 Family members of the victims of Argentina’s dictatorship demand justice and call for prosecuting those responsible. Photo: Bill Hackwell |
To speak of the current situation in Argentina requires a review of the previous 30 years. After the March 24, 1976, coup, the ruling class and the military, with the complicity of the Catholic Church, set up an extermination plan with the sole purpose of filling their pockets and ending once and for all any attempt to struggle for liberation and independence. The results were catastrophic for millions of Argentines both during the dictatorship and in future generations.
It requires going back to the end of the 19th century, when Argentine troops under the leadership of Gen. Julio Argentino Roca carried out the “Desert Campaign” throughout Patagonia to exterminate or force into submission the Indigenous communities that lived there. They massacred around 25,000 Indigenous people in that campaign; many others were forced to migrate to border zones or were taken as slaves to Buenos Aires. In that way, the ruling class achieved dominance over the land—vast stretches handed over for low prices or granted outright to landlords and politicians.
Later, over the course of the 20th century, the country suffered through innumerable military dictatorships.
The Argentine bourgeoisie gave the stamp of approval to repression and plunder. It applauded the dictatorships of 1930, of 1955 and of 1966 and 1976. It also applauded the neocolonial “democracy” of the 1980s that left the country in ruins with a foreign debt of $140 billion.
The Argentine working class has resisted the onslaughts of capitalism and the oligarchy. There was the massacre of workers in Patagonia in 1921, where mule and sheep herders as well as other field workers—including many anarchists—were gunned down for demanding better living conditions. Resistance lasted through the 1976 dictatorship, which left 30,000 people “disappeared.” The people, expressing themselves through their armed organizations, unions, student centers and artistic and cultural spaces, faced harsh repression, punishment and torture.
Operation Condor
In 1976, the heads of the military decided to implement a neoliberal economic model. To do this, they drew up a strategy to neutralize and physically exterminate revolutionary activists and any potential opposition. This strategy, created with and controlled by the U.S. government and harshly applied throughout South America, was what became known as “Operation Condor.”
 Argentina’s president Nestor Kirchner has distanced himself from U.S.-backed neoliberal policies without breaking from the capitalist class. Photo: Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images |
Argentina was left absolutely subordinate to the interests of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. From the first day of the repression, Washington sent signals of support. On March 24, 1976, the Washington Post wrote: “The Argentine military deserves respect for its patriotism for trying to save a sinking ship. The end of civilian government, normally a regrettable event, is in this case a blessing.”
The 1976 dictatorship took up the task of decisively fracturing the people’s organizations, with the aim of “ending subversion.” Counting on the support of a large sector of the middle class and the Church (which gave their blessings to the torturers), the military carried out “God’s will:” they tortured detainees non-stop, they stole their babies, they raped women, forced millions to leave the country, threw people live into the ocean from airplanes, threw bodies in mass graves and so on.
In this way, they took over the country and passed laws that favored themselves. They opened the doors to big businesses and transnational corporations. Most of all, they restored the “social order,” making arrangements with some bourgeois parties for the return to democracy—the democracy that they wanted. They were arranging a democracy that only benefited the exploiters, business owners, bureaucrats and corrupt politicians—in other words, the democracy of the presidents Raúl Alfonsín, Carlos Menem, Fernando de la Rúa and the current president Nestor Kirchner.
The Alfonsín and Menem governments passed the Law of Due Obedience, the Final Stop Law and the Pardon, which left all the killers of the dictatorship free.
Talking about the Menem government means talking about privatization, arms sales to countries at war, Senate scandals, the convertibility between the Argentine peso and the dollar, money laundering and so on.
It means talking about a government model that left millions of people without jobs, thousands of families living in the street, an unpayable foreign debt that all Argentines—those without jobs or land, the indigent, the people dying in the streets, the children who from birth have to pay the price of their malnutrition—have to pay off every day.
Lack of jobs is a crime
According to a recent United Nations report, 26.5 percent of children in northern Argentina only live to the age of four. In provinces like Chaco, 30 of every 1,000 children die at birth.
These statistics from the National Institute of Statistics and Census—questioned by Kirchner—are the greatest indictment against this exploitative model. According to this report, more than 6 million people (15.2 percent of the poorest population of Argentina) live on just over $20 per month. Eleven million people, making up 2 million families, live on around $60 a month—the majority being unemployed and living on welfare or in the underground economy. Teachers earn a minimum salary of $150 a month, while retirees receive $120 a month.
Meanwhile, the Menem functionaries enjoy good health and good fortune after having looted the country. Such is the case of Alberto Kohan, former secretary-general of the presidency, who is charged with paying millions of dollars in bribes in a deal between IBM and the Argentine Banco Nación. Kohan lives in freedom enjoying a fortune of $4 million.
Carlos Menem himself, who should be jailed for crimes against humanity, has a seat in the Senate that still allows him to speak and make decisions, all in the framework of “democracy.”
The businessman Sergio Taselli—currently owner of the Gándara milk products company, metropolitan trains, the Santa Ana refrigeration company, the Agrinac company and others—was the same person who carried out the infamous shutdown of the Yacimientos Carboníferos Fiscales coal mines, throwing thousands of families on the streets. Currently the Gándara milk workers are demanding the cancellation of the layoffs, better salaries and job security. Taselli is counting on having enough capital to avoid prosecution and to continue cheating the people.
Kirchner’s selective memory
The functionaries in the Kirchner government have a selective memory. They open museums in places that used to be concentration camps during the dictatorship, while at the same time they brutally repress workers in the Santa Cruz province in Patagonia, where more than 20 workers are in prison on a hunger strike.
They give some political space to former activists from the 1970s, mostly members of the Montonero insurgency. They also annulled two of the laws that gave freedom to the murderers during the dictatorship, and reopened cases against them. Nevertheless, the dictator Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla enjoys a light home confinement. Those responsible for the economic shutdown of the 1990s are free.
The government paid off the country’s IMF debt, paying $10 billion or 9 percent of the foreign debt. All the pseudo-Peronist “progressives” applauded. But still, children are dying of hunger, people are still eating from trash bins and retirees are surviving on crumbs.
Nestor Kirchner’s chauvinist government is carrying out a huge memorial to our 30,000 disappeared as part of the 30th anniversary of the dictatorship responsible for the disappearances. It is trying to co-opt the people’s event. They are having a special event in the Colón Theater, with the orchestra playing a beautiful Mahler piece, so that trade union bureaucrats and functionaries like Felipe Solá (governor of the Buenos Aires province), Vice President Daniel Scioli, Telerman and the Ferdandezes—all of whom are as implicated in corruption and cover-ups as the military itself—can applaud.
As one activist from a Buenos Aires people’s assembly noted, “Kirchner defends the human rights of those who are dead, but forgets about those of the living.” In the streets, the reality is different. The people’s demands aren’t waiting. The piqueteros are still blocking highways. There are around 150 factories that have been taken over, and the people’s assemblies are reorganizing.
The obligations of those in power
Already too much time and confidence has been granted to the Kirchner government. In the words of Humberto, a member of the Acratas teatro-piquetero group: “It is not enough to demand and raise the banner of human rights, words that are thrown around so often by those in power. Rather, it is time to start talking about human obligations. It’s time to start talking about the obligations of each one of these functionaries, deputies, senators, judges or of the president himself the moment he took power.”
The Kirchner government has been in power for three years. That’s not a short time. It is true that the bigger evils—for example, the privatizations of the public companies or increasing the public debt—are the result of prior governments.
But the Kirchner government is also responsible, because instead of listening to the workers, it handles and represses them. It is responsible because it continues to subsidize privatized companies and transportation. It sends troops to Haiti and Iraq against the people’s will.
Unmasking this government is not an easy task, since it is supported by the big business press. Some of the media absurdly compares Kirchner’s government to Chávez’s in Venezuela. It is associated with the anti-globalization currents that are pushing forward in Latin America.
But for those living in Argentina, the story is the same. Infant mortality, illiteracy, prostitution, torture and murders in the police stations are increasing daily.
Thirty years after the military coup and in memory of the 30,000 disappeared, social fighters are paying homage in their own way: blocking highways, declaring a general strike, organizing strikes in hospitals, shutting down schools. They are still demanding what they have been demanding for decades—dignity, social justice, bread, jobs, healthcare and education.
Prosecution and punishment for the genocides of yesterday and today! No to the payment of the foreign debt!
Articles may be reprinted with credit to Socialism and Liberation magazine.
