assumed this
formalistic position.

There is no doubt that formalities count, but in order to exercise
power with the "elegance" demanded by these legislators, the rules of
the democratic game demand that the executive branch exercise it
without a fraction of society daring to debate this right. As if this
was not enough, a crowd of irresponsible politicos mounted the wave of
these seditious protests in order to take revenge for the electoral
results of October 2007[2]: many of the senators who rejected the
resolution belonged to parties led by these spokespeople of the
Apocalypse.

All of the senators knew that the debate was no longer (or never was)
over whether to take more or less rent from the chacareros [owners of
small and medium-sized farms known as chacras, ranging from 50 to 400
hectares], but rather over the right of a legitimately elected
government to decide its customs policies. It is no coincidence that
those who voted against resolution 125 rushed to declare that "they
were not against the retentions". It's true: they were against the
necessary strengthening of the central executive power in a country
dislocated by three long decades of imperialist, neoliberal, quisling
and oligarchic hegemon......rest at http://links.org.au/node/534

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