Argentina - October 10th, 2019

The "Chubutazo" is still standing!

Chubut province continues unabatedly bankrupted. Plundered by oil companies, Aluar bosses, the fishing companies, the landowners and all the monopolies it has been left overexploited. Education workers and public servants have rebelled against this situation; they have gone on an indefinite strike for 12 weeks because they are collecting their miserable wages in arrears and in installments, their health insurance only covers 10 days a month and schools and hospitals are falling apart.
Both the workers and exploited as a whole support teachers and public servants’ strike since they see it as the way to fight back the drain they are suffering. In areas like Trelew, Madryn and Rawson unemployment rate is about 27% and goes over 40% among youth, in the Comodoro-and-Sarmiento oil basin poverty has doubled in the last year alone, while more than 2,500 registered oil workers lost their jobs, hitting directly those oil workers under Truck Drivers Union and UOCRA (construction) collective agreements, which represent 40% of the oil fields labor.
The struggle of Chubut workers keeps showing the path along with to fight against the selling out of Argentina to imperialism and the IMF. It has become indispensable to generalize, fighting like worker and peasant masses.
However, all worker organizations’ leaderships had told the workers, “We have to wait for 2019” and that Macri “would be punished in the ballot box”, namely through the vote for Fernandez, who is actually a different “collar” for the “same dog” to support the reactionary regime of 1853-1994 Constitution of the oligarchy, IMF and capitalists.
It is the very same bureaucracy of CGT and CTA who have unified today under Fernandez and UIA’s (Industrialists’ Chamber) commands, while workers are divided, the struggle of Chubut is isolated and undergoing lay-offs, factory close-downs, attacks on collective agreements, deepening labour flexibility and more hunger and misery.
Under these conditions, the Chubutazo does not give up and keeps facing the (provincial governor) Arcioni’s government, who is supported by Fernández-Fernández and the oil workers union bureaucracy of Lludgar and Ávila and does not stop its attack on behalf of the oil companies and imperialism. The exploiters’ Legislature was surrounded by public servants in Rawson; the camping of the teachers and their supporters in front of the Ministry of Education goes on and Road Authority workers intermittently perform road-blockades on Route 25; in Comodoro, a huge picket was held until Sunday 29/09 in the access to the fuel tanks plant; in Madryn there has been a historical blockade in Aluar by blocking the five entries in an action that had the solidarity of the rank and file workers of the UOM (Metal Union) and the UOCRA (Construction Workers Union); in Esquel the office of the health assurance company Seros and the building of the School Supervision Section are occupied. At the same time, seven secondary schools are occupied by students in Madryn, another four in Rawson, one in Lago Puelo; in Comodoro also two secondary schools and the Office of School Supervision are occupied as well, while parents and tertiary students who had taken the School No. 1 to prevent the entry of the scabs were attacked by PJ and the bureaucracy of Ávila themselves.
Since September 17, when comrade teachers Cristina and Jorgelina died on Route 3 while returning from fighting in Rawson, a fierce rage has broken out in the streets throughout the province and the buildings of the Provincial Legislature and the State government house were burned by the workers’ onslaught.
CTERA bureaucracy had to call a national strike again to decompress the hatred of all the workers in Argentina, who are enduring the same or worse conditions than those in Chubut. The rank and file in all the state workers unions in the province have long sought to unite in a single organism so to call from there the whole of the workers and exploited in Chubut to fight together.

The conditions for the general strike until the murderous government of Arcioni falls are more than mature, but it is the leadership of the MUS (Trade Union Unit Board) that prevents this from developing. The same day that Cristina and Jorgelina lost their lives, ATECh, the provincial section of ATE (national union that represents a big portion of the state workers nationally) led by Quiroga broke away with the MUS and negotiated with the government to comply with the mandatory conciliation, fulfilling an openly scab role aiming to sabotage the unified struggle of the workers and selling out the demands of the school auxiliaries (janitors, cooks, cleaners, etc).
As this struggle deepens and extends over time, the leadership of the workers opens at a 180º angle with respect to the grassroots workers. In the Provincial Plenary of education workers, which took place on September 17, the need to hold a plenary of delegates of struggling state workers was voted against the leadership of ATECh itself headed by Goodman (provincial leader of the ‘Celeste’ national ticket of the union internal tendency of Alesso-Baradel); furthermore, the appeal to all the workers of the province to fight together was also voted in the Plenary.
From that same day, while the grassroots have pushed to make this resolution effective, the leaders of ATECh seek to dismantle it. So much so, that on October 4th, a second provincial plenary of teacher delegates was held in Trelew. This was a plenary totally closed to the rank and file teachers, since only a handful of picked delegates participated, preventing the participation of more than 70% of the teachers who are struggling; this closed door “plenary” scabbed the call to the rest of the sectors to join in the same body as it had been voted on September 17.
The real limit that the rank and file workers have who are struggling to regroup their ranks is the leadership of ATECh and the group of public servants grouped in the MUS. None of the workers who are struggling in the province today believe any of their demands can be conquered if they do not defeat Arcioni’s government and the oil company regime.
While the workers push to regroup their forces to throw down Arcioini and his cabinet, even calling to break the national isolation to face the "social pact" of the bureaucracy with Macri and the capitalists’ government, the leaders of the MUS call for the Legislature to make a "political impeachment to Arcioni." Thus, it is Goodman and all the bureaucrats of ATECh and the MUS who are preventing Arcioni from falling into the hands of the direct action of the masses. They seek to divert the combat, taking it to the feet of the exploiters’ Legislature and the employers' justice, to expropriate the fight and save the whole of the regime of the oil companies.
Along with this, the MUS leadership, both the Kirchnerists and the PTP-PCR (Guevaraists-Maoists) cadres that are within the ‘Frente de Todos’ (Front of Everybody, the coalition led by Fernandez-Fernandez in the national election and will be the next Administration in Argentina starting D1c 10, 2019), seek to bring this enormous uprising at the feet of the bosses who pose as “opposition” to Arcioni, as Linares (Mayor of Comodoro Rivadavia) or the deputies of the FpV, who are those who openly support the governor.
The last "proposal" of the current government for teachers were no more than a mockery, since it does not resolve any of the points of the list of demands and at the same time intends to pay salaries by indebting the state again with $ 1.2 billion taken from the ANSES Sustainability Guaranty Fund (the Previsional Fund for Investments created to counter inflation and devaluation of the peso that guarantees the payment of workers’ retirement pensions) with an interest rate of 95%!
No more time wasting. The workers need to defeat Macri-Arcioni’s government. We need to expel Ávila and Lludgar and the rest of the union bureaucracy together so that oil workers, truck drivers, UOCRA workers and metalworkers coordinate in a single fight with the state workers and the student movement. We must now conquer a General Assembly of delegates with a rank and file mandate of all sectors in struggle.
This body will have all the authority to disarm both the police and the trade union bureaucracy’s gunmen, to set up the unified self-defence committees of the workers' organizations and to end the murderous government of Arcioni. We must expropriate without compensation and under workers' control the oil fields, Aluar, the landowners, the fisheries and all the industries to put them at the service of health, education and decent work for all.
That is the only way to end the hunger and misery of the people in one of the richest provinces of Argentina, imposing a provisional revolutionary workers’ and popular government, based on the organizations of the masses in struggle, building in Patagonia a stronghold against capitalists for all the exploited of the nation.
We have already lost two comrades in Chubut. In a general assembly held on September 23 at school 731, Jorge Mansilla, Cristina Aguilar's husband, said: “I am Cristina, I will take her place, I will block the roads as she did, do not break apart, don't divide yourselves; you have to join all your forces to win and make Arcioni’s government leave.” That is the path that the workers of Chubut and of the whole country must follow!

 

In Chubut Fernández is already ruling.
There the “social pact” of the bureaucracy is confronted by the masses

That is why the struggle of the Chubut workers is a witness fight. If they are defeated, Fernández will enter the government with enormous strength to attack the working class and the exploited, as his spokesman Arcioni is doing now.
But Chubut will not be able to succeed unless the fence imposed by the leaderships of the union bureaucracy of CTERA, the CTA and the CGT is broken.
The left parties members in the FIT-U have bet all their forces in the elections of October 27, giving the Chubutazo, which shows how to fight for the crisis to be paid for by the capitalists, a cold shoulder.
Enough! While the Chubutazo resists in isolation, hunger and misery are increasing day by day, hundreds of factories close and thousands of workers are laid off; the province of Tucumán is already applying Arcioni’s plan for teachers and public servants, paying them in arrears and ignoring the “trigger clause” (that establishes an authomatic increment to the wages according to the inflation increase, NT) signed in collective bargains. (Oil worker activist) Daniel Ruiz spent more than a year in prison and now he is about to face an infamous trial, (Mapuche leader) Facundo Jones Huala is still being held in Temuco (Chile) prison, the drivers of Buenos Aires Bus Line 60 are going to be judged, former drivers of the East Line bus line of La Plata are in house arrest, (autoworkers delegate) Sebastián Romero and 7500 companions are prosecuted for fighting, such as (shipbuilders union activist) Alejandro Villarruel of the Río Santiago Shipyard and the students of Río Negro, Córdoba and Capital Federal, while the murderers of Rafa Nahuel and Santiago Maldonado remain unpunished.
The situation is unbearable. The teachers’ union branches wrested from the bureaucracy of Alesso-Baradel, the Sutebas Multicolor ( teacher union tickets of the opposition to the teachers bureaucracy), the militant unionism and the militant picketeer (unemployed workers and their families) movement must put all their forces into breaking the "social pact" of the bureaucracy of the CGT and the CTA and fight to unite the Chubutazo with the resilient worker resistance that faces layoffs, labor flexibility and occupies the factories locked-out by the bosses, with the unemployed movement and with the militant student movement.
Chubut must not keep fighting alone! We cannot keep fighting factory to factory!
Let's vote delegates from all sectors to march to Chubut!
It is necessary to conquer a National Coordinating Organism of the workers in struggle, the occupied factories, the Militant Trade Unionism, the picketer movement and the student movement! •