Argentina - City of Rosario - March 7, 2023

The Peronist party with the support of the PRO brings the military back to the streets

The Fernández government has announced the dispatch of more than 1,000 members of the Federal Forces to Rosario and the army to, it says, help "urbanize" the poor neighborhoods of that city.

 A crude hoax;  for years, hundreds of thousands of workers from the interior of the country, driven by hunger and misery, settled in the villas of Rosario, as well as in Greater Buenos Aires.
The privatizations of Peronism and Radicalism in the 1990s deepened this process of mass layoffs.

 The bourgeoisie, the system and this infamous regime and this democracy for the rich have given them neither decent work, nor education, nor health and only shots were fired at the masses.  This happened in 1989 when they rose up in the hunger uprising, or as millions of exploited people did in Argentina in 2001. Rosario played a key role, both in the migrations of desperate layers of the working class in the '90s , as in the mass offensives of '89 and 2001. 40 years later, this rotten “democracy” for the rich wants to hide the 14 martyrs of the hunger uprisings in '89 and the 40 murdered in the State of Siege of De la Rua in 2001.

Chronic unemployment has led to despair millions of workers who die in public hospitals, have a degraded education in dilapidated schools that only serve for the food quota to be supplemented for their children, and which is in open bankruptcy.
From Rosario as from Buenos Aires and the large provinces with worker concentrations, a new slave labor force emerges in Argentina that keeps entering and leaving the productive process, with miserable wages, unregistered and made flexible, or survives with the miserable state alms of the Planes Trabajar (Work Plans), eating low protein rations in "popular food kitchens" or with only one meal a day.  60% of the workers have been left to their fate by the traitors of the millionaire Peronist union bureaucracies, sellouts of a thousand and one struggles and conquests of the working class.

 This is the new labor movement that has emerged in the last 30 years, the product of enormous betrayals by its leadership and the ferocious looting of the nation by imperialism, associated with the big native capitalists and oligarchs.  The PJ, the UCR and Macri's party are the guarantors of this plan of exploitation, hunger and misery.
In Rosario, one of these foci has deepened for decades of misery and desolation of the exploited.
As we said, there was imposed, from the privatization during the anti-labor and Peronist government of Menem, the privatization of the ports and, in this case, of all the waterways of the Paraná River, today in the hands of imperialist companies, associated with the great agrarian oligarchy.  They are associated in an imperialist looting economy that works largely in the dark.  They do not pay taxes and triangulate their exports with Paraguay.  That is what the shipment of tons and tons of grain to Paraguay and its re-exportation is all about, which allows the big agrarian bourgeoisie, Monsanto, Cargill and the big imperialist cereal companies to charge in hard and fast dollars on the world market for their goods exports and leave them offshore.

Proof of this -and that no one can deny- is that Paraguay has the largest flag fleet of barges that travels the rivers of Mesopotamia, and, it is not because of this small country's agricultural production!

 These peopple are a bundle of wretched!  They make a lot of a fuss about "the problem of the narcos", while cocaine and all kinds of drugs come and go on their own barges in the ports they control, with which they do fabulous business the same as they do with agro-livestock smuggling.
A black economy has grown and flourishes.  It is protected by the police and the State, judges and politicians.  They recruit in ultramarginal sectors of this new working class the sectors in a process of decomposition that have never entered the productive process.  Meanwhile, the absolute majority of workers in the working-class neighborhoods of Greater Rosario live precariously, "flexibilized", or under miserable Work Plans, and suffer the worst of exploitation, repression by the police, the state and its judges and, on top of that, by the "little soldiers" created and protected by all the latter.

The generalization of drugs in the working-class neighborhoods of the big capitals of the provinces is a conscious policy to break down and control the lowest layers of the working class.  It is no longer enough to contain the masses with the control of the police, the Church and all the institutions of the State and, for this reason, they organize "little soldiers" to discipline them and break down their ranks.  The murder of Máximo Jerez was the limit that thousands and thousands of workers of the Great Rosario endured.
Meanwhile, in the countries of the rich, in the neighborhoods of the oligarchy, all kinds of substances are freely marketed as entertainment and leisure for the parasites who live on rents and the work of others.

 The Minister of the Interior, the Mayor of Rosario and today the "stone face" Fernández announced that they have just failed in the fight against drug trafficking, when they themselves are the ones who cover it up, the ones who let it run and the ones who handle it with its armed and repressive forces, its judges, its prosecutors, its ships, its ports, which they control as Massa does with his band of allies from the transnational shipping companies from the ports of Buenos Aires and also from the Hidrovía...
Now they announce the "mother of the battles against drug trafficking", in an electoral race with the PRO to see who brings more repressive forces to the streets.  The drug trade?  An excuse.

 Everything is a vile lie and the workers and the people of Rosario have already shown it.  It is the workers of those neighborhoods, the vast majority of them, who know in which houses the lumpen and declassed are, organized by the Police, the State and the judges.
Yesterday in the neighborhoods of Rosario, the only force that can do justice and solve the problem of social decomposition and stop the "narcopolice" in 24 hours was seen, where not a single drug trafficker was left in the neighborhoods where the workers rose up.

The government's response was more police officers and the removal of the Armed Forces.  They seek to deepen the repression against the rebellious people who no longer believe them, because they know perfectly well who the "little soldiers" are, the drug traffickers and the police who organize them.

 More repressive forces in the streets is what Bullrich, the PRO, the U.S. ambassador and the Kirchners are looking for, who need to have them to attack the people.  They need them at times of great revolutionary uprisings.  They know very well what they are doing.  They fear that the great revolutionary struggles that are shaking Latin America today will develop in Argentina and that, here and there, put a limit to the imperialist looting offensive.  Already, Cristina herself had proposed taking out the Armed Forces to militarize the borders and place the thousands of detachments of the Gendarmerie as occupation troops in all the working-class neighborhoods of the country.  Does the lady suffer from amnesia?  If the only thing the military did not do in Argentina was defend the border, when they handed over the kids who went to defend the Malvinas.  This army only knows how to kill workers and be partners, as they are, in "peace" missions with the imperialist troops of the UN occupying Haiti or as Menem did by sending a couple of ships from Argentina to invade Iraq.  They are minions of imperialism!
They decide to take the army to the streets.  They fear, today more than ever, that a new 2001 will develop in Argentina. They know how they are attacking the masses.  They fear in Argentina a Plaza de la Dignidad in Chile, the First Lines in Colombia, the revolutionary uprising in the worker and peasant regions of Peru, the uprising against the coup in Bolivia and the workers' struggles in Brazil.
That's why they take the military out into the streets, when they couldn't do it either in patriotic parades, or to give out chocolate at events because the people repudiate them.  What a stock of wretched scoundrels!

The workers of Argentina already know this plan of Peronism, the PRO and the UCR.
 In 1973, with the JP and Cámpora, they began “Operativo Dorrego” to “repair roads” with the military, to whitewash their faces of 21 previous military coups, including the 1955 Massacre.  
In 1975 they launched the "Independence Operative" in the northern Province of Tucuman to search for "terrorists" in the forests.     
They did the same, from the Ministry of Social Action founding in mid 1973 the Triple A with López Rega and Perón that took the blood of the best of the vanguard workers of the 1973-1975 workers' Coordinators in Greater Buenos Aires.  They called in 1974-5 to crush the “factory guerilla” as Luder and Balbín did… and then they called on Videla and the military to impose genocide and save, in this way, the regime and the bourgeois state threatened by a phenomenal rise that had began in the Cordobazo of '69.  Things as they are.  You have to tell the truth.

US Ambassador in Argentina Stanley calls for order in the "Viceroyalty" and the boot-licker Viceroys obey

 The Gringos come for gas, for lithium, for minerals, for Vaca Muerta (fracking oil and gasfield), for grains, for soybeans... they come for everything... they even come for the drug business.  The US Navy knows a lot about that, about how to supply the largest consumer market.
Massa and the Peronist government say they don't have dollars.  Of course!... they have given them all to the IMF.  And not only that, they send abroad stealthily more than 40 billion dollars a year via smuggling, where the port of Rosario is the capital of "the currency flight" under the command of Cargill and Monsanto and well guarded by the union bureaucracy and the Prefecture.  They are a capitalist class and ruling elites of anti-labor parasites, worker killers, sweetened by this rotten democracy for the rich.

 In Rosario one sees the true character of this democracy of the slaveholders to which a parliamentary left pays homage every day, a Left that does not dare to propose that the only solution to this barbarity is to prepare the socialist revolution and regroup the best elements of the working class vanguard.  The bourgeoisie perfectly understands how to act in these preparatory moments precious to great class clashes.  Reformism refuses to state that the task to stop the scourge of "insecurity" of this rotten capitalist system is the uprising and self-organization, with self-defense committees in the very neighborhoods where the workers have to put up with and suffer from "insecurity" and   also have to fight against the most important of insecurities, such as is not been able to make the ends meet and have to look how the daily increases in the supermarket shelves' prices  and in services end up strangling the salary.

They announce that they are calling out the Armed Forces to “urbanize Rosario”… How can they be so cynical?  It would be enough to provide funds, set up worker cooperatives with workers building under an agreement, with advice from the Faculty of Architecture of Rosario, and thus urbanize and provide decent housing to all workers with specialized construction workers.

 They lie blatantly.  To urbanize, you nerd construction workers; but the military is there to kill the people and take care of the businesses of the big capitalists.  Don't lie anymore!
AWhereas all the murderers of the last dictatorship have not yet been punished, with General Milani freed by the Peronist-radical justice, with judges coming from the heart of the Videlist justice, today they announce that their Armed Forces are going to work as "construction workers"!
 The soldiers go to the streets to stay there, along with a thousand members of the Federal Police.  They are going to concentrate forces to stop the uprising of the people of Rosario and For preventing the fight that has begun from becoming generalized.
 Fernández (who is a Peronist) and (PRO's leader) Bullrrich's (that is, both official and the  opposition) plan is to leave the Armed Forces in the streets.  Armed Forces that tomorrow will once again spill the workers and the people's blood.
 As we have said, they need to use them again.  They are getting ready.  But, in turn, the facts in Rosario already speak for themselves.  Yesterday those from below spoke, exercising their justice against the drug-sponsor police, denounced as such in every Rosario neighborhood, and which was overwhelmed, while the masses took the crisis into their own hands and demonstrated that only they can solve it.

The way out of the national crisis and capitalist bankruptcy is only available to the self-organized working class and on condition of taking the crisis into their own hands.

 The task of the moment, to resolve the "crisis" in the neighborhoods, is to set up armed brigades of workers organized by block and by Rosario neighborhood so that in 24 hours drug dealing will end, especially the bosses of the drug traffickers.  And, for this, the Police must be disarmed and the people armed.  It is the police that has its “little soldiers”, just as the Naval Prefecture has them, taking care of contraband in the Waterway and the businesses of the oligarchy and the transnationals.
They say that "there are not enough judges"... However yesterday the masses did justice in 24 hours, demonstrating that only the workers can liberate themselves.
In 2001, the workers and the people imposed the method of the Popular Assembly, they took the crisis into their own hands, they did not delegate, they overthrew a government and a repressive and anti-worker regime.  That is the way, the method of the Popular Assemblies, that of the General Strike and the imposition of workers' control and the take over of the closed factories, renationalizing all the country's ports under the control of their workers so that smuggling and the flight of dollars, and the over and under-invoicing of exports and imports.  This is the task of the moment.  There is no doubt that then, drugs and "soldiers" would be scarce in Rosario and throughout the country.
That is the path that must be followed.  To end the scourge of drug trafficking, we must end the scourge of hunger, unemployment, poverty wages, destroyed health and education, we must end the scourge of the looting of the nation, we must end with the IMF, it is necessary to renationalize all the companies privatized by Peronism, the UCR and the PRO reactionaries.  That is a task that will only be guaranteed by the working class and its allies the people poor from the countryside and the city, advancing to seize power.

 There are no intermediate way-outs.  The working class needs a new program and to regroup its forces, divided a thousand times by the traitors of the union bureaucracy.
Enough of provisionally hired workers, all workers have to be registered and permanent!  Down with the wage tax!  Reduced working hours and one more shift in all factories!  Let's kick the IMF out! All the looters and parasites that oppress the nation must go!  For the self-organization and self-defense of the poor people!  Those from above do not take care of us, those from above kill us with slave labor, "trigger happy" police, repression of our struggles… and with their "little soldiers" in the neighborhoods!

Just like the world capitalist system as a whole, the economy and politics in Argentina are headed for catastrophe.  The bourgeoisie has also set up proto-fascist movements, it is preparing and arming them, as they do with the military, supported by a very rich anti-labor middle class, totally anti-national.
The conditions for great class clashes are already here.  The working class has its hands tied by an infamous Social Pact between the PJ and the other police, the union bureaucracy, which acts and represses in the interior of the labor movement.  There is no other way out, we must unite all the demands of the working class so that it takes into its own hands the resolution of this crisis and catastrophe that are here.
It is the treacherous union bureaucracy that divides the ranks of the labor movement, that prevents them from fighting.  The reformist left is which has long refused to unify all the struggles of the working class and has subordinated all of them to this rotten parliament that is a true Wall Street clerk.  Even the "Combatative Unionism" and its Plenary that they announced on one occasion sometime algo with great fanfare and cymbals has disappeared from the decisive struggles of the working class such as the Tire workers, the stevedores, etc.  Surely now they seek to unite for the elections... that's what reformism is all about.
The police should not enter the working-class neighborhoods! Neither their "narcotutelated", nor the murderous Armed Forces should!  If web Let them do, tomorrow they will enter the factories with the excuse of "industrial terrorism" in the face of any serious workers' struggle, as they did in the 1970s.

 Out with the genocidal army of the streets!  Out of the working-class neighborhoods, both the police and their "little soldiers"!  For self-organization and worker and popular self-defense committees that guarantee the safety of those below!  Open the way for the working class!  Open the way to the self-organized people!
 Argentina will be a socialist nation or a colony of Wall Street.

Carlos Munzer, for the Editorial Committee of  The International Workers' Organizer