Argentine Unions Demand Gov't Bonus, Less Police Repression

Argentine social movements are protesting on Monday demanding that the country’s housing ministry follow through with providing 1.5 million homes and to improve another 2.5 million properties in disrepair throughout the country.

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The Confederation of Workers for the Popular Economy (CTEP), Classist and Combative Wave (CCC), and Neighbors Standing on Their Feet, among other organizations are marching from the famed Buenos Aires obelisk to the Ministry of Housing, headed by Ivan Kerr to demand the government’s construction of social housing.

The Mauricio Macri administration’s 2019 budget that passed last month approved with it a 40 percent slash to the department of housing and social groups in Buenos Aires say the housing deficit is being felt hardest in the capital.

This is the city’s first major mobilization after many of the same organizations tried to march to the health and social development ministry last week to demand that the government deliver the meager bonus it promised last month to public workers to combat the country’s year-long 40 percent inflation rate.  

Monday’s marchers are making the bonus a part of their demands because the government has yet to distribute it, Emilio Persico from CTEP told local media. The union leader added: "People are very angry with the government because it is going bad (and) resolving social conflict with repression is a mistake." Persico said, "The only thing that repression does is to aggravate social conflict."

CTEP leader Gildo Onorato says that labor unions are available to build and repair homes and already began the work throughout the Buenos Aires province keeping “some 2,000 workers directly employed, and another 1,500 indirectly,” Onorato explained.

As the Macri government has driven the country’s economy into a recession, aggressively implementing austerity measures, cutting tens of thousands of government jobs, and selling off billions of its peso and dollar reserves over the past six months to try to save its devalued peso that remains at around 38 to the U.S. dollar, the administration has taken an equally aggressive stance toward organizations that oppose these very policies.

Last month the government detained several alternative press members while covering an anti-austerity and anti-IMF (International Monetary Fund) march and even imprisoned 15 soccer fans at a Sunday night demonstration. The newly appointed Buenos Aires head of security, Diego Santilli, who ordered the detentions told local media: "We will not allow hooded (people) with sticks to completely cut off the ‘9 de Julio’ Avenue," the city’s main street.

Social development minister Carolina Stanley told reporters over the weekend that demonstrators "are trying to take vulnerable people hostage" to which Persico responded by saying unions aren’t the first to create social upheaval.

“History shows that the majority of the dead are our companions" adding: "they killed Orellana and we did not have violent reactions." Argentine police forces are accused of killing two CTEP members Rodolfo Orellana and Marcos Soria, both murdered in late November during local demonstrations.

Argentina’s recession is becoming dire as the United Nations found that over 48 percent of minors are living in poverty, and the economy shrank by six percent in 2018.