The escalating confrontation between President Cristina Fernández and Hugo Moyano, the secretary general of the union of truck drivers (Schoca) and of the general confederation of labour (CGT), was like watching the head-on collision of two articulated lorries: everyone could see it coming for miles but neither ‘driver’ could apply the brakes to stop it. When Moyano called a general strike last week, it became clear that after some eight months of increasingly hostile verbal diatribes, the union leader was ready to show his hand.
By all counts, the mobilisation to the Plaza de Mayo this Wednesday (27 June) was not as impressive as expected. Local press estimates put the number of marchers at 25,000, when it was widely known that Moyano wanted to occupy the symbolic square with at least 70,000 people – believed to be the plaza’s full capacity. President Fernández’s supporters have read this as an indication that, while Moyano’s mobilisation ability is quite impressive, it is not as impressive as he thinks. In fact, according to the local daily La Nación, an unnamed minister said Fernández described the mobilisation as “skinny [i.e. with poor turnout] and aggressive”.
If in fact Fernández feared that the spirit of the march was intended to “oust” her as she had declared last week, the relatively small size allowed her to breathe a sigh of relief. But she would only have found this out in the early hours of the evening and long after Moyano had finished speaking since she decided to ignore the union leader publicly on the day. Not only did she schedule an official event in the province of San Luis to be quite far from the seat of the executive - the Casa Rosada demarcates the eastern border of the Plaza de Mayo - but she also ensured that she delivered her own speech an hour late and was still greeting her supporters while Moyano spoke.
According to Moyano’s supporters, the lower-than-expected turnout was partly the result of presidential intimidation. On Tuesday, Fernández announced she was withdrawing all police presence during the mobilisation, which many said caused widespread fear of violence and prevented many would-be marchers from attending. Moyano said that while many union leaders had been intimidated by the government and not participated in the march, the workers they represent had turned out en masse. He also called on demonstrators to show the government they knew how to behave and, just like they had arrived peacefully at the plaza, they should leave in the same fashion. Apart from the normal pushing in an event of this magnitude, there was no violence on the day.
Words that pierced like bullets
While the march was officially intended to show the government that workers want the threshold of the income tax to be raised as soaring inflation is eroding their real purchasing power, it turned into an opportunity for Moyano to voice many of the criticisms made by the opposition parties for years. Moyano, who was the only speaker, came out all guns blazing and was intent on showing that despite the political differences that had kept them on different sides of the fence for the past nine years, he was able to represent a widespread group of interests, ranging from the far Left, social movements, unionised workers and even the middle class. In his speech, he said the Peronist definition of “workers” did not just apply to blue-collar workers or those who depended on physical labour to earn their bread, but that it also encompassed the widest possible definition of the term, including white-collar workers, retirees, professionals, retailers and businessmen.
Moyano, a highly-divisive figure, is unlikely to become a political contender overnight, but the vast majority of those who participated in the march likely voted for Fernández in her landslide re-election victory last October. Moyano said he is in favour of Fernández seeing out her term (which ends in December 2015), but he was also clear that she should not seek a third re-election – for which she would have to secure a constitutional reform. Many of those present agree - and the fact that they voted for Fernández less than a year ago does not mean they would do so again. “This is a national and popular project that stopped being so national and so popular,” Moyano quipped.
Regarding his supposed wish to oust Fernández, he said “It seems that a legitimate claim constitutes extortion; it seems that a strike action by the workers wants to distort democracy. It seems that a national strike is a coup d’état”. He then went on to accuse Fernández of dictatorial tendencies: “what bothers us and we don’t like is the imposing manners that they [the government] have, to do everything as if they were a dictatorship.”
The union leader was also very critical of the government’s human rights credentials. He said that the low income perceived by retirees, the fact that many people still live in slums – and that the government has not delivered “on any of the four” housing plans it has announced – and that the children of many workers are not covered by the so-called ‘family assignations’ all constitute human rights violations. “I ask myself about when many of us stayed in the country after the [military] coup of 1976. There were two kinds of exile: those who exiled themselves outside the country and those who exiled themselves in the Argentine south to make a profit out of the [Central Bank’s circular] 1050”. (The 1050 was a directive that allowed banks to issue mortgages without setting the interest rate, which fluctuated according to the market. This meant annual rates climbed over 100% and many had their homes repossessed. Néstor Kirchner and Fernández built their real estate empire by purchasing those homes at auction). “While we were fighting the dictatorship, some were hiding under their beds,” he rounded off.
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