Social Conflict in Argentina (1989–2017): Democracy in Dispute

Struggles against Neoliberalism and its Overthrow (1989–2001)

The last Argentine civil-military coup took place in 1976 and set off a cycle of reforms that would irreversibly change the social structure, replacing the previous development model with a pattern of capital accumulation fundamentally aimed at financial valorization (Basualdo, 2011). ¹ The long-term effects of the changes enacted by the last dictatorship (1976–1983) included the deindustrialization of the economy and the growing predominance of financial capital, a readaptation of the state as a redistributive mechanism, and the reconfiguration of the relationship between capital and labor by means of a genocidal policy that resulted in 30,000 missing activists, the political disarticulation of the labor movement, and a generalized disciplining of the remaining social body (Azpiazu, Basualdo, and Khavisse, 2004).

Stemming from the struggles of unions, political parties, and human rights organizations during the last years of the regime, democracy returned after the dictatorship’s defeat in the 1982 Malvinas (or Falklands) War. However, that defeat (which was evidenced by the imprisonment of its main leaders for crimes against humanity only a few years later) must be assessed in terms of the success of the long-term transformations within and among social classes that it caused: the homogenization of the business elite and the heterogenization and social and political fragmentation of the working class (Villarreal, 1985). Argentine social conflict, which had centered around the classic dispute between capitalists and workers, became more complex as the social structure was transformed.

The breakup of the labor power articulated around the union movement greatly increased during the 1990s, when the Carlos Menem administrations (1989–1999) implemented more radical neoliberal policies that affected the smaller and less concentrated industrial branches and the purchasing power of workers. Policies including economic openness, financial liberalization, selective regulation of markets, and the furthering of a new kind of state based on a broad privatization of public goods and services (Cantamutto and Wainer, 2013) were introduced in response to an acute 1988–1990 economic crisis characterized by hyperinflation and a vertiginous increase of poverty and social marginality. ² During 1989 Argentina experienced a wave of looting of unprecedented proportions in recent history that prefigured transformations in the collective action of the popular sectors. The looting not only represented new forms of confrontation that overflowed existing channels for participation but dramatically exposed Argentina’s “new social issue”: the structural poverty of a significant portion of its population (Serulnikov, 2017).

Given the decline of union power because of defeats and the disarticulation of its social base (unemployment, informality, outsourcing, etc.), the social conflict of the time was characteristically diverse, including a multiplication of contentious actors with innovative organization processes, the appearance of heterogeneous demands and claims, and new forms of struggle. The union front created a new labor central, the Central de Trabajadores de Argentina (Argentine Workers’ Central—CTA), in opposition to the traditional Peronist Confederación General del Trabajo (General Confederation of Labor—CGT). However, many of the decade’s most important conflicts involved actors playing unprecedented major roles, including the families and friends of victims of police repression and/or abuse of power, retirees, the unemployed, human rights organizations, workers in recovered factories, and neighborhood assemblies (Schuster et al., 2006). Many of these groups were responding to particular forms of injury and remained outside the traditional institutions in charge of processing social demands. Many also proclaimed their autonomy from the state and from any political party or union, but others subscribed to political traditions such as Peronism or some variant of Marxism. Their demands were heterogeneous and included aspects that can be distinguished as corporate (e.g., pension increase or social assistance plans for the unemployed), political (e.g., changes in the economic model, the resignation of certain governmental representatives), and identity-based (e.g., the formal recognition of organizations). These new actors resorted to unusual modes of performance to satisfy unmet demands or to solve their problems in the face of state inaction. Direct action, understood as “forms of contentious action that are not mediated by the dominant institutionality” (Pérez and Rebón, 2012: 21), expanded. Popular protests surpassed traditional channels of participation and were expressed through disruptive modalities such as street and highway blockages, building takeovers, encampments and blockades, escraches, ³ looting, and uprisings (Antón et al., 2010; Auyero, 2002; Farinetti, 2000; Merklen, 2010).

These novel processes of organization opened the way for popular resistance to neoliberalism, which turned into what was termed a new repertoire of action of Argentine social movements (Auyero, 2002; Merklen, 2010; Svampa and Pereyra, 2003). The importance of these transformations was such that many of these new dimensions persisted even when the political and economic conditions changed. Strictly speaking, the new forms of organization and struggle did not replace but complemented the old ones. Both the provincial uprisings and puebladas (popular revolts) and the expansion of the piquetero movement, made up of factions of the unemployed, were based on experiences of union resistance that found new channels of action via new modes of organization (Auyero, 2002). This change in the repertoire of collective action should be understood not as a simple empirical inventory of relatively new and more powerful modes of action but as a set of new forms of socialization and political participation. The key to this process was the transformation of “workers” into “the poor” (Merklen, 2010)—in other words, the shift from the factory to the neighborhood (Svampa, 2005). Territorialization became the most important factor in the “re-affiliation” of the popular universe once all references to the world of formal work had been lost.

This social fabric, woven around cooperation (which often effectively replaced the state), was based on political and social organizations with strong territorial anchoring: the piquetero world. Consequently, transformations of popular struggle have been related to the urgent need for more and better tools for obtaining resources in a context of accelerated impoverishment and the creation of new networks of containment and belonging that would provide an identity and collective anchor for these modes of popular participation.

All these transformations in social conflict increased toward the end of the decade, when Argentina experienced the toppling of the neoliberal model as it went through its worst economic, social, and political crisis as a nation. In 1999 Fernando de la Rúa, a member of the Unión Cívica Radical (Radical Civic Union), became president and increased fiscal adjustment and economically orthodox measures. Between 1999 and 2002, economic activity dropped by almost 20 percent, social indicators such as poverty and unemployment worsened dramatically, and the system of democratic representation underwent a deep political crisis. ⁴ Intense and belligerent social conflict took over the streets of the country.

Resistance on the part of the various sectors affected by neoliberal policies (mainly the leading piquetero movement) grew as the model’s collapse became increasingly evident. Toward the end of December 2001, in response to a series of government measures meant to deal with the fiscal deficit and the abysmal default on the foreign debt, ⁵ protesters started demanding the resignation of the minister of the economy and, finally, the president himself. December 19 and 20, 2001, ⁶ were a turning point in recent Argentine history and constituted the apex of the cycle of protests begun years before, in which the popular and media sectors demonstrated en masse, issuing different demands but using a common slogan: “Everyone should go!” The mobilizations, looting, street and highway blockages, and clashes with security forces throughout the country not only put an end to the de la Rúa administration but inaugurated a new national political-economic context. Despite the collapse of the economic model itself (which gave rise to disputes among the ruling class regarding how the exit should be handled), ⁷ the political change in early-twenty-first-century Argentina cannot be understood without accounting for the popular struggles that finally put an end to the pattern of accumulation that had governed the country for 25 years.

The social movements called attention to the damage and injustice produced by the neoliberal model and dynamited its consensuses, but they failed to overcome their own fragmentation or form strategic alliances with other actors to initiate a new hegemony (Muñoz, 2010; Retamozo, 2011). Lacking alternatives from the world of popular organizations, political reconstruction had to be carried out by “traditional” actors, albeit using other political-symbolic coordinates and employing different power relations between the ruling class and the subaltern sectors. After de la Rúa’s resignation on December 20, 2001 (and an interim of five different presidents in the period of a week), the Peronist Eduardo Duhalde (a former candidate defeated by de la Rúa in the 1999 elections) managed to obtain majority support from his party and was proclaimed president until the end of the period. Duhalde had to acknowledge the protests and began by avowing the damage produced by neoliberalism, thus accepting the legitimacy of the demands. Among other measures, he implemented a massive income program called Unemployed Heads of Households that issued 150 pesos per month (US$50) to almost 2 million families. In a society faced with unprecedented levels of unemployment and poverty, ⁸ state intervention was meant to guarantee a minimum subsistence level for the most disadvantaged social groups and neutralize potential social outbreaks (Perelmiter, 2012). Thus, despite not having led the way out of the crisis, the social movements served as a determinant of public policies and even of the dynamics of representative democracy. After the murder of two piquetero militants by police on June 26, 2002, during a protest for an increase in unemployment benefits, Duhalde had to call for early elections and pass on the baton. On April 27, 2003, his candidate of choice, Néstor Kirchner, became president with only 22 percent of the vote after Carlos Menem (who had taken 25 percent of the votes during the first round) resigned.

Kirchnerism and the Social Movements (2002–2007)

The Kirchner government consolidated a new model of accumulation based on Duhalde’s interim foundations. Neo-development (Costantino and Cantamutto, 2017) took advantage of an upward economic cycle based on favorable international conditions for commodity exports to promote the expansion of the domestic market, the recovery of purchasing power across important portions of the working population, and an improvement in various social indicators such as unemployment, poverty, and social inequality. That said, several indicators only reached precrisis levels. Weakened by its low voter percentage, the government began to channel multiple civilian demands and form innovative political alliances. In spite of having belonged to the party that carried out the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, ⁹ Kirchner developed a progressive rhetoric that portrayed the state as the space for social problem resolution and social integration (Muñoz and Retamozo, 2008). He also identified previous leading actors—Menemism, financial speculation, multilateral credit organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, and, going farther back, the last civil-military dictatorship—as enemies. ¹⁰

Changes in social conflict became evident. During the first years, the piquetero movement remained the most dynamic actor with the greatest veto power. The new official discourse appealed to a sector of this movement: those who saw themselves as belonging to the national-popular tradition of combative Peronism of the 1960s and 1970s. Both because of the ideological affinity with this sector and the government’s explicit tactic of building alliances with related social movements, a broad set of organizations (the most numerous in number of militants and adherents) became progovernment and were given political posts across various state levels. This not only further fragmented the piquetero movement but produced changes in the goals, tactics, and modes of organization of the now progovernment groupings, which conceived their social militancy as linked to their work within the state (Perelmiter, 2012). Additionally, a type of collective action that had been infrequent until then was introduced: mobilizations in support of the government or against government adversaries. The Kirchner administrations built a contentious social base using these sectors, often employing this recourse to confront economically powerful actors (Perelmiter, 2012; Pérez and Natalucci, 2010).

However, not all piqueteros became involved with the administration’s discourse. A heterogeneous sector that included fractions of left-wing Peronism, traditional Marxism, and autonomism maintained its opposition to the state while retaining its previous tactics, mainly street blockage and encampments. Although the government deactivated repression as a way to confront these conflicts, it managed to isolate this sector with relative success not only by fragmenting old alliances but by delegitimizing the piquetero movement and picketing (street blockage) itself as an anachronistic mode of struggle. As some of the specialized literature maintains (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, 1999), the presence of a “radical wing” benefited the progovernment sector in its “dialogist” role as a conflict mediator. That said, and despite the political dispersion, the overall movement probably benefited from the containment of both sectors: the goals attained included an increase in the number of productive enterprises, cooperatives, and social subsidies financed by the state (Perelmiter, 2012).

At the same time, the sustained expansion of the domestic market led to a growing reincorporation of large numbers of the unemployed into the labor market, although many of them were in precarious conditions. The gradual recovery in employment levels weakened the social base of the organizations of the unemployed and strengthened union power as explicitly promoted by the government during collective negotiations and collective labor agreements (institutions in charge of the wages and working conditions assigned to unions, the state, and the business sector). Thus the government made explicit its desire to reinstitutionalize social conflict, incorporating some demands and actors into the formal political system and rechanneling the most disruptive street protests. The conflict map slowly changed in terms of actors, demands, and forms of struggle. Until 2002 the struggles were mainly carried out by the unemployed; during the following years, it was unionized workers who were responsible for most of the protests, usually in the traditional working-class format of the strike (Antón et al., 2010; Etchemendy and Collier, 2007). Although a significant portion of the popular sectors (particularly the remaining unemployed and workers in the informal sector) continued protesting outside institutional margins, by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first-century conflict in Argentina had moved from the streets and openly disruptive actions to mostly institutionalized and regulated forms of protest (Antón et al., 2010).

This process of “union revitalization” (Senén González, 2011) did not entail a return to the typical union model of import-substitution industrialization of the postwar years. For one thing, it only reached formal unionized workers, while a third of the economically active population remained structurally outside the registered labor market. This pattern of tripartite negotiation was termed “segmented neocorporativism” (Etchemendy and Collier, 2007: 149). Its segmented character was based on the fact that the new basis for union power and negotiation resided mainly in the registered sector of the economy, leaving out the greater mass of workers who remained in precarious conditions in the informal sector. Although unions retained a pragmatic autonomy with regard to the government (Etchemendy and Collier, 2007), several union leaders held ministerial and congressional posts during those years. As we shall see, the relationship was not linear.

Despite the renewed prominence of labor conflict, Argentine struggles retained the complex and heterogeneous character of the 1990s. Two types of demand, driven by different actors, came to occupy center stage. One was the demand for justice in the fight against insecurity. The government had taken swift action regarding the historical claims of human rights organizations and, during its first two months, repealed impunity laws that protected leaders and leading cadres from being charged with crimes against humanity during the last de facto government. However, by the mid-1990s the fight against impunity had taken on new meanings, with insecurity (the fear of becoming the victim of a crime) becoming one of Argentine society’s greatest concerns (Kessler, 2011; Pereyra, 2011). This reached a tipping point with the kidnapping and murder of Axel Blumberg, the son of the businessman Juan Carlos Blumberg, in March 2004. The ensuing protest involved more than 200,000 people and was one of the period’s largest rallies. Although the movement led by Blumberg quickly decreased in size, the government acknowledged some of the demands and bolstered the penal code with more punitive legislation. The demand for security would become the source of numerous collective actions (some of them violent [Gamallo, 2017]) during this period, although the proportion of violent crimes decreased (Kessler, 2011).

Finally, the twenty-first century saw the emergence of socio-environmental struggles. The very rationale of the development model (based, in part, on the processing of natural resources) led to tensions expressed as social conflict. Resistance to a prospective gold mine in Esquel in 2002 (a turning point in the history of environmental resistance) and protests in the city of Gualeguaychú, Entre Ríos, against the installation of pulp mills on the Uruguayan side of the Uruguay River became the emblematic struggles of the period. There were also numerous local conflicts involving indigenous communities’ claims of landownership, complaints by peasant organizations against compulsory fumigation, resistance to the clearing of virgin land in response to the expansion of the agricultural frontier, and urban struggles over the contamination of rivers and the relocation of landfills (Merlinsky, 2013).

Most of these struggles involved autonomous and novel processes of organization such as self-appointed citizen neighborhood assemblies (Bottaro and Sola Álvarez, 2012). These organizations generally adopted the assembly, a direct inheritance from the critical December 2001 days, as a political mechanism; they favored direct democracy as their main organizational form. The assembly content of these movements also reinforced the autonomy of collectives vis-à-vis companies and the state. Given the dynamics of their particular conflicts, these organizations were less permeable to government discourse and, therefore, remained the most oppositional and intransigent. Because of this and although some demands have led to institutional changes, ¹¹ environmental demands in general have been excluded from the political system and, in some cases, repressed (Costantino and Gamallo, 2015).

The Conflict between the Government and the Agricultural Bourgeoisie: The Cristina Fernández De Kirchner Administrations (2008–2015)

The Néstor Kirchner government that ended in December 2007 had managed not only to repair the political-institutional crisis that gave birth to it but to build its own legitimacy around an extraordinary economic recovery ¹² and the creation of new social consensuses (Muñoz, 2010). All of this got Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Néstor’s wife, elected president for the 2007–2011 term. Although social conflict seemed to continue along the same lines, an unusual event would disrupt not only the political situation but the very universe of social protest. At the beginning of 2008, during record increases in international commodity prices, a government project that tried to increase the fees on grain exports found unexpected resistance among the upper echelons of the entrepreneurial class. Entrepreneurial protests began with lockouts and went on to adopt a strategy used by the unemployed—the blocking of strategic routes across the nation. The unexpected consequences of this cycle of protests ¹³ were due not only to the ironclad corporate defense of sectoral interests in a context in which leading economic sectors had historically had little direct influence on the state but also to the capacity for articulation and interpellation that El Campo (The Countryside, as the belligerent bloc was known) achieved among the heterogeneous groups, economic sectors, and political factions that disagreed with the government. The conflict became a political opportunity for scattered opposition groups to gather around a common political identity, anti-Kirchnerism (Gamallo, 2012). An indicator of this articulation was the appearance of massive mobilizations in opposition to the government in the nation’s large urban centers. This brought back the cacerolazos, now repeatedly used by the middle and upper classes in protest against the government.

This conflict led to the most important political crisis since December 2001 and forced the government to temporarily suspend the intended measure so that it could be approved by the Congress. During the months of congressional sessions assigned to the measure, hundreds of thousands of citizens mobilized throughout the country to support either the agricultural front or the ruling alliance. As a reaction against the opposition, dozens of social organizations, piqueteros, and unions played a central role when they took to the streets in support of the government, disputing the public space with their antagonists. Despite this, the opposition gathered greater street consensus, and this was reflected in Congress. The project was approved by the Chamber of Deputies but rejected by the Senate: the vice president broke the tie by voting against the project promoted by his own government.

The development of this conflict and its resolution led to lasting transformations in the political arena and the scenario of social conflict. They began a process of polarization (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2005) that would increase over time with the confrontations almost inevitably centering on Kirchnerism and attracting a set of supporting social actors and creating new enemies in different areas. After the defeat the government lost allies both from a sector of Peronism (part of its cabinet) and from the other parties that made up its alliance. In addition, alliances with some economically powerful actors began to crack; the major mass media conglomerates became fiercely oppositional. These factors, coupled with economic stagnation as a reflection of the international crisis that began in 2008, were responsible for the electoral defeat of the ruling party in the midterm elections of 2009.

From then on the government took up the political initiative, radicalizing its measures and discourse: it nationalized the pension funds that had been privatized in the 1990s, issued a universal subsidy to children, promoted antitrust legislation to regulate media conglomerates, and approved the law of equal marriage, acknowledging sexual-minority civil rights. These measures and the confrontation with some of the more concentrated sectors of the economic elite attracted center-left groups enthusiastic about the idea of a sovereign and popular government. Two milestones marked this new stage: the multitudinous celebrations for the national bicentennial (which assembled more than 2 million people between May 21 and 25, 2010) and the death of Néstor Kirchner on October 27, 2010. ¹⁴

A new Kirchnerism, reconfigured by unprecedented confrontations and strengthened by a new relationship with the social movements, was born. After Kirchner’s death, thousands of youths across the country joined official social organizations, especially La Cámpora, a group with organic ties to the national government (Vázquez and Vommaro, 2012). While Kirchnerism had from the beginning maintained a dispute for the “streets,” this feature was now accentuated, the movement seeking to lead not only the Justicialist Party but also the social organizations identified with the ruling party. This eagerness to direct and subordinate the social movements would end, years later, as many organizations left the progovernment camp. The Kirchnerist groups—heterogeneous and often in competition among themselves—supported the government by convening hundreds of thousands of people and participating in official events, celebrations, commemorations, festivals, etc.

Thus the universe of mobilization in Argentina began to split into two opposing camps. Official collective actions celebrating the government’s triumphs by local groups, parties, unions, and a good number of unaffiliated citizens sought to take over streets and squares. Though some maintained a conflictive relationship with the government over the administration of resources or political differences (Natalucci, 2012), the general approach of the groups that identified themselves as Kirchnerist was to support the government in its confrontations with adversaries. At the same time, social movements and opposition groups took to the streets to fight the government and make concrete demands. There were two evident political orientations in this latter group: the leftist, with an anticapitalist discourse that continued its struggle, and the regressive (Antón et al., 2010), with a completely different symbology and forms of participation, which took to the streets with very heterogeneous slogans but the explicit goal of discrediting the Kirchner experiment.

In this polarized scenario, popular organizations unrelated to the government and unaligned with the right-wing opposition found it difficult to find legitimate space for their claims. In spite of this, the struggle of some opposing piquetero organizations and grassroots unions made up of orthodox leftists continued. One of these mobilizations was the occupation of the Parque Indoamericano, an undeveloped area in southern Buenos Aires. During the early days of December 2010, some 15,000 people from informal settlements ¹⁵ took over the property to protest their overcrowded living conditions and the absence of a state housing policy. The main goal was to start building there while negotiating a series of governmental measures aimed at solving the housing problem (Zapata, 2013). The national and local governmental response, however, took the form of violent eviction (ordered by a local judge) using federal and local forces. The conflict at the Parque Indoamericano indicated that urban planning had continued along the lines of the neoliberal model to the extent that urban inequalities (transport, access to housing, etc.) had in fact deepened even though the development model had been transformed (Ciccolella, 2009; Guevara, 2014).

The economic recovery of 2010–2011 and the political initiatives resumed by the government during those years allowed Fernández de Kirchner to be reelected with 54 percent of the votes at the end of 2011, with a difference of almost 4 percent with regard to the next-most-popular candidate. However, in mid-2012 protests against her summoned mainly through social networks emerged throughout the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of the country’s main cities, and there were cacerolazos across the nation (Gamallo, 2012). Though the first spontaneous gatherings of that year took place exclusively among Buenos Aires’s most affluent neighborhoods, the last ones were massive and occurred with increasing levels of organization in practically all of the country’s important urban centers. The latter included demonstrations at public buildings. The trigger for these protests was the implementation of new controls on the purchase of foreign currency, but according to interviews with demonstrators the demands were quite diverse (Pereyra, 2016). The main drive was precisely to oppose the government in a context of fragmented and dispersed partisan opposition. The protests of 2012 were important because they sketched out, on the streets, the regrouping that the conservative opposition would undertake some years later. Additionally, they showed that the capacity of the middle-to-high sectors to contest the space of social protest that had come to the fore in 2008 persisted.

Another emblematic conflict of Fernández de Kirchner’s last administration involved the unions. The rupture of the alliance with the CGT shifted a group of unions that had played an important role in the defense of the government toward the opposition. This happened during the 2008 political crisis provoked by the agricultural enterprises. Beyond the sector’s specific demands, ¹⁶ the conflict between the government and the unions can be partially explained by the government’s attempt to subordinate the unions and some union leaders’ desire to occupy more powerful positions within the state and in electoral candidacies (Gamallo, 2012). During Fernández de Kirchner’s last term, the CGT called five general strikes with great impact. Meanwhile, social organizations and opposition piqueteros continued to demand that the government update the amounts issued in state subsidies for productive enterprises (Natalucci, 2012).

Toward the end of this period, new mobilizations of organized sectors emerged. These included the women’s movement against patriarchy (expressed by the slogan ¡Ni una menos! [Not One [Woman] Less]) and the mobilizations of informal workers, who continued to represent a third of the waged workers in Argentina, via the creation of a union body made up of several preexisting organizations, the Confederación de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular (Confederation of Popular Economy Workers—CTEP). The women’s movement led a mobilization of more than 300,000 on June 3, 2015, to protest femicide and gender violence. This resulted in the creation of an official registry of femicides by the judicial branch. Although the government strengthened some measures such as the partial nationalization of the YPF oil company in 2012 and the creation and/or increase of subsidies to various sectors of the population, the economic model began to show signs of exhaustion and the improvement in social indicators stagnated (Kulfas, 2017). Confronted by more and more social sectors, the administration slowly lost the political capital it had achieved with the overwhelming 2011 triumph. It was defeated in the 2013 legislative elections after the massive mobilizations of 2012, and its 2015 presidential candidate, Daniel Scioli, lost to the right-wing Mauricio Macri, inaugurating a new stage for the country and for Argentine social movements.

Social Movements in a New Neoliberal Cycle

Although Macri had promised to retain a substantial part of the more progressive measures enacted by the previous government, once in power he quickly demonstrated that his goal was regressive reform; during his first months of government there was a marked transfer of income from workers to concentrated sectors of the economy (Scaletta, 2017). In contrast to Kirchnerism, the new government promoted demobilization, ¹⁷ initiating a smear campaign against unions and social organizations that was often accompanied by severe repression of social protest. The purpose in the long term was to regressively transform the correlation of forces between the dominant classes and the subaltern sectors. In this sense, the 2015 elections not only represented a democratic alternation but also marked a change of development model (Scaletta, 2017). ¹⁸ The peculiarity of this situation is that this change occurred without any economic, social, or political crisis to justify it. Although, during its last years, the Kirchner government model showed indisputable signs of exhaustion, none of the social and economic indicators pointed toward a crisis in 2015. ¹⁹ For this reason, applying measures of fiscal adjustment and economic orthodoxy was not easy. From December 2015 to December 2017, struggles multiplied in all areas.

The change in government transformed the divisions among social movements: old alliances or fractures were reconfigured in a new scenario in which the center of political gravity had rotated from Kirchnerism to Macrism. In this context, the CGT carried out two major general strikes during 2017 and one in 2018; other sectors, such as teachers and state workers, conducted massive mobilizations and strikes that were, in some cases, successful. The aforementioned CTEP, which brought together informal and unemployed workers, played a leading role and achieved the implementation of the Social Emergency Law, which created a register of informal workers and granted them public health insurance. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to repudiate a Supreme Court ruling that reduced the sentences of those (both military and civilians) convicted of crimes against humanity during the last dictatorship. A massive May 2017 march caused a reversal of this ruling, although, months later, other perpetrators were shown leniency with house arrest. The women’s movement also led to mass mobilizations, including a March 8, 2017, strike, and managed to place the decriminalization of abortion on the public agenda. Almost all of these sectors converged in the December 2017 protests against a reduction in retirement pay and pensions. Although the bill was approved in Congress, the protesting sectors showed so much unity and articulation (as well as radicalization, which resulted in intense episodes of collective violence) in these marches that the government was forced to withdraw its labor reform project.

Conclusions

Social conflict in Argentina has undergone important changes since the country’s return to democracy in 1983. Generally speaking, collective action has expanded to multiple actors, channeled weightier demands, and expanded its forms. This heterogenization of conflict seems to be irreversible, given the labor, identity, and political complexity of the popular sectors and the middle classes. This, however, does not imply—as the theory of “new social movements” (Melucci, 1999) maintains—that the working class has forever lost its leading role in social conflict. Rather, it is simply a matter of acknowledging the transformations in the world of labor and the coexistence of workers’ struggles with a broad spectrum of social movements issuing a diversity of demands that often articulate among themselves.

I have tried to show that, since the cycle of protests that put an end to the neoliberal model at the beginning of the twenty-first century, collective action has increasingly been part of Argentine political-institutional life. One of the specificities of South American democracy is the relevance of street mobilization. In this regard, it is evident that, just as Kirchnerism cannot be explained without addressing the social movements that challenged the neoliberal order, the experience of 12 years of progressive government radically transformed those movements. It not only fragmented them with regard to their support or opposition to the government and altered their tactics and modes of organization but also constructed a new field of political confrontation around the state and, specifically, the ruling coalition. This partly explains the emergence of numerous official social organizations and of social movements that were conservative both in the class membership of the mobilized and in their slogans and forms of mobilization. These two processes are a novelty peculiar to this period and call into question some of the postulates about the so-called new social movements: not all participation in the state implies weakness, subordination, or co-optation (Svampa, 2008), nor does the action of social movements necessarily imply democratization or expansion of rights. In fact, Macri’s candidacy and subsequent victory in 2015 can be explained in part by the emergence of the “regressive social movements” that in 2012 staged massive protests in the face of a fragmented partisan political opposition and began to erode public opinion and produce successful oppositional articulations.

The victory of a right-wing government in 2015 opened up a new field of confrontation in which old divisions and alliances are being reconfigured. The challenge for popular organizations of developing common tactics, given their heterogeneity, has sometimes been met in the form of resistance to concrete public policies that threatened to roll back social rights. Once more, social movements seem to be a step ahead of the political leadership. The coming years will show how far the government can advance with its plans for structural reforms. On this point, the dynamics of collective action have much to tell us.

Supplemental Material