I am the other: from the rubble of a collapsed society in Argentina the voices of its people can still be heard loud and clear. David Ransom went to Buenos Aires to listen - Latin America: Argentina - Social Movements

New Internationalist, May, 2003 by David Ransom

'LOOKED at from the outside, it's pretty chaotic,' says Hebe de Bonafini. 'A useless Government, completely dependent on the International Monetary Fund. There's no work. Children have been dying of hunger for a long time, though this has only recently been reported in the newspapers. The political quarrels, the Peronists, the Radicals -- most people are no longer interested in that kind of politics. Only a tiny minority votes, because there's no-one to vote for.'

Hebe de Bonafini is one of the more vocal among a remarkable group of women. The Madres ('Mothers') of the Plaza de Mayo (1) have turned up on the square outside the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires every single Thursday for 26 years. They have demanded to know the whereabouts of their children -- 'disappeared' with perhaps 30,000 other people during the Dirty War waged by the military on its own population between 1976 and 1983. The residue of that war lingers like poison in the land. But the Madres, for many years alone, have been the antidote. They have made themselves heirs to a poignantly inverted inheritance -- what their own children stood and died for.

Argentina is a land of irreducible truths. Children die of hunger in a country that overflows with food. Most of its people, once among the wealthiest on earth, are now among the most impoverished. Here you cannot ignore, barefaced and brazen, the meaning of a ruinous global orthodoxy.

Outlines of catastrophe

The rough outlines of the catastrophe are easy to trace. Argentina's natural wealth lies in vast pampas grasslands -- much of them now infested with genetically modified organisms -- where cattle, sheep, wheat, soya, flourish without undue human exertion. Landowning dynasties form the core of an oligarchy that is completed by a business, financial and political elite. Together, they take it as their patriotic duty to run the country in their own interests. These interests usually coincide with those of their confreres around the world, who for the past generation have espoused the 'neoliberalism' of the Washington Consensus.

From the outset, neoliberalism was imposed on Argentina by force -- the Dirty War. Since then it has made ample use of a uniquely Argentinean tradition of populist, personality-cult patronage known as 'Peronism' -- so called after President Juan Peron and his wife Evita in the 1940s.

The latest embodiment of this cult is Carlos Menem. As President during most of the 1 990s Menem pursued a policy of self-enrichment through privatization, foreign loans and gunrunning that was hailed by the IMF and the US Government at the time as a 'model' -- until there was nothing left to sell off and the loans could no longer be repaid. All it took was 'contagion' from the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and the 1999 devaluation of the currency in Brazil -- Argentina's major trading partner -- for the house of cards to fold.

At this point Menem judiciously left office, while the debts were offloaded on to the Argentinean people. Factories shut down, banks closed their doors (the infamous corralito), the currency was unhooked from the US dollar and the savings of the urban middle class -- excluded from the insider trading of the elite -- were simply stolen. The banking district of Buenos Aires, just by the Plaza de Mayo, is still under siege, battered and defaced.

Its ill-gotten gains stashed away outside the country, the oligarchy soon discovered that one of its most profitable options was to buy up, at knockdown prices, its own country's 'foreign' debt -- of which it is now thought to own more than half.2 So the Argentinean people are being starved to pay an oligarchy that derived much of its wealth from stealing the original loans. It is a straightforward scam of positively Wagnerian proportions.

On 19 and 20 December 2001 the official declaration of a 'state of siege' provoked a spontaneous uprising in which more than 30 people were killed. The popular slogan, Que se vayan todos -- which translates loosely but quite faithfully as 'Go to hell the lot of you!' -- referred to the en tire political class, which declined to oblige. A bizarre sequence of aspirant leaders eventually stopped with the appointment by Congress of President Eduardo Duhalde -- the Peronist party boss of Buenos Aires. Another presidential election is scheduled for 27 April 2003. Hardly anyone is expected to participate. The only significant contest is for the Peronist nomination -- and Carlos Menem has been deploying a small part of his personal fortune in trying to secure it. Not one thread of democratic legitimacy remains.

Meanwhile, on 1 February 2003, La Nacion newspaper in Buenos Aires ran two headlines. One cited official statistics showing that 21 million Argentineans now live in poverty -- close to 60 per cent of the population and an increase of nearly 7 million on the previous year alone. Almost 10 million are 'indigent', living in absolute poverty. The other headline reported a phone call from President Bush to President Duhalde to celebrate the repayment of billions of dollars of Argentina's 'foreign' debt. The two stories' are one - the catastrophe compounds itself.