Route blockades spread across Argentina

A protester hits the front of a bank with a hammer during a demonstration in Buenos Aires on June 28, 2002 against the government of Argentine President Eduardo Duhalde and the plan to exchange frozen savings for bonds.
Photo by Ali Burafi, AFP

By Vero and Buzzard

Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 26 (AGR)— Last Friday there were route, highway and street blockades, and marches all over the country, including dozens in Buenos Aires. Inside the city, the marches of the CCC and CTA converged on the Plaza de Mayo where the movement and union leaders gave speeches and led songs and chants. Though there were other marches and blockades of various other groups, few others went to the plaza during those hours. The marches and blockades, though they all had their own demands, were to commemorate the 6-month anniversary of the popular revolt of Dec. 19-21 and in remembrance of those killed in the repression.

Every day one hears about Cortes de Ruta (route blockades) in all parts of the country and each week there are more. Every day more and more people are joining the various Piketero (a person who takes part in a route blockade) groups, looking for ways to survive in a country where more than half of the populace lives below the poverty level. The means, organization, and daily activities of the different groups may vary greatly, but most of the demands are the same when a group blockades a route: the refusal of the new proposed budget (which would cut 400,000 state jobs, cut the hospital, school, and retirement budgets); creation of jobs; release of Piketero political prisoners; non-payment of the debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF); re-nationalization of privatized natural resources and public services; nationalization of the banks; re-opening of abandoned factories under worker control; and the most commonly seen -- payment of Planes Trabajar (welfare plans).

In the last 25 years, almost all public services and national resources have been privatized -- most to foreign businesses. More than 300,000 people have been downsized since the beginning of the year and in that time food and gas prices have more than doubled. Hospitals in the poorer zones, outside of the capital, are being closed, while those that remain open are running out of supplies (almost all imported). Many schools are not holding classes, either because of teacher strikes or because they are literally falling apart (many children living in poverty don’t go to school at all, they are working or begging in the street). To cash in on their retirement payments, retired folk have to wait in endless lines and are given the runaround by beaurocrats, only to find that more has been taken out of their 120 peso per month check, if they are able to get it. Every day it gets harder to get what one needs from the trash in the city because every day there are more people searching through the trash.

For these reasons there are hundreds of thousands of Piketeros participating in various groups. There are organizations of every type, from one that uses the name of Movimiento Teresa Rodriguez, led by Roberto Martino and continues the legacy of the Fogoneros (the people that kept the tires burning through the below-freezing nights during the blockades outside of the YPF/Repsol refinery in Cutral Có ´96) to the Corriente Clasista Combativa (a group directed by the Communist Revolutionary Party, which has never had a clash with the police due to their refusal to blockade routes in key places) to the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados Anibal Veron which blockades routes, starts community gardens, reclaims space to build asentamientos, (housing on squatted land, usually made from whatever is at hand, although the MTD collects funds for bricks and shingles before beginning the occupation and construction) and operates community and cultural centers, among other things. There are seven main groups, some with decades of experience in community organizing, and all but two are tied to or were created by political parties or national unions.

Some of the Cortes de Ruta groups make all decisions by direct democracy and revocable representatives, some make some decisions in this way but have leaders, and some are simply led by the unions or political parties. The level of autonomy from their respective union or political party varies.

They united as a Bloque Nacional Piketero in May of 2001 and held a number of national congresses, but have since divided again. The root of the division was the decision of the leadership of the CTA, Víctor De Gennaro, not to take to the streets during the revolts of December ’01, according to him, for questions of security. Many of the other groups have since shunned them. Nonetheless, during the speeches in the Plaza de Mayo last Friday, it was announced that the CCC and the CTA are to merge.

While the government has raised the stakes on Cortes de Ruta, labeling it as the crime of sedition, most people arrested in the blockades are shortly released (many times after being brutalized and tortured). There are currently 2,800 people undergoing processing for arrests in Cortes de Ruta. On the other hand, the Government arrests Piketero leaders, tries them on trumped-up charges, and holds them in prison for years. After a great increase in protests that repeatedly closed down downtown Buenos Aires and a lot of negotiations between the leaders of the CCC and CTA and the government of Duhalde, Emilio Alí and Raúl Castells (two CCC leaders) were released in the last month without completing their sentences.

Historically, mostly teachers’ unions and student groups have accompanied unemployed laborers in the Cortes de Ruta. Since the rise of the independent Neighborhood Assemblies, the Piketero movement has had many relations with other sectors of society, in that the Inter-neighborhood Assembly (partially made up of middle-class professionals) has pledged solidarity with the Piketero movement. Many of the marches and protests of the Inter-neighborhood assembly are supported by the Bloque Piketero National, and vice-versa. What one sees from the outside is that due to the heterogeneity of the piketeros, while an assembly may mobilize to support a blockade organized by the Federacion de Tierra y Vivienda, the same assembly booes a CTA union leader off the stage if he gets up to give a speech.

The Planes de Trabajar have been the most effective force in quelling and dividing the Piketeros that the state has come up with. The Planes de Trabajar essentially consist of a three-month welfare subsidy of 150 pesos per month per household. The federal government hands them down either to the municipal government or to the Piketeros themselves. While many of the groups demanded genuine and stable work 6 years ago, now most of the blockades demand these subsidies. Getting the Federal government to agree to pay these subsidies is only the first step in the fight to obtaining the money they imply. Once a group wins the concession of these subsidies, if it is handed to the municipal government, it is usually as hard or harder a struggle to make the local government to turn over the money. There is a lot of discussion about how to distribute these subsidies. Some groups combine the money from all the subsidies to start cooperative enterprises and finance community and cultural centers, free schools, and the construction of asentamientos. Other groups distribute the money evenly among those participating in the blockades.

Israeli reoccupation intensifies

By Brendan Conley

July 2 (AGR)— Israel intensified its US-funded reoccupation of Palestinian territories, killing several Palestinian civilians and destroying the Hebron headquarters of the Palestinian Authority.

The Israeli army attacked the Palestinian Headquarters in the West Bank town of Hebron on Fri., June 28, using more than a ton of explosives. About 15 Palestinian militants had defended the headquarters, but Israeli officials have found no one -- dead or alive -- in the rubble. Bulldozers are continuing the destruction. Israel banned international journalists from major West Bank towns until recently.

Hebron is one of seven towns in the Palestinian territories that Israel has reoccupied recently, imposing a blanket curfew that has confined about 700,000 residents to virtual house arrest.

Israel justified the invasion as retaliation for a series of Palestinian suicide bombings and attacks last week that killed more than 30 Israelis.

Israeli troops reportedly shut down an office for liaison with the Palestinians near Bethlehem, ordering the staff out and replacing Palestinian flags with Israeli ones.

The violence continued throughout the territories. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli troops killed a Palestinian woman and wounded her husband near the Israeli settlement Kfar Darom. Israeli troops killed a 12 year old Palestinian boy in the al-Fara refugee camp near Jenin by shooting him in the chest with a tear gas canister.

The attacks came as the United States -- which provides Israel with extensive military funding -- repudiated the Palestinian leadership. US President George W. Bush demanded June 24 that Palestinians elect “new leaders” -- apparently meaning leaders other than Yassir Arafat, who came to power in elections deemed “free and fair” by international observers.

On June 30, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Washington has cut ties with Arafat, and has no plans to deal with him in the future.

A bill is pending in the Knesset, or Israeli parliament, that would deny compensation to Palestinians injured by the Israeli Defense Forces, even in cases where soldiers violated the law. Israeli human rights organizations are protesting the pending bill.

Women against hemisphere-wide free trade area

By María Isabel García

Bogota, Colombia, June 28 (IPS)— The model established by the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) will worsen the already precarious conditions of women’s employment and will be a blow to Latin America’s cultural identity, say women activists from 10 countries in the region.

The FTAA is an initiative that arose from the 1994 Summit of the Americas in Miami, with trade negotiations for a hemisphere-wide free trade area scheduled to conclude by 2005. The agreement encompasses the 34 member countries of the Organization of America States (OAS), all countries of the Americas except Cuba.

The FTAA, slated to take effect in 2005, will accentuate the workplace discrimination that Latin American women suffer, according to a recent gathering of women from a wide range of economic backgrounds. Forty percent of the economically active population in the region are women, but they earn an average of 30 percent less than their male co-workers.

“The FTAA will not only remove the backbone of the local economies, but will also erase our cultural identities,” according to a statement issued by a forum of women academics, professionals, factory workers, farmers and social activists from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela.

Economic liberalization and privatization have led to the “dismantling of public infrastructure” in the region, and with the FTAA “this process will accelerate,” wiping out “traditional medicine, education and cultural diversity,” concludes the meeting’s final document.

The seminar titled “Women and the FTAA,” which took place in Bogotá, was the first in a series of conferences to be held in Colombia in preparation for a women’s regional summit in October, to occur in parallel to the OAS ministerial conference in Quito.

The presence of networks of organizations working in favor of women’s economic, social and cultural rights, “not only against physical and sexual abuse, was decisive” for the meeting in the Colombian capital, said Peruvian sociologist Mairela Rivera, the seminar’s coordinator.

It is essential to create processes in which “we women appropriate for ourselves the economic problems that directly affect us,” she added.

Venezuelan economist Adicea Castillo said that in Latin America “women earn around 30 percent less than men do for equal work.”

This tendency, which is detrimental to women, “will be reinforced by the FTAA [because] the liberalization and privatization model has already accentuated the gender segregation of employment,” she said.

Castillo pointed out that the social deterioration caused by the strict economic policy adjustments is “deepening the phenomenon of the ‘feminization’ of poverty.”

As an example, she cited the personnel hiring systems of maquiladoras (free zones for manufacturing exclusively for export), in which women are the vast majority of the workforce and there is “a nearly complete debasement” of their labor and social rights.

Mexican anthropologist Leonor Aída Concha, spokesperson for Women for Dialogue and member of the Network of Women Transforming the Economy, says Latin American women “suffer the economic adjustment effects more than men do,” both in the informal and formal sectors.

Women spend their lives looking for work, and in rural areas — because more and more men are emigrating to the cities or abroad — women must take charge of the land and try to create a future for their families, said Concha. She interprets the proposals of the FTAA, “which are not really new because they have been promoted since 1980, as diminishing women’s standard of living because they mean more and more hours of work.”

Castillo and Concha’s perspective on the matter coincides with data produced by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, a United Nations regional agency), indicating the existence of a high level of vulnerability among the poor sectors of society resulting from unstable employment and household income.

The prospect of social protection reveals deficiencies in terms of coverage, and a new set of risks tied to the globalization process, according to an ECLAC report discussed during the agency’s 20th period of sessions, held in May in the Brazilian capital.

The women’s forum in Bogotá also assessed the make-up and potential for revitalization of associations of peasant women, teachers and health workers, in conjunction with other types of civil society organizations.

Peruvian sociologist Rivera explained that the local campaigns in preparation for the OAS meeting in Quito seek to establish alliances among a variety of groups.

“We are not limiting the space to women only, because we believe our agenda is also a commitment to society as a whole,” she said.

“Our line of action [is] to go beyond a simple denunciation of the FTAA and of globalization to encompass a broader range of arguments,” because it offers an alternative model for society and for women, Rivera explained.

US bombs Afghan wedding, kills and injures scores of civilians

Compiled by Eamon Martin

July 1 (AGR)— On Monday, July 1, US helicopter gun-ships and jets fired on an Afghan wedding, killing 40 and injuring at least 100 civilians, witnesses and hospital officials said. Initial sources said that as many as 250-400 people might have been killed or wounded.

The attack occurred in the village of Kakarak in Uruzgan province, in the south of the country, where special forces and other coalition troops were searching for remaining al-Qaida and Taliban fighters.

One survivor, Abdul Qayyum, told reporters at a Kandahar hospital that the attack began shortly after midnight and continued for more than two hours until US special forces ground troops moved into the area.

“The Americans came and asked me ‘who fired on the helicopters’, and I said ‘I don’t know’ and one of the soldiers wanted to tie my hands but someone said he is an old man and out of respect they didn’t,” he said.

Survivors of the attack said several guests had just fired their Kalashnikovs into the air, as is traditional in Pashtun wedding ceremonies. A US air patrol overhead wrongly concluded it was coming under fire and responded with devastating force.

Pentagon officials conceded that at least one bomb dropped on the village of Kakarak was “errant.” But their initial response was confused and they were unable to explain why the pilots had failed to establish whom they were attacking in a region clearly abandoned by Taliban and al-Qaida fighters several months ago.

Hospital officials said a number of wounded were being brought to Kandahar. Most of the dead and injured were women and children, they said. A six-year-old girl named Paliko was brought to the hospital still wearing her party dress. She was injured, but villagers said all members of her family were killed.

“We have many children who are injured and who have no family,” nurse Mohammed Nadir said. “Their families are gone. The villagers brought these children and they have no parents. Everyone says that their parents are dead.”

At Bagram air base north of Kabul, the US military spokesman, Colonel Roger King, said an AC-130 gunship, a B-52 bomber and other aircraft joined the attack after coalition ground forces came under fire.

“Right now there are a lot of different opinions as to what happened,” Col. King said.

“There are no Taliban or al-Qaida or Arabs here,” resident Abdul Saboor said. “These people were all civilians, women and children.”

The incident is embarrassing for the US military, which has so far had little success in fulfilling its initial war aim of hunting down Osama bin Laden. Most senior Taliban figures together with remnants of al-Qaida decamped to Pakistan’s tribal regions late last year, intelligence sources believe.

There have been several reports of the United States’ attacking civilian targets since Washington’s bombing offensive started in Afghanistan on Oct. 7 last year. Eleven members of a wedding party were killed in a similar incident in May in the village of Balkhiel, 30 miles north of the town of Khost. The guests were bombed after celebrating by firing into the air. US officials later insisted their planes had come under enemy attack.

Sources: Associated Press, Guardian (UK), MSNBC, Reuters

Ríos Montt sets his sights on Guatemala presidency

Efraín Ríos Montt, a former dictator accused of genocide, plans to run for the presidency of Guatemala next year.
Map courtesy of CIA World Factbook

By Néfer Muñoz

San Jose, Guatemala, June 27 (IPS)— Efraín Ríos Montt, a former dictator accused of genocide, plans to run for the presidency of Guatemala next year if he is able to get around a constitutional clause that already thwarted his presidential ambitions in 1990 and 1995, due to his past as a de facto leader.

Retired General Ríos Montt, who at age 76 is the president of Guatemala’s single-chamber Congress, wants to become the successor to President Alfonso Portillo, also a member of the right-wing Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG). Portillo himself says Ríos Montt -- widely seen as the president’s right-hand man -- is the best possible FRG candidate, despite the fact that the constitution of this Central American nation bans him from standing for president because he headed a de facto military regime in 1982 and 1983.

Article 186 of the Guatemalan constitution disqualifies from running for president anyone who has taken part in a coup d’etat, or who, as a consequence of a coup, has become head of state. In addition, article 281 states that the prohibition cannot be amended.

The FRG holds 63 of the legislature’s 113 seats, 13 votes less than the total needed to convoke a new National Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution.

However, the third vice-president of Congress, Jorge Arévalo, argues that Ríos Montt could run in next year’s elections, because Guatemala’s laws are not retroactive, and the retired ex-general became de facto head of state in 1982, three years before the present constitution went into effect.

The possibility of Ríos Montt standing in next year’s elections set off a political storm, even though the FRG general assembly won’t elect its candidate for the September 2003 presidential poll until next May.

As a minister of an evangelical church, he interrupted a reading of the bible to followers in March 1982 to assume power through a military putsch and launch a counterinsurgency campaign that was even more brutal than that of his predecessors.

US President Ronald Reagan immediately recognized his government, and granted it support to intensify the fight against the leftist guerrillas, which included the declaration of a state of siege, press censorship, and secret courts given special powers.

Ríos Montt also strengthened the army’s efforts to set up armed civilian vigilante groups in the countryside to fight the guerrillas or anyone suspected of “subversion,’’ ordered widespread searches and raids in the cities, and sent special troops into rural areas to carry out a “scorched earth’’ policy, aimed at eliminating the rebels’ support base. Many villages were burnt down, and the local residents — down to the last baby — were massacred.

According to local and international human rights groups, more than 15,000 people were killed in Ríos Montt’s first year as head of the ruling military junta, while 70,000 fled to neighboring countries, mainly Mexico, and around 500,000 headed to remote mountainous areas to live in hiding.

In August 1983, Ríos Montt was deposed by another coup, which brought to power General Oscar Mejía Víctores.

“If Ríos Montt becomes president, it would be a grave setback in political, social and economic terms,’’ said Orlando Blanco, director of the non-governmental Guatemalan National Coordinator of Human Rights (CONADEGUA).

“The most negative effects of a Ríos Montt presidency would be felt in the interior of the country, where the human rights situation could substantially worsen,’’ added Blanco. Lynchings of suspected criminals by mobs of local residents, which have become increasingly widespread since the mid-1990s, are especially common in rural areas and farming towns, according to the United Nations.

In 1990 and 1995, the Constitutional Court kept Ríos Montt from running for the presidency, in compliance with article 186.

But the retired general is widely considered the real power behind the scenes.

“Guatemala has an authoritarian culture, and prefers iron-handed rulers,’’ said Carmen Ortiz of the Guatemalan non-governmental Association of Social Investigation and Research. “For that reason, if Ríos Montt finds the way to run for president, he would likely be elected.’’

WORLD BRIEFS

Hunger strike and escapes
rock Woomera
Fifty asylum seekers at the Woomera detention center in South Australia sewed their lips together as part of an ongoing hunger strike, a detainee said June 27. The Immigration Department said only four adult men had sewn their lips together. About 190 asylum seekers including 15 children, aged between six and 12, and a pregnant woman, were refusing to eat, detainee Ramzi Rihei said. They have vowed to continue the hunger strike until they die.

Rihei said children had chosen to take part in the hunger strike, which entered its fourth day June 27, against the wishes of their parents.

On the night of June 26, thirty-four asylum seekers escaped from the detention center. Five have been recaptured and four people have also been arrested for aiding the escape and are in custody. Three people alleged to have “aided and abetted” the escape have been released on bail.

The break-out happened around midnight, when refugee supporters with vans drove up to the center, and then broke through the fence. (ABC News, The Sunday Times)

Capitalism in crisis
Shock waves spread around the globe June 26 as the collapse of the telecommunications giant, WorldCom, led to plunging stock markets over fears there were more accounting scandals to come.

Millions of investors watched their savings disappear as the markets, still jittery after the collapse of Enron, reacted badly to the news that one of the world’s largest telecoms companies was spiraling towards bankruptcy.

The auditor for WorldCom during the period in question was Arthur Andersen, which earlier this month was convicted of obstruction of justice for its role in the demise of Enron.

WorldCom announced that its profits between January 2001 and March 2002 had been inflated by $3.5 billion. This is now believed to be among the biggest-ever cases of accounting fraud.

Analysts predicted that the WorldCom scandal could have a future major impact on confidence in the financial markets, with investors unable to trust that companies were being honest about their profits. (The Herald, Scotland)

Two killed in clash between pickets and police in Argentina
Two were killed, 90 wounded and 60 arrested when police tried to prevent unemployed protesters from blocking roads leading into the Argentine capital June 26 to demand larger unemployment subsidies, food, and medical supplies for public hospitals.

“We would like to not have to block any more bridges, but our babies and elderly are dying here, and the doctors can’t do anything, because we have no medicines in the hospitals,’’ said Roman Catholic priest Alberto Spagnolo, who heads one of the numerous organizations of unemployed that have sprung up in this crisis-ridden Southern Cone country.

The tension, which continued to run high after the violent clash between demonstrators and police on the Pueyrredón bridge, which links the Buenos Aires satellite city of Avellaneda with the southern part of the capital, led security forces to declare themselves on alert, to prevent looting.

The protests, in which many diverse organizations that tend to hold their own separate demonstrations came together for a single cause, also targeted the government’s economic policy and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which received Argentine Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna in Washington the same day. Roads and bridges were blocked in 19 provinces, although the most serious incidents occurred in Avellaneda. (IPS)

US unilateralist path scored as self-defeating

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, June 29 (IPS)— Apart from the zealots of the Christian Right and pro-Likud neo-conservatives in and outside the administration of President George W. Bush, the growing consensus among foreign policy thinkers here is that the more Washington indulges its unilateralist and military instincts, the faster its present hyper-power status will erode.

While the time when lesser powers could form the kind of coalition that could seriously challenge US military power remains very distant, Washington’s ability to work its will on the rest of the world is likely to diminish steadily, particularly if it keeps rejecting the advice and counsel of its closest traditional allies who are more multilaterally inclined.

“The success of US primacy will depend not just on our military and economic might, but also on the soft power of our culture and values, and on policies that make others feel they have been consulted and their interests have been taken into account,’’ says Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and one of the leading critics of Bush’s unilateralist trajectory.

Although Washington’s tendency toward unilateralism was already growing under former President Bill Clinton, in part due to pressure from a rightwing Republican-controlled Congress, the pace has accelerated dramatically since Bush took over 18 months ago, and particularly since he launched his “war against terrorism” after the attacks of last September.

Early last year, his administration rejected the Kyoto Protocol to prevent global warming. Since Sept. 11, it has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, launched construction of a national missile defense system, and undermined other international arms-control negotiations.

More recently, it has reaffirmed its determination to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein; approved a Nuclear Posture Review that targets five non-nuclear states for possible nuclear attack in total violation of previous US commitments; proclaimed a new strategic doctrine of pre-emption against suspected enemy states; and “unsigned’’ the Rome Statute creating an International Criminal Court (ICC) to try war crimes and genocide.

It is now threatening to pull out all US nationals from UN peacekeeping operations if the Security Council does not give them blanket exemption from the Court’s jurisdiction.

“The administration’s worldview particularly favors the unilateral exercise of power,’’ says Steven Miller, editor-in-chief of International Security, the most influential US journal on global security issues. “There is a sense that US policy is operating on the premise: ‘What choice (does the rest of the world) have?’ We’ve created a set of rules and one of the rules is that rules are for others.’’

Not only is this implied in the administration’s actions on Kyoto and the ICC; it is explicit with respect to Washington’s attitude toward international arms-control regimes that would limit its own freedom of action. “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless,’’ Bush declared in a little noticed but highly significant passage during his recent address at the US Military Academy at West Point.

At almost $400 billion, the US military budget will account for 45 percent of the world’s total military expenditures next year, or just about as much as all of its NATO allies, plus Russia and China, combined.

“I’ve gone back in world history and never seen anything like it,’’ said Yale professor Paul Kennedy, who notes that one US Navy aircraft carrier task force — of which seven are deployed around the world at all times — costs the equivalent of about two-thirds of Italy’s total annual military budget. Moreover, Washington is currently sustaining that budget at the relatively comfortable level of only three percent of total US GDP, half of the defense burden on the US economy during most of the Cold War.

Yet, Kennedy remains skeptical of US power today, particularly of its relevance. He says the major security challenges of the coming years will derive from massive demographic change and ever-growing gaps between the world’s rich and poor countries.

“Does having 14 of the world’s most powerful aircraft carriers address these issues?’’ he asks. “I think you have to be a really stupid conservative to think (such wealth gaps) will not make for a terribly insecure world for your children to grow up in.’’

Pointing to the sustained dive in US technology stocks, the spectacular collapse of high-flying US companies like Enron and WorldCom, the sharp slide in the dollar, and indications that foreign capital that kept the US economy and stock markets galloping during the 1990s may be heading for the exits, some experts argue that the economic assumptions on which a unilateralist policy and a monumental defense budget are based will prove unfounded.

In the current edition of Foreign Policy, Immanuel Wallerstein of Yale University cited a recent report that a Japanese laboratory, to the great surprise of US engineers, has developed a computer 20 times more powerful than the fastest US counterparts.

“The Japanese machine is built to analyze climate change, but US machines are designed to simulate weapons,’’ according to Wallerstein. “This contrast embodies the oldest story in the history of hegemonic powers. The dominant power concentrates (to its detriment) on the military; the candidate for successor concentrates on the economy.’’