Los Piqueteros: Horizontal autonomist organisation in Argentina

national | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Monday June 23, 2003 13:28 by Robert Allen - An Talamh Glas atgrallen at yahoo dot com

Graciela and Neka of the Argentina Autonomista Project are in Ireland in June and July, firstly at the Grassroots Gathering in Dublin June 27 and 29, and then touring the country in mid-July. Neka is a piquetera with Anibal Verón co-ordination group in Buenos Aires. Graciela is the organiser of the AAP, which includes puppet show. This is the story of the piqueteros and why Graciela set up the AAP.

June 26, 2002, another day of mass mobilisation, 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 mobilised for the major arteries into the city. But this time the Argentinian 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 mobilised 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 organiser, 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. http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/imf/argentina/txt/2002/0626asesino_dario.htm
It was also, 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."
The response of the people was immediate. Dario Santillan 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 Argentinian 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 privatisation of the economy imposed by the International Monetary Fund changed everything. Nine years later the Argentinian 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 organised the piquete (picket or blockage) of 300 roads. Thousands were arrested and five were killed, but it left the economy paralysed. It was a tactic started in 1993 and developed into a national movement in 1995 after the privatisation 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 organise throughout the county to form the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (MTD). Organising locally – Darío Santillán was an organiser with MTD Lanús and Maximiliano Costeki with MTD Pte. Peron – they affliated 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, tyres, 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 individualisation of piqueteros 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 Feburary 2002, declared that there would be a universal subsidy of 150 Lecops per family, the response from the piqueteros was to set up more mobilisations. 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 is 50:50 men and women and the issues that dominate are those that characterise Argentinian 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 clientelism 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 neighbourhood" that is challenging Peronism, capitalism, globalisation 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 realise 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 neighbourhood 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 politicisation of the communities that is making a difference. "To understand why we need to work on our organic gardens we also need 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 realising that they can control their own livies and that this is the real threat to Duhalde and his Peronist traditions. "The biggest change is the disruption of this clientelism," she says, adding that people, particularly women, are realising 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 globalisation. 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."

Graciela and Neka will be at the Fifth Grassroots Gathering. Info: hhtp://grassrootsgathering.freeservers.com

http://www.autonomista.org

FURTHER READING:

Picket and pot-banger together: Class re-composition in Argentina? http://www.geocities.com/aufheben2/auf_arg.html

Que Se Vayan Todos! Argentina's Popular Rebellion http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/imf/argentina/txt/2002/0918que_se_vayan06.htm

SEE ALSO: Argentina Indymedia http://www.argentina.indymedia.org/features/english/