The Strike in the Campo

I've been out out of contact with much of the world since we left for the campo on Thursday.

We drove deep into the center of the province driving through demonstrations in Cañuelas, Lobos, Roque Perez, Saladillo, General Alvear, and Tapalqué (the very center of the province of Buenos Aires.)

Fotos to follow.

I was struck by the character of the people that manned the "roadblocks". These are not the oligarcas that we have been led to believe were behind this rural strike. They were the very kind of rural people that my wife and I know from our small-town dealings on a day-to-day basis.

Neither was our experience what we might have expected during the height of a rural strike that has caused the price of soy in Chicago to rise at least 3.3 percent and cause the giant grain ships to be rerouted from Argentine ports.

The road to Tapalqué, some 200 miles to the center of a province the same size as France, was
largely deserted. There were very few cars to pass, not to even mention the number of large agro-bearing trucks that are usually a pain on the provincial two-lane roads.

The "roadblocks" were informational-only for private vehicles and, at least on Thursday, very few semi-tractors were to be seen along the sides of the road and lingering in the truckstops. From my logistics background, it made sense: the great majority of truckdrivers, it seemed, had made the choice not to pull agricultural produce through an area in which they were sure to be challenged, not to mention be delayed severely.

In all my years of driving that 300 Km route, never was the trip faster or easier... even with the roadblocks and the (few) private drivers' curious attitudes toward the picketlines and the literature they distributed.

There was evidence of previously burned tires in the road, the remnants of their steelbelts in the ashes. There were grids of tire-puncturing steel at the ready, showing a menace to those who did not slow down and stop to receive a leaflet or two.

Upon stopping, however, drivers like my native-born wife were greeted with camaraderie and we both wished the ordinary people well. We then passed quickly through the roadblock and onto the next town... and onto the next, admittedly menacing, roadblock.

But at each place it was the same. Working people in working clothes, looking tired and explaining the reason that they were in the middle of the route doing something they had never done before.

The flyers they distributed were all different and all spoke of their own locale's plight over the past few years as government restrictions and increasing taxes took more and more of the profit from their efforts. The figures quoted were not often sourced and in some cases were unintelligible but all spoke of government efforts to make them contribute more and more until they could not sustain hope that it would stop.

We displayed each previous stop's flyers on our dashboard in hopes that no harm or delay would happen to us. Each time we were stopped, however, the people we encountered showed nothing but dismay if not desperation at was happening to them and to what unprecedented lengths they had been drawn to.

These were ordinary country people in Argentina, people that have no history, at least in living memory, of organizing to protect their own interests. Whether or not they knew that they were being barraged in the press as oligarcas (members of the traditional land-holding oligarchy) was not clear to us. The press was also making clear that there seemed to be no national organization that could claim their allegiance... making it difficult for the government to negotiate their way out of the confrontation.

Some groups claimed to be authorized... or, at least, capable of speaking on their behalf. The biggest of them all, Sociedad Rural Argentina was dismissed out of hand by the demonstrators as being the spokesman of the traditional big landowners and the traditional rival of the small and medium sized operators that are the genesis of this strike.

Although there are at least four large agricultural groups that represent great numbers of farmers and ranchers here, the local "assemblies" that man the roadblocks do not appear to be beholden to any of them, making negotiations more difficult.

As we approached Tapalqué, Thursday night, the word was spreading that President Cristina Kirchner would address the nation again at 6pm that evening to respond to the unrest from her previous national address on Tuesday that announced the new taxes on grain exports.

The little town offered little in the way of a venue to watch President Kirchner's address. After giving up hope of hearing the president live... we stopped at on of the few places in town that had not shutdown from 6pm to 8pm in solidarity with "el campo". To our surprise the little store not only was open but had a television. The speech had been delayed to the point that we were able to hear all her introductions and the full text as delivered by the president.

Suspicions had risen that the speech would not be conciliatory. If the president wished to rescind the export tax increase, it was felt that a national address was unnecessary. Given the timing, there was not much to hope for other than a challenge to the "ruralistas" to give up. Those suspicions were not disappointed at close to 7pm when the president began to speak.

Cristina Kirchner appeared unusually disheveled and from the beginning gave no quarter to the protesters that were also shown on the screen during her speech. She framed the debate as Peronism vs. anti-Peronism.

An audible sigh came from the 4 or 5 people in the little store as it became clear that not only would there be no resolution but that it would exacerbated by the swift government rejection of the strike and its aims. Some may have went to bed dejected but others left the little store more determined.

The timing of the speech struck me as strange. The new Cristina Kirchner government certainly wanted to avoid any hint of weakness... like any new government faced with such a crisis... but strikes like these are notoriously easy to break. All that is required is to let them burn out. People need money... and whether day-laborer or investor, all that is normally required is to make them miss a payday or two or three. Then, they reluctantly rejoin the economy. Strikes like this one thrive on attention. For the president to address it so quickly and, to my hearing, so insubstantively, was to invite criticism of weakness.

That night and the next morning, talk was of Eduardo Duhalde, the former president and staunch Peronist and critic of the Kirchner regime that he created by handing the reins of power to them and supporting them. Duhalde gave a speech/interview in which he declared that during the crisis in which Argentina passed thru multiple presidents... leading up to him... that the people of the campo had given up much for Argentina and that he would support them.

Many people along the route and in the rural cafés called him the "bombero", the fireman that would come again to save the day.

On the way back, Saturday, the complexion of the so-called "rural piqueteros" changed a quite a bit. They were much better dressed and seemed to be composed of not the same working-class. A blonde woman that we encountered at the very first seemed to be dressed in clothing that would not have been out of place on a west London street. A man nearby showed-off a pair of the fine boots that are made in the area but are not seen in the corrals in which I had been working hours ago. Anglophile clothing is as traditional in the campo as is the Spanish influence but on the entire trip back not one of the Saturday "crew" on the picket line was staffed by the familiar (to me, at least) weather-worn, thread-bare, sincere men and women that had staffed every position on the way down.

Both Kirchner and Duhalde spoke of a distinction between the small and medium sized producers and that of the grand landholders that exist here but to a much lesser extent than in other South American countries.

This strike does not come from the big landholders.

But already, I could see that the strike was playing into the hands of the natural enemies of the Kirchners and their reforms. The true oligarchy, if indeed it truly still exists, must be delighting in the "heads I win / tails you lose" hold they have had on Argentina since its founding.

I struggled to think how the people that I saw on the trip down to Tapalqué could differentiate themselves from the natural enemies of the present government. The people I saw had already separated themselves from the Sociedad Rural Argentina that was so anxiously trying to negotiate a positive outcome both in the press and with the government... but the people I saw on the Saturday picketline bore little resemblance to them.

"The prediction business is a funny business", Yogi Berra is reported to have said. "Especially when you're talkin' about the future!"

I've made some predictions here in these blog pages. I'll make another one now: if the working, small, and medium-sized producers that started this righteous effort don't find a way to tell the nation and the world the difference between themselves and the few still-grand landowners here, they will be swallowed in the age-old push and pull between what remains of the rural oligarchy and what is left of the urban social reformers in Argentina.