Power and Resistance in the Shaping of Argentine Domestic Policy

Resistance in Context

Argentina has a rich history of protest that dates back to its independence, with particularly acute examples stemming from the popularity of anarchism at the turn of the twentieth century (Romero, 2002: 21), the 1919 Semana Trágica, the Peronist uprisings in 1945, and the “azos” (Pozzi, 2000) starting with the Cordobazo and Rosariazo in 1969 and leading to the Santiagazo in 1993 and finally the Argentinazo in 2001—in addition to the infamous armed revolutionary struggle of the Dirty War. ² The brutal repression of thousands of activists during the Dirty War left Argentina without an entire generation of experienced activists and instilled fear in those that remained. Therefore, it was only beginning with the Santiagazo that politics returned to Argentine streets (Romero, 2002: 312). The protests that emerged in the mid-1990s and culminated in the Argentinazo marked the return of their use as a systematic and effective form of politics.

The fall of De la Rúa is considered by many as an instance of backlash against politics and the politicians associated with the failures of neoliberal adjustment policies epitomized by the pervasive chant “¡Que se vayan todos, que no se quede ni uno solo!” (Out with them all, not a single one should stay!). During the crisis period, the chant was one of frustration with the ruling political class and with what the Argentine people viewed as the corruption of the political elite. However, there was never a call for the seizure of state power, since there was no one well organized enough to accomplish this and no political will to express discontent by nondemocratic means. The Argentinazo was rather a rejection of the existing state power and representation—not so much a challenge to the state in itself as a rebirth of popular power and protest. ³

Although it is now difficult to determine what exactly the people may have intended during those heady days in 2001 and 2002, it seems likely that they themselves did not know in any specific way beyond a call for radical change that would bring them economic improvement and political change. If nothing else, it was evident that the unemployed working class and—in a moment of unprecedented solidarity—the middle classes were fed up with the behavior of the political elites. Clear though it was, this intense feeling of frustration never led to any significant political and social change. It was laid to rest with the election of Néstor Kirchner and the recovery of the economy resulting from strong demand for the kind of commodities Argentina traditionally provided. However, as Schuster (2005, my translation) explains, “in politics, the reconciliation of the sectors of society with politics should not be misunderstood as suggesting that the conditions of ‘¡Que se vayan todos!’ have disappeared from one day to the next; it is better understood by seeing them as latent and as though they might return in force at the first slip of the government.” Indeed, although many of the social protest organizations have diminished in scope and size, they continue to show their influence through protests. It is clear that the dialogue between protest actors and political elites has a significant effect on policy making in Argentina and that decisions are made as often in the streets as in Congress. Importantly, protest is used where the limits of institutional politics fail to channel grievances, and in Argentina those limits are frequently apparent (Machado, Scartascini, and Tommasi, 2011).

More than 10 years after the cry of “¡Que se vayan todos!” most of the elites then targeted are back in power. In the past 11 provincial elections 7 governors kept their seats, and the Peronist party has continued to have a monopoly of institutionalized democratic politics. Only in Catamarca did an alternative candidate win (Clarin, October 5, 2011). Although the Kirchner administrations have differed from previous administrations in their approaches to neoliberal reforms and tolerance of the military, not only are they members of the Peronist party but many members of their administrations are part of the old political machinery. Most important, they do not represent the social movements that epitomized the Argentinazo and demanded a political alternative to the elite structure. Although it is clear that the events surrounding 2001 did not leave a lasting impression on the political structure—even if it did shake it up a bit—their most lasting legacy is a repertoire of contention and a culture of resistance that engages in dialogue with the state and creates policy through this repertoire.

In recent years, protests have often bypassed traditional political parties to bring day-to-day needs to the forefront by the use of road blockades and cacerolazos, even though there have been significant efforts to co-opt and suppress them. Since the mid-1990s the tactics used to articulate popular contention have changed significantly to include these two main forms of protest. This does not, however, mean that the struggle has had little in common with the armed struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Those struggles, particularly with regard to social justice and social exclusion, were revived to some extent, but the tactics used were new. This was in part because of essential support for democracy but also because there was no impetus for another organized attempt at violent revolution. These tactics of opposition and the interchange with the political elite that they encompass are part of what Michel Foucault (1982) terms the “antogonism of strategies,” a concept that allows us to understand a system by looking at those that oppose it. This helps us to understand the importance of the conversation carried out in the streets in Argentina and the impact it has had on policy and the articulation of elite politics there.

The Repertoire of Contention

During the Dirty War (1976–1983), many protesters were silenced, some permanently. The fear that permeated the streets before and during the Argentinazo was one that many of the new activists had grown up with and that was now slowly beginning to dissipate, allowing a safe space again for protest and opposition. As one former assembly member told me, “We understood that the recovery of our memories [of that period] meant not just the recovery of human rights but also the recovery of the struggle of the generations that had fought in the 1970s” (interview, Buenos Aires, April 2007). The period surrounding the crisis of 2001 was the first real opportunity since the military dictatorship for the people to return to the streets and demand change. Although they possessed no unified and concrete political project, their protest was extremely significant because it created the possibility of what they saw as a new kind of revolutionary activity, one that was compatible with essentially democratic conditions. This meant that the period around the summer of 2001 saw many different forms of protest, among them demonstrations, assemblies, strikes, road blockades, occupations, and cacerolazos. Some of these forms had been seen before, whereas others were new to the country. Protest was manifested in a plethora of ways by different social classes across the urban/rural divide. Two of these forms of contention continue to be used systematically today.

Charles Tilly (1995: 41) defined the “repertoire of contention” as “the ways that people act together in pursuit of shared interests.” Drawing upon theatrical metaphors, Tilly contends that contentious politics can be seen as performances in which particular instances improvise on shared scripts and the repertoires these collective performances build (2006: 35). He shows that repertoires of contention draw on the identities, social ties, and organizational forms that constitute everyday social life and produce the collective claims that people make and the means they have for making them. In the course of contending or watching others contend, people learn the interactions that can make a political difference and the locally shared meanings of those interactions (2006: 42).

In Argentina, the repertoire of contention changed radically after the 1990s. Road blockades, only minimally used in the early 1990s, now emerged as one of the main forms of protest, especially for the unemployed groups (Schuster et al., 2006). The use of cacerolazos also gained momentum, addressing the neoliberal reforms employed by President Carlos Menem. They were used mainly to protest rises in the cost of living, increases in taxes, low wages, the high cost of public services, and security concerns. These helped to build a new repertoire of contention that has been adopted by many different sectors in unrelated protests since 2001. Although they have working-class roots (Biagini and Roig, 2008: 82), after the 1990s cacerolazos also became a middle-class phenomenon. ⁴ They have included both unemployed and employed professionals as well as blue-collar and unemployed workers. Although cacerolazos had occurred prior to the Argentinazo in the 1980s and 1990s (Biagini and Roig, 2008: 82) and possibly even earlier, they have become more common since the Argentinazo, often in conjunction with road blockades (Clarín, January 11, 2012). ⁵ In contrast to the blockades, they are usually not found outside of urban contexts.

Other forms of contention that emerged from the Argentinazo, such as the assemblies, ⁶ did not persist. When those who should have left the political stage after the protests failed to do so, there was a great deal of public discussion in the assemblies regarding the significance of the uprising and its consequences. Much of this discussion produced only further disillusionment and frustration. The established political parties of the traditional left interpreted the phenomenon of the assemblies as a new opportunity for them to recruit members and spread their ideas. As a consequence, a number of these assemblies became places where the leaders of these political parties engaged in struggles for power and prestige, something that ultimately also helped to marginalize them further. Assemblies became increasingly irrelevant to the needs and desires of the people. As a 2002 poll by the Centro de Estudios de Opinión Pública found, 46 percent of the people interviewed believed that going to the assemblies to speak about their problems did not lead to any significant resolution or action (Clarín, January 11, 2002).

In 2008 a countrywide protest using road blockades and cacerolazos begun by the agricultural sectors took place after President Cristina Kirchner issued a decree raising export taxes on soybeans and other farm exports from 35 to 45 percent and introducing a new sliding-scale taxation system. This was eventually identified as a policy that would distribute to the less fortunate the wealth acquired by farmers because of an increase in the global commodities market (New York Times, June 24, 2008). Menem’s neoliberal policies had abolished these export taxes, but Néstor Kirchner had resurrected them, and Cristina Kirchner wanted to increase them to fund social programs and the budget deficit. These increases were considered punitive by the four key interest groups that represented the sector: the Sociedad Rural Argentina, the Federación Agraria Argentina, the Confederación de Sociedades Rurales Argentinas, and the Confederación Intercooperativa Agropecuaria. Not unlike the heterogeneous groups that came together during the Argentinazo, these groups historically represented divergent elements of the socioeconomic and political spectrum, and together they called for a countrywide strike.

Road blockades in Argentina emerged in 1995 in the province of Neuquén and began to be used routinely as a form of interruption of the everyday movement of people and goods by 1997 (Villalón, 2007). They used everything from tree trunks to burning tires and cars and were used mainly to elicit direct social assistance and employment from the government (Schuster et al., 2006). This form of protest was mostly identified with the piqueteros, and as these groups received greater concessions from the government in the 1990s many organized themselves into Movimientos de Trabajadores Desocupados (Unemployed Workers’ Movements—MTDs) in order to receive subsidies from the state. They formed cooperatives for a range of purposes such as the barter of goods and services, soup kitchens, sewing workshops, food distribution facilities, housing, and clinics. Three factions emerged among these movements: (1) groups or organizations that entered into agreements with the state, such as Barrios de Pie or the Federación de Tierra y Vivienda (Federation of Land and Housing—FTV) and the Unión Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (Argentine Workers’ Central Union—CTA); (2) the intermediate Corriente Clasista y Combativa (the Class and Combative Current—CCC), which worked with the government but did not become part of it; and (3) the more radical organizations, such as the MTD Teresa Rodríguez and the MTD Aníbal Verón, that belonged to the Bloque Piquetero Nacional. ⁷

Although the use of road blockades was already prevalent among other organizations such as unions and civic organizations (Schuster et al., 2006), it has since spread to other sectors and become part of the repertoire of contention of Argentina’s working classes. From August 2010 to August 2011, 1,405 road blockades were registered, about half of the number registered for the Argentinazo (Nueva Mayoría, 2011). Although piqueteros were responsible for a significant part of the road blockades in 2011–2012 (34 percent), 45 percent were carried out by employees of oil refineries, 8 percent by the agricultural sector (specifically fruit), 7 percent by truck drivers, and the final 6 percent by indigenous people, food workers, former soldiers from the Malvinas war, and a pro-Kirchner group (Nueva Mayoría, 2011). In fact, on October 5, 2011, there were two road blockades in the country, one by the trucking union seeking the incorporation of airport logistics personnel into the union and the other by former employees of oil refineries in La Plata and Santa Fe (Clarín, October 5, 2011; La Nación, October 5, 2011). In both cases, most demands were met or negotiated.

At the height of the agricultural protests of 2008, farmers were manning hundreds of road blockades across the country, preventing road travel and food deliveries. This led to food shortages and shortages of gasoline and other necessities. In an effort to give her tax policy more legitimacy, Cristina Kirchner decided to seek congressional approval for it. This caused the farmers to stop their blockades but brought the various factions of the piqueteros out into the streets to defend their interests. This time the piqueteros who supported the government represented it in the streets, while other piquetero groups protested the tax increase alongside the farmers. For almost every agricultural protest, the government sent out its own demonstrators, and encounters between the two sides were tense and sometimes violent. In addition, farmers not aligned with any of these interest groups, students supporting the farmers, and others who did not belong to any organized group participated in the road blockades and protests in the countryside. ⁸ In one of these protests in Buenos Aires, a protester on the side of the farmers, Alejandro Gahan, became involved in a fight with the leader of the FTV piqueteros group, Luis D’Elia, who was seen as a representative of the Kirchners. D’Elia hit Gahan in plain view of various television cameras, and when in 2009 he was taken to court for his actions he claimed that the government had encouraged him to participate in protests and road blockades (La Nación, November 6, 2009). This suggests that the articulation of dissent by the protesters was something that the government felt it needed to respond to in kind.

The strikes and riots lasted for over three months, and ultimately a tie on the bill in the Senate left it to Vice President Julio Cobos to cast the tie-breaking vote. Cobos voted against the legislation, and the export tax increase was repealed in July 2008. ⁹ The massive protests had made it clear that the president’s tax increase did not have the support of the majority of Argentines. Moreover, it was clear from the beginning that those who presumably would have benefited from the money gained from the tax increase in the form of better programs for the unemployed and the poor did not come out into the streets to support them. Only the token organizations representing the unemployed that had joined the government after the Argentinazo supported the president’s decision.

The Antagonism of Strategies

Much can be learned from these acts of resistance about power relations in Argentina. Foucault’s notions of power and resistance give us a framework in which to understand their broader implications. “Resistance comes first,” writes Foucault, explaining that the power relation emerges through resistance and struggle. Power implies and produces resistance and vice versa. Since power is everywhere in society, resistance is also everywhere. Foucault proposes moving toward a new economy of power relations to bridge the gap between theory and practice, using resistance “as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used.” In other words, to understand power relations one needs to understand the forms of resistance (for example, protest groups or groups in opposition to the government in power) and the “attempts made to dissociate these relations” (quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: 211). Analyzing power relations by what he calls the “antagonism of strategies,” Foucault argues that it is the repertoire of contention and the way elites deal with it that defines the power relationship.

In the Argentine context, it is clear that resistance is present because power relations exist. What is distinctive about this resistance is that it takes shape in the streets rather than in organized government structures. The significant increase in the use of cacerolazos and road blockades after the Argentinazo and their apparent efficacy indicate that the conversation between resistance and power in Argentina is one of direct action. These tactics are used not only by those who might consider themselves liberal or on the left but also by those who consider themselves conservatives and on the right. It is not limited to political parties or ideologies or social classes and generally revolves around an immediate issue or problem. Often there is an alliance among politically disparate groups that agree on the particular issue at hand. All of this is then played out in the streets in some form or another. Much of the politics of resistance since 2001 has been conducted in the streets rather than in the Casa Rosada or in Congress.

It could be argued that this repertoire of contention has become a part of the institutionalized political system and a characteristic of Argentina’s democratic system. In other words, instead of depending on political representatives in Congress, Argentines express their grievances, frustrations, and disappointments directly through street protests. The forms of resistance in Argentine politics have become more systematic, less spontaneous and random and more organized. Historically, grassroots groups have come together very quickly against the government in coordinated action about a common issue—usually in the form of a mass protest and often carried out in the government square. This has been the case even if the groups involved were politically disparate, and it is an integral part of the Peronist system of networks. Co-optation and direct action are not new. For example, trade unions and other groups came together in the government square in Buenos Aires on October 17, 1945, to demand the liberation of Juan Perón. Since the return to democracy in 1983, however, the Argentinazo and the agricultural protests of 2008 are the first examples of any significant return to this form of mass protest. In addition, the continuous presence of cacerolazos and road blockades in various protests since the Argentinazo highlights the effectiveness of these forms of protest and their use as systematic forms of expressing grievances and changing policies. These events show the absence of institutionalized political channels capable of providing for the practical and concrete articulation of popular sentiment.

Direct Action

There are two reasons for this that substantiate the claim that the more institutions lack the means to perform their duties well, the greater the incentive for citizens and groups to try to affect the policy-making process through more direct (and less institutionalized) channels such as protests and demonstrations (Machado, Scartascini, and Tommasi, 2011). First, ever since the transition to democracy in Argentina power has been centralized in the executive (Lupu, 2010). Second, the legislature has a reputation for being a rubber stamp for the administration, and the Kirchners have enjoyed a legislative majority throughout both their tenures. Presidents in Argentina frequently use decrees of necessity and urgency, and this weakens the ability of Congress to check the executive.

Moreover, the party system in Argentina is weakly institutionalized (McGuire, 1999) and—since the Argentinazo—dominated by the Peronist Party. Since the party’s traditional rival, the Unión Cívica Radical, was significantly weakened during the administration of Carlos Menem and after De la Rúa’s flight from office in 2001, many of its members have joined various Peronist factions including the Kirchners’ Frente para la Victoria (Victory Front—FPV). Jones et al. (2002) have found that Argentina’s weak Congress is populated by transient amateur legislators who answer to fragmented provincial leaderships, largely because of party-centered electoral rules in a federal system. As a result, it plays a limited role in the making of public policy and is a relatively ineffective check on the executive branch. In addition, O’Donnell (1996) has argued that the general exclusion of the legislature from policy making has led to a delegitimization of Congress and a general resentment among legislators, who consequently feel little responsibility for the policies that are being made.

This, in turn, leads citizens to put little trust in their parties or politicians and encourages them to find alternative ways to express their discontent. Thus, for many, the streets are their only option for a fair representation of their resistance to government policy. This explains the moments when people come together across political, economic, and party lines to bypass politics as usual, considering the issue at hand so detrimental to their daily lives that they cannot leave it to a rubber-stamp Congress to decide. The massive protests and demonstrations of resistance not only influence the decision makers but also oblige them to participate in these street politics through the movements that have joined them. This is evidenced particularly by the agricultural protests of 2008 but also by the delegitimization of key political leaders after the Argentinazo.

Conclusion

According to Foucault, the twenty-first century will be known for the articulation and development of new theories and practices of resistance. In Argentina, the resistance of the 1960s and 1970s clarified and mobilized the antagonism of strategies within the hierarchy of power and determined the importance of protest in the articulation of power within the political elite structure. This has been the legacy of the Dirty War and is now being articulated in a new way. The relationship between those who hold office and those who make claims on them needs to be understood in the context of the antagonism of strategies developed in the discourse and activity of the 1960s and 1970s. To understand the dynamics of party politics in Argentina, looking at the articulation of popular contention is fundamental.

A new repertoire of contention emerged from the Argentinazo. In particular, two forms of protest have persisted since that period—road blockades and cacerolazos. These tactics form part of everyday politics in Argentina and reflect a dialogue between the state and its citizens in the formation of political policies. Argentina has seen a rebirth of popular power and protest, and this resistance is key to understanding democratic consolidation and the policy-making process.