Vol.64/No.19 May 15, 2000
Unionists in Argentina protest cop assault
BY MANUEL GONZALEZ
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina—"They're doing the same to us that they did during the dictatorship, and this is supposed to be a democracy," unionist Guillermo Santibáñez angrily remarked.
Santibáñez, a public transportation worker, had participated in an April 19 labor protest by 500 workers that was brutally assaulted by the Buenos Aires police. The cops attacked demonstrators with rubber bullets, clubs, tear gas, and high-pressure water hoses, injuring 37. Most of the casualties were still in local public hospitals a day later for treatment and observation. Fourteen cops have been arrested as the government tries to dodge responsibility and minimize the political fallout from the assault.
The rally was one of a number of protests against antilabor legislation that has been pushed by the new administration of President Fernando de la Rúa.
After six weeks of controversy following the passage of the measure in the lower house of Congress on February 24, the Argentine Senate approved the bill April 26. The decision, which came one week after the police assault, was heartily welcomed by Wall Street.
The new law will gut industry-wide bargaining, which workers won through their battles to organize powerful industrial unions following World War II. It also allows employers to extend probation for new employees and ends the automatic renewal of union contracts during protracted negotiations.
"This government has always said it had a plan to help workers, but after this police attack it is more obvious what kind of plan they really have for us," said Santibáñez. The demonstration he participated in was called by a breakaway wing of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), for decades the main trade union federation. The CGT split in March after the dominant wing of the officialdom caved in and supported the bill in face of government threats to take away the unions' control over dues.
"We are going to stay here all night to pressure the senators so they don't pass this law behind the backs of the people," said Hugo Moyano, head of the truckers union and of the dissident CGT, to the protesters. Earlier he had been inside the Senate demanding that the session be stopped. The legislators ignored his plea.
The incident used as a pretext for the police attack occurred when protesters refused to leave an area where a pile of trash had been set on fire. Government officials later reported that three Buenos Aires district attorneys had given the order to dislodge the protesters.
The cops beat, punched, and kicked protesters, using their rifle butts. News cameras recorded an assault by a cop who slashed the shirt of one of the protesters. By midday 49 unionists had been arrested and released.
Outraged by the scenes of police repression they saw on television, hundreds of workers and students took to the streets to protest.
"We condemn completely the attacks and repression by the police and support the legitimate demands of the workers," said Sergio Fernández Novoa, a spokesperson for the Argentine Workers Federation (CTA), in an interview with the Militant. Leaders of both wings of the CGT also condemned the attacks.
In face of widespread public outrage over the police violence, Senate leaders decided to postpone debate on the antiunion legislation for a week.
Government officials were quick to distance themselves from the police attacks. Interior Minister Federico Storani called them "brutal and savage," but also claimed that the protest was "a deliberate attempt to impede the functioning of Congress" and therefore unlawful. The bourgeois press also ran antiunion television ads and editorials denigrating the protesting workers.
The De la Rúa government got off to a brutal start in December when it sent federal cops to crack down on a demonstration in the impoverished northern province of Corrientes where workers were demanding back pay owed to them for months. The cops killed two protesting workers. The repression has only deepened anger among broader numbers of workers.