Social movements that reimagined Argentina.

• Author: Fiorentini, Francesca
• Position: Thinking Politically

If 2011 was any indicator, 2012 will be a year of further popular resistance to government austerity and a finance sector spun out of control. Whether it's the Occupy movements in the US that have spread to the UK, the indignados of Spain, or the general strikes in Greece and Italy, the people of the world when faced with economic crisis and tired fix-it schemes are saying in near unison: Now it's our turn.

Though refreshingly new, these movements have a South American predecessor: Argentina 2001, when popular protest put an end to destructive neoliberal policies and forever changed the political terrain of the country.

Ten years later, with the country's unparalleled economic growth since 2003 and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's landslide re-election victory, it is easy to forget just how the country climbed out of those difficult days. Though many credit former President Nestor Kirchner with creating a new economic model that reined in a private sector run wild, it was the people whose unyielding protests during the 1990s and through the turn of the century would ultimately bring about change.

As historian Ezequiel Adamovsky writes in Le Monde Diplomatique, "It was the constant threat of looting, targeting of politicians, of rebellion, of occupations, of roadblocks, and those assemblies that disciplined both management and local and international financial sectors, opening an unimagined space for politics."

This unimagined space included the unemployed, labor unions, and the middle classes alike, who took to the streets in the final months of 2001, uniting under the slogan "Que se vayan todos" (They all must go). It was a powerful indicator that the entire political system was broken, and that not just the president and the economic minister, but all of Congress had abandoned and sold out its people. In less than two weeks the country saw the popular ousting of five presidents. For a people who not long before had lived under a military dictatorship in which any inkling of social protest could cost one their life, it was a moment of political reconstitution and reclamation of popular power.

From a vacuum of political power and severe economic necessity grew new political formations outside of traditional party politics. Hundreds of neighborhood assemblies came together to meet people's most basic needs and create a space for local dialogue. Bartering clubs (with their own forms of currency) experimented in alternative economics, and workers of bankrupt businesses began to occupy and run enterprises on their own.

Ten years on, with fewer street protests and US trademarks like Starbucks and Subway encroaching on the capital, what remains of this anti-neoliberal angst? How have the political formations whose "horizontal" nature inspired not just Argentina but the entire world, faded into the background of political landscape? Which projects have survived? Though the country may be far from the chaos of economic collapse, is the economic model the Kirchner governments have so exalted crisis-proof?

Long time coming: 1990s and the piquetero movement

Years of neoliberal policies had taken their toll on the Argentine people. Unemployment reached 17% in 1996 and the infant mortality rate from 1995-97 was 20.4 (20.4 of 1000 infants would die before their first birthday). At the same time, the country had no social safety net or unemployment centers to help the poor subsist and find work. As sociologist Maristella Svampa details, "there were no policies to compensate the effects of labor 'flexi-bilization' measures or massive firings that accompanied the privatization of state enterprises, not to mention these companies' adjustment to a new open-market context."

The poor suburbs of Buenos Aires in addition to rural...