BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND MARTÍN KOPPEL
CORDOBA, Argentina - "We've taken over this hospital because they haven't paid us in two months and because the government has sent the health-care system to hell," said Ana María Martoglio. She and other nurses and workers were guarding the entrance to the San Roque hospital. A bedsheet hung overhead with a hand-lettered announcement: "This hospital is occupied."
"Menem said Argentina was going to join the First World," remarked Martoglio, local representative of the Union of Public Employees, referring to President Carlos Menem. "That's ridiculous. The bosses are doing really fine, but the government's policies are squeezing the working class and favoring the rich."
Since January, throughout Córdoba and other Argentine provinces, working people have been carrying out a sustained wave of protests, mostly blacked out by the international big-business media. They are resisting the depression conditions the economy has plunged into, as cap italists - foreign and domestic - see how far they can push down the wages and living standards of workers and farmers.
Economy minister Domingo Cavallo announced June 5 that the government would not pay 300,000 federal employees their June wages until July in order to keep paying on Argentina's foreign debt, as demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The next two months, President Menem added, will be "a little rough."
In this city of 1.1 million, the country's second- largest, workers have held strikes and marches, erected road barricades, and taken over some government buildings and factories. As in many other provinces, most public employees - including teachers, hospital employees, and utility workers - have not been paid since March. Retired workers have received no checks since February.
"We're holding a symbolic occupation of the hospital," Martoglio explained as she toured two Militant reporters through the facility. The 800 nurses, doctors, and other workers there are caring for 100 in-patients as well as emergency cases but are not accepting new patients. "It's not just that we haven't been paid. The government isn't funding the public health-care system. The patients here have had to bring their own syringes, medicine, and even bedsheets. We won't accept that."
Nora Romero, a nurse at the Children's Hospital, added, "Three hospitals in the city are now occupied. And last week we held a March in Defense of Health Care of 3,000 people. We've received a lot of support, especially from students."
`IMF has robbed us'
That day, hundreds of teachers met at their union hall
to discuss the next steps in their fight to get paid. Since
mid-March, elementary and high schools throughout Córdoba
province have been shut down as teachers demand their back
wages.
"Cavallo pushes Argentina more and more into debt with the IMF. We have to stop paying that debt. The IMF has robbed us a hundred times already," said Betina Pozo, a high school teacher whose monthly wage is 350 pesos a month (one peso equals one dollar) Rent for a small two-bedroom apartment in Córdoba averages 400 pesos a month.
"I have a second job and still can't make ends meet," she said. "My husband, who works at Gillette as a salesman, sees small businesses close every day. He's out of a job now too."
Later that evening, dozens of students set up barricades with burning tires on the street in front of San Martín High School, which serves as a grade school in the morning and a secondary school at night. "We want our teachers to get paid so we can go back to school," said Vanina Maggeri, 16, waving the black smoke away from her face as her classmates chanted and sang songs. "It's the government's fault."
English teacher Andriana Sánchez, who joined her students at the street protest, explained that these demonstrations and marches have been a virtually daily occurrence here for the past several months. That day, public employees were occupying the offices of the Ministry of Agriculture. The next day, angry, unpaid unionists took over the Ministry of Health and were evicted by cops.
Cops paid but not teachers
"They've paid the police but not the teachers," said
Walter Grahovac, general secretary of the Union of Educators
of Córdoba Province, in an interview. He added that before
the strike, teachers were also compelled to buy chalk and
other supplies that were lacking because of cuts in funds
for education.
Grahovac reported on some of the recent teachers' mobilizations, which have been joined by many students and their parents: a shutdown of schools and rally on March 13; a march to the legislature March 16; an April 5 march and occupation of government offices; a torchlight parade of 20,000 on April 12; a province-wide strike by public employees on April 18; and a national strike on April 21. Similar marches and protests took place throughout May and early June, including weekly demonstrations by retired workers.
These struggles by state workers have coincided with nationwide demonstrations by university students protesting an education bill that would introduce tuition fees. Some 8,000 college students rallied in Córdoba May 31. A similar number marched June 7, taking over several university buildings They joined thousands more who marched that day in Buenos Aires and other cities.
Working people in other provinces around the country are also seething with anger. On April 11, for example, 8,000 public employees surrounded the state legislature in the northern province of Jujuy and demanded the repeal of a wage cut. The parliament quickly restored their wages. Marches and strikes have taken place in the provinces of Salta, La Rioja, Santiago del Estero, Tucumán, Entre Ríos, San Juan, Chaco, Río Negro, and Neuquén.
A focal point of anger at the government was the April 12 fatal police shooting of Víctor Choque, a construction worker in Ushuaia, in the southern province of Tierra del Fuego, during a workers' demonstration against plant closings. "The nationwide strike was moved up a week to April 21 to condemn the killing of Víctor Choque, as well as the government's economic policies," reported José Pihén, general secretary of the Union of Public Employees in Córdoba.
`Tequila effect'
"Nothing like this crisis in the provinces had happened
here in years," Pihén said in an interview. "The detonator
of this situation was the devaluation of the Mexican peso in
December" and its shock waves, widely described here as the
"tequila effect."
In the first several months after the December 20 Mexico devaluation, imperialist investments in Argentina virtually evaporated. Stocks on the Merval stock exchange plunged 40 percent and panicky investors pulled out $8.5 billion from Argentine banks, money that only now is beginning to return.
The country's fragile banking system continues to teeter. A few banks have closed and a third of Argentina's 200 financial institutions have effectively ceased to operate since the beginning of the year. International bankers are pushing the Menem administration to step up the liquidation or merger of scores of weaker banks.
The resulting credit crunch - with interest rates peaking at 70 percent in early March - has had disastrous effects on small businessmen and farmers, many of whom had become heavily indebted in recent years. Thirty thousand Argentine businesses went bankrupt in the first three months of the year, commercial sales dropped 35 percent, and credit card defaults are at a record high.
The credit squeeze has hit Argentina's auto industry particularly hard, with car sales falling by more than a third over the past 12 months. In May and June, several major manufacturers announced two-week temporary layoffs. CIADEA, formerly the Renault plant, suspended 4,500 auto workers in Córdoba, and SEVEL, which produces Peugeots, suspended 4,000.
The deep recession has deflated the giddy proclamations by capitalists at home and abroad that Argentina, supposedly a model "emerging market," was going to join the ranks of the First World. An incoming flood of foreign capital sent the Buenos Aires stock market soaring 15-fold during the early 1990s and a new crop of Argentine millionaires mushroomed. Upscale shoppings, virtual clones of suburban U.S. shopping malls, sprouted in Buenos Aires to cater to the expanded middle classes.
Ever since December 20, Menem and Cavallo have repeated the mantra that "Argentina is not Mexico" and that the government will not abandon its policy of pegging the Argentine peso to the dollar, a supposed guarantee against instability. But international capitalists are nervous about the growing social tensions and how far the regime will be able to pursue its assault on the working class.
Cavallo admits recession
Menem's May 14 reelection brought sighs of relief in
corporate boardrooms around the globe. But on June 6, when
Cavallo publicly spoke the word that has been on workers'
lips for the past couple years, stating "there is a
recession," stocks plummeted 10 percent over two days.
In a May 16 article titled "Argentina still on the operating table," columnist David Pilling of the London Financial Times outlined some of the moves imperialist investors demand Menem now take: "the orderly contraction of the banking system" to strengthen bigger banks at the expense of weaker ones, "tough belt tightening" in the provinces, and pushing through "laws aimed at lowering the cost of Argentine labour."
Above all, the government must make its payments on Argentina's foreign debt, which according to the World Bank has grown to $67 billion, from $27 billion in 1980. Of this, some $5.5 billion will fall due in the next six months.
That debt will continue to grow. The Inter-American Development Bank announced June 5 its plans to loan Argentina another $1.3 billion, mostly to finance the privatization of provincial banks.
One of the most dramatic consequences of these government priorities, compounded by the credit squeeze since the Mexican peso crisis, is the situation in Argentina's provinces. The Menem administration is driving to shift more and more of the social services - and the political cost resulting from cuts in these programs - onto the provincial governments, the main employers in some provinces. As a result, tens of thousands of workers have not been paid in the past two or three months and many more are unemployed.
"This province was financed by the Bank of Córdoba Province. When the credit disappeared, the province was left fundless," said Pihén of the public employees union, noting that the federal government's policy is to severely restrict loans to the provinces. He added that many workers have been able to survive the crisis only by obtaining credit from local stores and through their unions. "Now that has dried up too."
Prices in Argentina remain extremely high. According to a study cited in the June 8 issue of the major daily Clarín, the cost of living in Buenos Aires is 23 percent higher than in New York.
At the same time, employers have kept wages and retirement pensions down. Córdoba teachers and hospital workers interviewed by the Militant reported average take- home pay ranging from 300 to 450 pesos a month. At the Air Force aerospace plant here, organized by the Association of State Workers (ATE) union, some workers with 25 years' service take home 650 pesos a month. One worker produced his pay stub, showing that after the deduction of 388 pesos - his monthly payment on a union-arranged loan - his pay came out to 162 pesos.
War on labor
A major front in the employers' war on labor in
Argentina is their demand for "labor flexibility." This
consists of a package of bills before Congress that would
seriously weaken basic gains won by the unions over the past
50 years.
One would gut collective bargaining and replace it with plant-by-plant negotiations. Other measures would allow bosses to combine jobs, change work schedules more freely, institute "work teams," reduce overtime pay, introduce probationary periods, hire more part-time workers, eliminate severance pay, shorten vacations, impose forced arbitration, and lower wage scales. In some industries, such as textile, unions have already agreed to some of these concessions.
Another line of attack on labor is the effort to gut the health-care plans to which all workers and employers must contribute, and which are largely administered by the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the main labor federation. Workers currently have access to a system of free public hospitals and medical care. The Menem administration is pushing to "deregulate" the union-run plans and allow companies to offer private medical plans as an alternative.
"This will lead to a situation in which only those with money will be able to afford health care," said Guillermo Rocha, assistant secretary of ATE in Córdoba province. "Under a new law, hospitals have to be `self-financing' and they will charge fees."
The assault on union-run health plans is similar to previously adopted laws that privatized workers' pension funds.
Mass layoffs
Since Menem was elected in 1989, the government sold off
most state-owned enterprises to domestic and international
capitalists, including the oil, telephone, gas, electricity,
and transportation companies.
"I worked 20 years at the phone company until 1991, when it was sold to a Spanish company," said Alberto Sordelli, 48, an activist who supports the human rights group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. With the threat of layoffs, "I took their offer of voluntary retirement. I found work as a day laborer on the docks but now I'm unemployed," said Sordelli, who has seven children.
The dismantling of state-owned companies, cutbacks by provincial governments, and mass layoffs in private industry have swelled the ranks of unemployed to a record 12 percent - more than twice the 1990 level. Many more workers are underemployed, often doing marginal jobs such as selling toys on the streets. According to figures released by ATE, more than one out of three workers is unemployed or underemployed.
The depression has pauperized large layers of working people, especially in the countryside. Many have migrated to the huge slums that surround the major cities. About 10 percent of Córdoba's population lives in these villas miseria (miseryvilles).
"These days you see many more kids in the streets doing odd jobs," remarked ATE union activist María Elena Pereyra. She pointed to recent news headlines about increasing cases of malnutrition and deaths from contaminated water in poorer provinces like Jujuy and Tucumán.
Meanwhile, the employers, the media, and the government have unleashed a propaganda campaign to blame this social disaster on immigrant workers, who have come to this country in larger numbers since 1992. More than one million workers have immigrated from neighboring South American countries.
"Today they instill anti-immigrant poison against Bolivians and Paraguayans and Uruguayans," noted Oscar" Mengarelli, ATE general secretary in Córdoba province, in an interview at the union hall. He said the unions should reject this prejudice.
Why`workers voted for Menem ` In the context of this economic and social crisis, the presidential elections took place May 14. Menem, of the Justicialist Party, which claims the mantle of former president Juan Perón, handily won reelection over his opponents. The Peronists' traditional rival, the Radical Civic Union (UCR), was crushed at the polls with a mere 17 percent. Senator José Bordón, candidate of the new Frepaso coalition, won 29 percent.
Carlos Miranda, a worker with 20 years' service at the airplane factory here, said he voted for Menem along with many of his co-workers. The main reason, he said, was "stability. Now prices are stable. You can plan to buy something even if wages are low. We don't face the nightmare of hyperinflation."
The UCR has been discredited by the 5,000 percent annual inflation that devastated the working class during the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín, whose term ended in 1989. Under Menem, inflation dropped to single digits.
Fear of instability was cited by other workers at the state-owned airplane plant, which has just been sold to Lockheed. The new owners are reportedly planning to cut back the workforce from 2,000 to less than 1,000. The sprawling plant makes Pampa planes and other military aircraft. Many of those voting for Menem, however, were not enthusiastic. "I'm not very confident about the future," said Miranda.
Asked about Frepaso's candidate, aerospace worker Hugo Orellana, 47, commented, "None of the candidates offered an alternative [to Menem]. The other parties had no proposals." Bordón actually campaigned for harsher austerity measures than Menem.
Frepaso was established by forces that had been in an electoral grouping called the Big Front (Frente Grande). That formation included Peronists who were disenchanted with Menem's abandonment of bourgeois nationalist policies and his open identification with U.S. imperialism, as well as social democrats and the Communist Party. Later, most of the Communist Party's members left or were expelled from the coalition, while some of its members stayed in what became Frepaso. The party has lost most of its membership over the past decade.
Fracturing of CGT
The union movement, hit hard by the employer and
government offensive, has also begun to fracture. The CGT
officialdom has been weakened by its close identification
with the ruling Peronists.
In 1989, about 40 unions broke away, leading to the formation of the Congress of Argentine Workers (CTA), which now has about 600,000 members out of some 2 million employed unionized workers. The major unions affiliated to the CTA are the ATE and the teachers union, as well as the rubber workers and naval workers unions.
Another dissident formation, the Movement of Argentine Workers (MTA), remains affiliated to the CGT but has carried out joint demonstrations with the CTA against government policies.
The CTA held its first national elections June 6, electing Víctor de Gennaro as general secretary. For the first time in the country's union history, elections were held by direct, secret ballot.
Meanwhile, long-time CGT chief Antonio Cassia, who had bragged he would "never launch a strike" against Menem, recently announced he was leaving the labor federation under pressure from other CGT officials. The CGT organizes the major industrial unions in Argentina, including the auto, oil, and electric utility workers.
While unions have suffered big blows in recent years, employers are concerned about the brewing unrest and protests in the provinces, even if these actions remain scattered. Capitalists nervously remember the December 1993 workers uprising in Santiago del Estero. Thousands of public employees who had not been paid in three months, joined by unemployed and retired workers, burned down the governors mansion, legislature, and courts in that northern province, along with homes of politicians from both major parties and of some union officials.
"If things continue like this," aerospace worker Miranda said, echoing a comment by some other workers, "we may see another Cordobazo." He was referring to the semi- insurrection that took place in Córdoba in 1969 during a working-class upsurge in Argentina.
That rebellion, involving thousands of revolutionary- minded auto workers, students, and others, was crushed. From 1976 to 1982, a military regime waged a savage campaign of repression against working people, killing and disappearing tens of thousands.
Today, however, there is a generation of young workers and students who did not live through that period and are not afraid. Along with them are many workers who have learned through the harsh experience of the last several years that the government's austerity measures and opening of the economy to greater imperialist profit have meant only worse conditions.
Perhaps this is why the Menem government was terrified by the recent month-long strike by 47,000 oil workers in neighboring Brazil. The Brazilian strikers, who fought to defend their wages and jobs against some of the same economic policies the regime in Buenos Aires has carried out, won support and admiration from working people throughout Latin America. The capitalists fear such resistance may be emulated by workers in Argentina.
Alejandro Barberín, one of the nurses occupying the San Roque hospital, made a comment that echoed the views of many workers interviewed by the Militant. "The policies of Menem, Cavallo, and [Córdoba governor Eduardo] Angeloz are a total disgrace, humiliating for the working class," he said. "They are trying to destroy our human dignity.
"But we are standing up. We will fight them."