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Argentina Special

We Didn't Vote For Them...

Repression

Despite the unprecedented changes happening at street level, there’s little new in mainstream politics and government. President Duhalde is an old political hand, and well known for corruption during his previous years in office. In his nine years as governor of Buenos Aires, he amassed support, contacts and experience that now stand him in good stead, including the use of violent thugs (‘patoteros’), both paid and party political. At his swearing-in as president, hundreds of his supporters, said to have been paid to come, battled outside and inside Congress with protestors, and there are even rumours that some of the looters who precipitated the downfall of President De la Rúa were paid by the Peronist party. Duhalde has ordered the repression of at least one cacerolazo, on the 25th January, since taking power, and is now making use of the thugs of his party apparatus (officially called the Justicialist Party, aka Peronism) to intimidate a population which still clearly remembers the fearsome repression, torture and murder of the military dictatorship (1976-1983), when 30,000 people ‘disappeared’. In the Buenos Aires barrio of Merlo a few weeks ago, the assembly was attacked one assembly has even been shot at. In the barrio of Avellaneda last Sunday the assembly, gathered to protest at corruption in the local administration, was prevented from reaching their destination by a gang of 300 thugs sent by the local municipal leader. Last Tuesday during one of the regular savers’ protests at the Bank of Boston, a woman was beaten to the ground, kicked and handcuffed and had teargas sprayed in her eyes by police, and many of the other protestors were beaten and arrested.

Out With All Of Them...

From the first night of the uprising, the Argentinian people have shown utter contempt for politicians, summed up in the slogan ‘Que se vayan todos’ – out with all politicians. Not that this disillusionment with representative politics is new. In last Octobers general elections, more than 40% of the compulsory) votes were blank or spoiled - the majority going to a cartoon character, Clemente the cat politician, who has no hands so he cannot steal! So while politicians in the West denounce their own demonstrators as either foolish, indulgent or violent for having the cheek to fight for a better world, the mass media focuses on protests in Seattle and Genoa, while burying news of general strikes and mass protests in countries like Argentina. But we know that it will only be people around the world working together and linking up with international struggles, that can defeat capitalism. As one of the speakers at last year’s National Assembly of piqueteros, put it, “Argentina is part of a world-wide crisis – all over the world piqueteros are arising. And last week, 300,000 piqueteros invaded the city of Genoa to say ‘no’ to world-wide imperialism.” Others have taken up the slogan ‘Todos Somos Argentinos’ – ‘We Are All Argentineans’ –because people know that what is happening now in Argentina will be happening in a country near you soon if the IMF and their big business mates carry on destroying the planet in their never ending search for profit. Unless of course, we stop ‘em.