BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Pounding on drums under a sizzling afternoon sun, several dozen union members marched through a downtown plaza here recently, chanting slogans and setting off firecrackers. Their leader paused at a camera to answer questions for a television reporter. Then he strode over to several police officers and briskly shook their hands, thanking them for not halting the protest.
A few blocks away, neatly coifed matrons strolled through a fashionable district of Cartier, Hermes and Burberry shops where uniformed doormen tended marble- and polished-brass entryways to elegant apartment buildings.
Welcome to Buenos Aires.
Much has changed from two years ago when a default on the nation’s crushing foreign debt triggered the deepest economic crisis South America has known.
The crisis sparked severe government belt tightening. Joblessness soared, general strikes erupted and workers poured into the streets facing police resistance.
The repercussions of that crisis still rumble through this nation of 38 million, despite the presidential election last April that buoyed hopes that incoming President Nestor Kirchner could do something his predecessor could not, and despite an improved economy that is now adding jobs rather than shedding them.
Indeed, Argentine businesses invested $2.78 billion in the first 10 months of this year, or about twice what they invested in 2002, and they accounted for 35.1 percent of all investments in the national economy in the first 10 months, up from 23 percent last year. In addition, a recent report by the Di Tella University’s Center for Financial Studies showed consumer confidence up 15.8 percent over November 2002.
Still, in a recent speech to the Argentine Chamber of Commerce, Kirchner noted that Argentina is still straddled with a debt that is 150 percent of the size of its national economy, even though the country benefited from a monthly 1 percent gain in real wages over the last half year. The government forecasts that gross domestic product will grow 7 percent this year, the fastest in six years.
By electing Kirchner as president, voters made Argentina the last South American nation, with the exception of Columbia, to have a left-of-center president.
To placate rising expectations by workers and stimulate the consumer economy, Kirchner pledged to employ a few economic incentives that international lending groups, such as the International Monetary Fund, discourage.
The government plans to raise the minimum wage in January to 350 pesos a month from 300 pesos, about $100. So far this year, it ordered three rounds of targeted wage increases to restore some salaries to their pre-peso-devaluation level.
“According to Kritz’s estimates, 75 percent of the workers that benefit from the wage increases belong to the half of the population that is not below the poverty line,” according to the Dec. 12 Buenos Aires Herald. “Among workers below the poverty line, only 12 percent are formally employed. By ordering wage increases in this manner, the government may be counteracting its own goal of achieving a fairer distribution of income, Kritz concludes. In other words, while the rich [relatively speaking] are getting richer, the poor are as poor as ever.”
With an official jobless rate at about 15 percent, pensions lowered and the farming industry suffering under a World Trade Organization agreement that the minister of economics said creates unfair advantage for subsidized United States and European agricultural exports, working people remain discontent and union picketers continue to march here and in the provinces.
Still, earlier this year Argentines marked 20 years of a democratic turnaround from the reign of the generals and the 1976-83 so-called Dirty War, a dark period when an estimated 30,000 workers, students, journalists, intellectuals and others “disappeared” for speaking their mind. Clutching flower-ringed photographs and banners, mothers of many of the disappeared continue to hold memorials for their loved ones every Thursday here at the Plaza de Mayo.
The Dirty War still echoes here, and early in December it was reported that a team of investigators found no evidence that the German carmaker Mercedes-Benz conspired with the government during the military dictatorship to disappear 10 workers from one of its factories outside town.
One of Kirchner’s pledges was to clean up corruption and incompetence. In November he ordered a “complete cleansing” of the 47,000-member Buenos Aires province police force. He has sought to remove Supreme Court justices, accusing them of malfeasance, and his administration suspects that police brass looked the other way as rogue cops carried out kidnappings of members of prominent business families and celebrities for ransom.
Most recently, his administration convinced Uruguay to reverse a decision to appoint a naval attaché to Argentina who is accused of being “a savage torturer.”
Argentina is a member of Mercosur, a trading block that also includes Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil. Twenty-five percent of Mercosur’s trade is with the European Union, which absorbs about half of Mercosur’s agricultural exports.
Argentina’s relations with one EU nation, England, grew frosty early in December over ramifications from the 1982 war in the British-governed Falkland Islands, over which Argentina has always claimed sovereignty. A leaked document revealed that British warships carried nuclear depth charges during the war in the Falkland Islands, which Argentina calls the Malvinas Islands.
Although Argentina lost the 73-day war, it sunk six British warships. London denied that any of the sunken ships carried nuclear weapons. But Kirchner demanded an explanation and apology, which the Blair administration ignored.
Meanwhile, on Monday Jaime Jelincinc, the mayor of Magallanes and the Chilean Antarctic Province, pointed out that “Chile supports Argentina’s claim to Malvinas,” according to the Mercopress News Agency.
He also called for direct air flights to the islands from Argentine soil on an Argentine carrier. Currently, only a Chilean carrier flies to the islands once a week from Chilean cities and once a month from Rio Gallegos, a city in the Patagonia region of southern Argentina.
The Third Person 