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Matter in Motion through Space and Time ... http://www.egroups.com/group/Communist-Internet ] [Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ] . . ----- Original Message ----- From: John Clancy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <Africa: ;> Cc: <news: ;>; <overflow: ;>; <blindmice: ;>; <Asia: ;> Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 6:06 AM Subject: [CubaNews] Argentina: Reporter's Notebook (2 of 2) from: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subject: [CubaNews] Argentina: Reporter's Notebook (2 of 2) Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: "Walter Lippmann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 05:23:01 -0700 Subject: [CubaNews] Argentina: Reporter's Notebook (2 of 2) Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK FROM ARGENTINA (2 of 2) By Jon Hillson The cab I am in turns right off avenida 9 de Julio -- one of a series of parallel avenues that form a broad, spacious central artery, abutted by rows of handsome buildings and divided by islands of grass. It heads down Suipacha, towards the small hotel on Suipacha where I'm staying. At that exact moment, 20 feet away, two pistol shots split the night air. That's a gun, I say to the taxista. "Someone's robbing a bank," he says matter-of-factly. Just then, a figure hurtles out of a doorway, slips, falls, gets up, and scampers away. "Nothing unusual," he says, shrugging off the incident. Sensational media coverage about a wave of "street crime" -- including numerous assaults on supermarkets, is widespread, but it has no real resonance, since millions believe the real looters and thieves run the country and government. This is a refreshing way to address the question of who are the real criminals in Argentina, and elsewhere. * * * The Casa Argentina-Chile, a community center in the working class section of barrio San Telmo is jam-packed with people. Every Wednesday, for the last year there's been a trueque [place of barter] set up there. People -- parents, grandparents, some with small children or accompanied by teenagers -- bring a variety of goods to swap. The list of items is endless, from socks and underwear to cakes and pies, used flatware and plates, jeans, typewriters, lighting fixtures. For each time the goods are brought, the bearer gets a ticket indicating a credit. It is used to for exchange. "There's no money here at all," says Teresa, a volunteer. Over a loudspeaker crackling with static, a plumber offers his services. Vendorsr can trade their items for a visit and work, or someone can offer their credits, which the plumber can use to get any merchandise, or a sausage sizzling on the grill. "We have other food too," says Teresa, "but no meat. There's not much meat in this neighborhood." Or money. Despite the cramped quarters -- hundreds of people shoulder to shoulder, with small children underneath -- there's no friction, no bickering, no shoving or shouting, just the din of conversation, the squeal of babies, music from some place, the amplified announcements. Some trueques are stationary, have their own established center. Others take place in community center like this. They crop up in working class neighborhoods across the city as a popular, emergency defense against the rash of indigence sweeping the country. Who organized this one? "We did, the people of the barrio," says Teresa, as she greets people at the door, signs them in, and gives out the credits. * * * In the upscale Buenos Aires Recolecta neighborhood -- a more classical, tree-shaded version of the toney upper East Side of Manhattan, or the homes and apartments of Beacon Hill in Boston -- the elegant cafes and excellent restaurants that dot quaint streets, are cheap now, as are the taxis to get you there, If you have lots of pesos, or better, dollars. "You should see this place at night," says Franklin, a waiter and an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. The restaurant he works at is right across from the famed Recolecta Cementary where, the rich and famous of Argentina are buried, their coffins in rows of mausoleums. The Duarte family tomb is there, too, and behind its barred windows is the coffin of Eva Peron, the main attraction for tourists. My favorite tomb is that of the great Argentine boxer, Lus Angel Firpo -- the "Wild Bull of the Pampa" -- who fought, and lost to Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight championship of the world. He is cast, larger than life in bronze, in trunks and robe. "The are private cars everywhere, no buses, private cars, nice cars," Franklin says, pointing to a nearby avenue that passes the cemetary, "and lots of people are selling their cars to live, so you know there's money." Tourists come mostly from Mexico and the United States, and Britain, he says. The level of social tension is not like Mexico, where units of machine-gun toting soldiers patrol the airport in the capital city. The international airport on the outskirts of Buenos Aires is less militarized than its U.S. counterparts. Bullet-proof vests are standard for Argentine police, but there are virtually no armed guards -- as is common in Mexico City -- in front of stores, banks, money exchange centers. The rich may be worried, but they are not yet shaking in their boots. On Fashion TV, a cable channel, maybe a thousand gleaming, healthy faces watch a Giordano show from Mar del Plata, the exclusive resort. The models, "proof of Argentine beauty," the announcer gushes, stroll down the aisle, braless in transparent tops, the cameras angling up from the edge of the runway for the best shots of what's revealed by microscopic thongs the models wear under tiny miniskirts, or as bikinis. The crowd oohs and ahhs, the men grin, the announcer, is in his cups. His cohost, a women, tries to explain the significance of the frocks. Diversions remain for the rich and their hangers on, from European-style auto-racing to the track for the horse crowd, golf, and tennis tournaments at pricey clubs. Couples and families saunter into restaurants, dropping $100, 200 $pesos for late dinner -- sumptuous beef, grilled to perfection, consumed with rich, locally produced red wines. I watch a hefty couple eat from a huge parilla, a heaping stack of barbecued beef, chops, chicken, sausages, sweetbreads, and tripe. They leave half the platter of protein uneaten. * * * On a crisp Friday night, the grand Teatro Coln opera house -- bigger than La Scala, in Italy -- opens it doors for the Buenos Aires premier of the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. This acid metaphor of life in the Weimer Republic -- polarized by crisis, riddled with corruption, pregnant with possibilities of change -- is best known for haunting melody, Moon of Alabama, which has been covered by artists ranging from the Doors to Dave Van Ronk. Brecht and Weill wrote the opera between 1927-30 in Berlin, the real life city of Mahagonny, where the "worst crime is to have no money." The staging is both stark and garish, laden with garbage. The Coln's orchestra plays the Weill score -- a gripping, discordant, menacing, bracing symphony -- with almost athletic enthusiasm. The cast -- all Argentines -- sing in the original German, with subtitles in Spanish flashed high above the broad stage. It's opening night and here comes the cream of Buenos Aires society. I make the mistake of going in the front entrance, where I briefly mingle with enough fur to orphan a generation of minks. I am in the middle of a New Yorker ad that speaks Spanish, with men in $1,000 suits and lean women gleaming to be seen in state of the art cosmetics. I remember an earlier observation made by a young street vendor in La Boca, the wildly painted river neighborhood first settled by Italian immigrants in the 1920s. "All the rich women in Buenos Aires look the same," he says, "because they go to the same surgeon." I am informed by the usher, in pantaloons, tights, and a powdered white wig, "that's the wrong entrance." I leave the building, go to the side door, up the elevator with the riff-raff, to the fourth balcony, stage left, up there with the students, and others who pay for cheapest tickets, 40 pesos. I crane my neck to see the performance and read the translation, at the same time. Even the pigeons are cold. As the city of Mahagonny goes bankrupt, characters trudge "for rent" signs and place them across the set. They are in Spanish, with Buenos Airs phone numbers, the kind you see throughout the city. All that is missing it the most common sign: liqudacin total. This punctuates the obvious, as references about the social and economic crisis and moral decay written more than 70 years ago deprives prevent those who come to the Coln for a diversion from the all-consuming calamity. This is not Italian dancing clowns, nor the far less political Three Penny Opera by the same authors. Some in the audience are clearly dismayed, but many stand and cheer the cast during a long curtain call. I am no connoisseur of opera but I know what I like, and this -- in its musical grandeur, its acrid deconstruction of bourgeois society, its stunning imagery -- is something to behold as if fuses past and present with eerie precision. Afterwards, the cab I hail on a side street pulls up alongside a chauffered late-model Mercedes. The passengers, elegantly garbed gentlemen and ladies fresh from their encounter with the people of Mahagonny, stare ahead, silent and stone-faced. These plutocrats are, perhaps, among the anonymous candidates solicited by Diego Guelar, Argentina's ambassador to the United States, to save the country. "The richest are also the most responsible," he writes, in a full-page op-ed piece in Clarn, for this task. The article is entitled, "What's missing is refounding a real capitalism in Argentina." Guelar deploys his argument by first explaining the theory of surplus value and the exploitation of wage labor for private profit, elaborated by "Karl Marx...the only economist that scientifically explained capitalism." For the Marxists, this form of economy is "evil and must be abolished by the proletarian revolution." For those who "are not Marxists," however, this system is "the motor of social progress," the ambassador states. Except in Argentina it is not working. How can "a real capitalism" be brought to the country? "Any 30 businessmen must throw the first stone," Guelar urges, "they must repatriate of what they have legally expatriated" -- the $106 billion they have disappeared from the country. By doing this, they can "be even richer, but, this time, as the saviors of an Argentina on the edge of chaos and disintegration." This modest proposal, floated on April 8, is met with dead silence in subsequent editorial pages. Such cynical posturing has already appeared elsewhere, earlier. The Los Angeles Times, in an editorial entitled "Argentina's Test of Faith" suggests that the country's government "should urge jittery investors who sent money abroad to repatriate a fraction of it as an investment in Argentina's future. This would be a show of good faith. The people of Argentina must demonstrate that they believe in their country before they can rightly ask others to do so." The editorial appears on April Fool's Day. * * * "The idea is not to just occupy the factory, and not just to produce," says Ral Godoy, a central leader of the independent Ceramic Employees and Workers Union in Neuqun, at the Zann factory, some 700 miles from Buenos Aires. "It is to have a social program, to demand jobs for the unemployed to increase production. This is not about a contract" Lean, intense, Godoy is addressing 40 or so workers, most of them women, in the relaxed atmosphere of the Brukman garment factory they have occupied since December. A modern, full production shop, the six-story plant a couple of miles from the center of the city produces men's suits. The bosses disappeared before the social explosion, and with them, supervisors and secretaries. The ceramisistas of Neuqun began their occupation in October last year. Some 330 workers continue to produce building tiles, working two shifts, and maintaining ovens on a third in a factory, Godoy tells the garment workers, that is about an acre in size. These two groups of workers are trying to figure out how to unite Argentina's fragmented labor movement and the fight-back efforts workers are mounting. Theirs are among the most advanced such battles. Godoy tells the Brukman workers -- there are 55 altogether, about half of the pre-occupation labor force, "you work twice as hard as we do, you do double work, as workers, and as women." The women nod. He describes the need to build a new labor movement, "independent, democratic, that defends the workers." He explains that no one is on full time at Zann, that the factory assembly can remove members of the executive committee of the independent union at any time, that everyone has equal voice and vote. The union has reached out to the unemployed, works with the piqueteros, and cut key routes in the city to focus attention on the struggle. The union has won recognition from the provincial courts that the bosses locked them out, that the occupation "is legal," Godoy says. Local university professors and students in solidarity with their struggle help them without accounting and engineering challenges. They have had marches and protests involving youth and the unemployed. The seeds of a social movement have been planted. The Zann workers, like those at Brukman, are demanding the provincial governments assume ownership of the two plants, and that they continue to operate under workers control. The assembly is marked by easy going give-and-take, real questions, no sloganeering. The assembly approves an appeal to call supporters together in a few days to advance awareness of their common struggles, provide a platform for others, and take a step forward in organization and coordination. "I was born as a worker in this factory," says Celia Martnez. She is a leader of the elected six-member Commission of Internal Struggle, which has assumed direction of production and distribution of suits that once bore Christian Dior and Pierre Cardin labels, the commercial apex of the 51-year operation. Short, strongly built, effervescent, she says she "never dreamed of the changes that have taken place. The whole world has changed. We have proven what we can do. We don't need them." Late last year, the workers were ousted by cops but returned as hundreds took to the streets to defend them and the police evacuated the building. Some sleep in the factory as a defense detachment. Supporters and workers staff a street kitchen. Banners and streamers from the building announce the occupation. Security admits customers to the show room, where they try on, and buy suits. I try one on, a gray, pinstriped, double-breasted wool-polyester blend, and buy it. Celia asks if I want a label sewn in. I tell her they need one that says, "made under workers control." She smiles. I tell her that when I speak about Argentina, I'll wear it, to show what the workers can do without bosses. A bigger smile. "That's the best promotion," she says. "We can produce other things. There are hospitals in Buenos Aires that need sheets. We can make them. We are investigating other markets." It is business as usual, but very unusual. Through their struggle, the workers discover the real books of the bosses. They are learning the secrets of management. "I've been in three garment factories in 40 years in the industry," says Matilde, who must have started work in her early teens. "This is my third plant. The Peronist union delegate for this industry today is the some one who was a delegate when I first started work. The same!" She laughs. "We never knew each other here until six months ago," she says. Workers were divided by gossip, work, petty irritations that the bosses used against them. "That's pretty much gone. You saw some one for 10 or 15 years on another floor and you never talked. That's over." The owners, interviewed by a Boston Globe correspondent, are outraged that production continues. "We have a business that's been hijacked," says one, "the workers are staging a big show of tears." But, the Globe article notes, the "two sides agree" on the fact that for two weeks last year the workers got paid $5 a week. The Globe reports that workers "at 11 other factories making anything from tractors to flour and steel have seized production and operation of their bankrupt companies, after owners disappeared or were kicked out." The February issue of Perspectiva Mundial publishes interviews with several workers from these factories, at length. It is clear that such efforts are critical part of rank-and-file fighters reaching out for class solidarity, as they struggle to find way to respond to the tremendous blows of the employers and the state. "We have won much support from other workers, in spite of the police who are always here trying to intimidate us," says a worker from EMFER, where 150 members of the Metal Workers Union have occupied their freight car repair facility. According to Clarn, ceramisista leader Ral Godoy tells me,"there are 5,000 work sites in some kind of conflict with employers in Argentina today, some are becoming cooperatives because of the workers, or there has been an occupation, or the owner is trying to create a cooperative of his own to make money." Because of the fragmentation of working-class organization, these militants face the challenge of simply finding each other. Raul, Celia and I talk around a table on the sixth floor of the plant, along with a supportive lawyer, a couple of young videographers. Some sip mate, the potent Argentina national beverage, an herbal tea infusion, taken through a steel straw, drunk hot, from a cup that looks like a small water pipe. It is rarely found in the cafes of the capital, noted for rich coffee. The taste for mate, I learn quickly, is acquired. What does tile factory workers' leader think of the Argentine ambassador's proposal that "any" 30 rich people should repatriate some of their billions to "save" the country? "Only 30 parasites, no more?" Ral says, smiling as he exhales a plume of smoke from a cigarette. "The workers will save the country," Celia says. "We are very few," says Godoy of the factory occupiers. "This is very hard what we are doing. But the leaders of the official unions do nothing, they ignore the workers. We are beginning something." Later in the week, as many as 2,000 people, including several Zann workers, who travel 1,200 kilometers to Buenos Aires, women and men from Brukman, their working class allies, and many unemployed, take to the streets to defend the struggles. There is a meeting of "chiefs" -- government representatives, bosses from Brukman, top union officials -- to discuss the situation. It last for eight hours, nothing is resolved. There is no media coverage of the march. On April 13, Calle Jujuy is blocked off by rows of tires. The sun comes out after a week of gray skies, and up to 500 people, overwhelmingly workers, many young people, most unemployed, fill chairs in front of Brukman in a Meeting in Defense of Occupied Factories. Many who can't find seats stand. A light breeze teases the air with the aroma of sausages volunteers are grilling on the outdoor workers kitchen. The police are far away, at either end of the block. The Brukman and Zann workers explain in detail their struggles, their aims: increased labor unity, militant defense of salaries, the creation of jobs, solidarity, national coordination of struggles, increasing sources of information. "This is the struggle in Buenos Aires," says Oscar Bayer, a journalist for Pgina 12, respected by all progressive currents and a new generation of young journalists for his stands against the military regime. "It is not very well known, but it is very, very important. This encuentro will help, I hope." He is introduced from the platform and addresses the crowd briefly. "This is the beginning of something new," he says, "something necessary." Fifteen workers speak, some of them local delegates in independent unions, others in fights with Peronist bureaucrats, who are trying to oust them. They are in their 20s and 30s, only a handful appear older. On the platform with Godoy and Martnez is the leader of a garment factory occupation of 135 overwhelmingly female workers, from Monteviideo. Most of the worker-representatives are from Buenos Aires province, a few from nearby states. The main exception is the delegation from the Zanon workers, the ceramisistas who have taken a day long bus ride to get here. The speakers include workers from the railroad industry, public transportation, high school and university teachers, contract trash collectors, metal workers, municipal and government workers and many others. A significant minority are women. They report on their struggles, including a new occupation in a small metal working shop in Buenos Aires. Workers read messages of solidarity from several fronts of conflict across the country, giving the gathering a national flavor. They all urge participation in a giant May Day march in the Plaza de Mayo, "a huge assembly of workers" to demonstrate an alternative to the institutions responsible for the crisis. This May Day will not be ceremonial or traditional. "Unemployed or employed," says a teacher's leader, "you are a worker." The crowd cheers. There is discussion of putting together a national paper to circulate information about these struggles, networks of communication, actions of solidarity. There are reports on potential strike actions. Celia Martnez speaks. She is dressed in the blue work smock the garment workers wear. She details the efforts of the garment workers at Brukman. She stumbles a bit, apologizes, but no one is bothered, everyone listens carefully. "This is the first time I've every spoken to so many people," Celia says. But the struggle in the plant, and what she and her coworkers have done these past five months has given her and them confidence. She continues. "We have shown we can run the factory," Celia says, her voice filling the block on this balmy day in Buenos Aires, as the crowd erupts in applause, "and we can run the country." Copyright (c) 2002 by Jon Hillson, NY Transfer News. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================================= Your use of Yahoo! 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