Eduardo 'Chiquito' Belliboni is one of the national leaders of the Polo Obrero in Argentina. It’s an organisation of the Piqueteros movement, which organises mainly unemployed workers against neoliberal policies. It has faced intensified state repression, including a case against Belliboni himself, since far right president Javier Milei’s election. He spoke to Camilla Royle and David Karvala.
Eduardo “Chiquito” Belliboni
SOCIALIST WORKER
Friday 20 December 2024
The Piquetero movement has existed since the 1990s and was known for forming pickets or blockades on roads. Could you explain the movement at that time and why people took this action?
At that time, I was a rail worker and was sacked for fighting against privatisation. The government at the time had a neoliberal policy of privatisation and mass layoffs.
More than 20 percent of the working population were laid off and without work, an enormous social crisis that generated unemployed workers’ movements.
The first demands of the movement were for the right to work.
But organisations began to see the need to socially assist the members of the unemployed movements, and that is how popular soup kitchens were born.
We fought to establish an organisation in the neighbourhoods to sustain a great movement of unemployed people, as the Black Panther Party did in the United States with the Free Breakfast Programme they ran for children.
We formed an independent tendency in 2000, the Polo Obrero (PO) or Workers’ Pole. The idea was to concentrate on a class-based program of demands and also a revolutionary demand for a government of the workers.
At first the Argentine ruling class fought the organisations militarily. There were many deaths, many Piquetero organisations bear the names of those who were killed such as Darío Santillán, Maximiliano Costecchi and Teresa Rodríguez.
The Cristina Fernández de Kirchner government of 2007-2015 instead tried to co-opt organisations so that they would be instruments of welfare and not a factor in the fight against the state or against the capitalist regime. But we in the PO and other organisations remained independent of the government.
Could you talk about the kind of tactics that you use and whether those tactics have changed in 30 years?
The picket or blockade of streets is a tactic used by the Piquetero movement because it is mainly a movement of unemployed people. That’s because these workers do not have a factory and they can’t go on strike.
The effect of capitalism and the industrial revolution was to concentrate the workers in a factory, while the process of unemployment disperses them into the poorest neighbourhoods.
The worker does not stop being a worker because he or she does not have a job. It is a historical error of many currents of the Argentine left that say, “Well, I am no longer interested in this person because he or she has stopped being in the productive part of capitalism.” This is not true in any case.
The movement had to go to where people lived, and that’s where the pickets or roadblocks began.
Lots of people assume that pickets and blockades are something new for the working class. Do you know when the first picket was? It was with the construction of the pyramids. There was a picket because they were given very bad food. So it is a 3,000 year old tactic.
The first pickets in Argentina involved perhaps 300 or 400 workers, but they grew to thousands.
And then we began to build a network of organisations across the country. On the national days of picketing, they can involve 100,000 people or more.
In Europe and elsewhere a key question for socialists is how to defend migrants against racism. Is that also part of the Piqueteros’ programme?
Yes, of course. There is fierce racism here, especially against the Bolivian and Peruvian communities, who are very easily identifiable.
The contempt and racism are expressed today when the presidential spokesman announces that migrants will not have the right to health or education in Argentina. We strongly defend the right to migrate and the right to live.
There should be no borders in Latin America. Someone who was born in La Quiaca, a city on the edge of Argentina’s northern border, for example, can live next to someone who was born in Villazon, which is over the border in Bolivia. They are exactly the same.
For us as revolutionary socialists, the border is there between exploiters and exploited. The differences are of class—never of race, religion or place of birth.
What role do women play in the Piquetero movement?
About 70 or 80 percent of the Piqueteros are women.
They play a leading role in the neighbourhoods because they are the organisers of the daily fight against hunger. And they are the great organisers of the struggle in the neighbourhoods.
In the early days of the Piquetero movement, the most affected by the layoffs were the men.
Many men left their homes. So it was the women who had to shoulder not only the material support of life, but the organisation in each neighbourhood.
What we did was also give a gender content to the politics of the working class. We discussed the particular problems of the women comrades, the fight against domestic violence, the fight for the right to abortion, the fight for equal pay.
Could you explain how the kitchens are organised as well?
Well, a lot of food is distributed. But the kitchens have also been points of organisation for workers for their rights.
Teachers come to the neighbourhoods to help with educating the kids.
We also do sports and social activities that integrate the neighbourhood and put a barrier to drug trafficking. If not, it is the drug traffickers who influence the families.
When there are many unemployed people, the unemployed can try to sell their labour very cheaply to the capitalist.
We organised the fight against layoffs. We explained to all workers that the unemployed should fight so they don’t have to beg for a job at the factory gate, offering themselves at a lower price than those in work.
It is not just a canteen, but a political struggle for workers’ rights and for organisation against the capitalist state.
You have been very critical of the trade union bureaucracy. Do you think there is any opportunity to work with ordinary trade union members?
It is not only possible, we do it all the time. We have national assemblies of employed and unemployed workers, where rank-and-file workers come as well as some combative, class-conscious union leaders.
We have common struggles for things like public works, the paving of streets, water provision, services that are not available in many neighbourhoods and we form alliances with students to fight for public education.
We have a policy of a united front from below and not with the union leaderships, like those of the CGT and the CTA union federations. They have totally given over to government policy.
Could you summarise the situation after a year of Javier Milei?
The Milei government is an offensive, counter-revolutionary government against the workers. But not only because of the specific measures it takes, such as its labour reforms that have rolled back workers’ rights.
The government’s underlying principle is a counter-revolutionary reaction against workers’ organisations. Not only revolutionary organisations like us, but also those that are centre left, or social democrats.
He does not want any kind of workers’ organisation because he intends to wipe out workers’ rights to allow the capitalist class to restore its rate of profit.
That is why he is supported in parliament by Peronists. That is to say, right wingers not as extreme as him. Even without a parliamentary majority, Milei has managed to pass laws in favour of these brutal measures against the workers.
The capitalist class as a whole fundamentally supports all the measures that the Milei government is taking in favour of the capitalist rate of profit. It is a rabidly capitalist government.
It has been 11 months since the food was cut off to the soup kitchens, it’s not sending any more food. And its intention is to destroy the neighbourhood organisations.
How would you characterise Javier Milei’s politics?
Milei is a fascist. There are people around him who are fascists. But that doesn’t mean that Argentina is now a fascist state.
There are still roadblocks and huge mobilisations. They have not crushed the working class, which is one of the central aims of fascism, the crushing of the physical and organisational forces of the workers’ movement.
He has not been able to destroy democratic freedoms and he has not managed to install a regime of exception, although he has that intention.
The Milei movement attacks LGBT+ people and women. That is, it is a reactionary movement along fascist lines. But it has not managed to impose itself and we continue fighting.
How are you going to respond to the repression that you personally and the movement have faced?
There are two levels of response. One is the one that the government brings to us, which is a struggle at the legal level, in which we will appeal the accusations against us.
We have a legal fight, which is always unequal because justice responds to political power.
But then there is the social struggle, the fight against the Milei government, in which we have taken up the slogan, “Milei out.”
The harm that Milei is doing to this society is irreparable. According to the United Nation’s children’s agency Unicef, over a million children in Argentina go to bed without eating. Milk consumption is falling, while the exorbitant profits that milk producers have in Argentina increase. Argentina is a country of cows. But workers’ children go without milk.
If I were to say as a leader of an organisation, “Okay, we are not fighting anymore, we are making a pact,” all the cases against us would be dropped. But we are not going to do that, so we are going to fight judicially and we are going to fight in the streets.
Do you think there is a possibility of a general strike?
Today we don’t see it because the rank and file in the unions don’t have enough strength yet. And there is a pact between the main CGT union federation and Milei to maintain the status quo.
The conditions are there for a general strike—which is what could end Milei—but the bureaucratic obstacle is also very important.
What can socialists do internationally to support the movement?
First, to distribute information about the Piqueteros. Sometimes we call for protests at Argentine embassies. And well, of course, in a materialistic world like capitalism, all the resources they can gather. We are doing solidarity campaigns, gathering funds, because the charges against us implies hiring lawyers and experts and that all costs money.
It is the capitalist state with all its force against the organisations of the workers.
Socialists around the world must be more united than ever before at such a difficult time for the cause of the socialist revolution. We need to confront this reactionary offensive in the world, which we see an extreme case of here in Argentina.David Karvala is a member of the revolutionary socialist network in the Spanish state, Marx21.net
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