Opinion Sur Joven

A brief summary: on March 11 Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández, decided to raise export taxes. She created a sliding-scale taxation system for grain and oilseed: the higher the international price, the higher the taxation percentage.

Rebellion came soon. First, the farmers began a strike; but, since they didn’t receive an answer, they tried blocking the roads. About 200 roads. And soon came the Easter weekend. And it was a complete chaos.

Those days I got stuck at a roadblock near Gualeguaychú city (the symbolic core of the rebellion). There were producers of soybean, corn, citrus fruits, rice… A wide variety of them. They settled by the road and wouldn’t allow any vehicle to pass. The eternal line of buses full of tourists coming back to Buenos Aires with people getting off of them and asking "what are we going to do?" wasn’t a good sign. And it finally wasn’t.

The first round increased the tension between truckers/tourists and farmers. Insults, disputes, all that in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the pampas without any trees and under the bright sun of the southern fall.

The military police intervened. And so did the president that day with her first words regarding the conflict. Her speech only added fuel to the fire. It raised protests not only in the provinces but also in Buenos Aires and many other cities. The “pot-banging” protests, popularized during Argentina’s economic crisis in 2001, got back to the streets. And, all of a sudden, a referee appeared between the two boxers: public opinion.

The farmers, rustic though not naive, understood that if they wanted to win this round they had to win the main battle and have people on their side. The government also realized having the referee on its side was the best choice…

New round, same old fight

From then on, the conflict became something else. The roadblocks were limited for export grain trucks only, while the rest of the traffic –with some interruptions- was allowed to pass. So only one sector was angry now: the truckers.

The government started a dialogue with the heads of the agricultural organizations, then stopped dialoguing, then went back to dialoguing, and so on. The farmers went back to the strikes over and over, sometimes pushing the Government’s buttons.

They held a rally in Rosario, province of Santa Fe, where 250,000 people gathered to support their position. And a smaller one was organized by the government at Plaza de Mayo, the historic meeting site for the people of Buenos Aires.

Time passed and we’re in June. The conflict was at its worst. It’d been at its worst since April. Argentinians were sick of it. Sick of listening to it on the radio, watching it on TV and reading about it on the newspapers. Sick of the fight, the permanent dispute, the warlike rhetoric and the Government speeches officially broadcast in every channel.

And the tension on the road came back reloaded, because a new boxer added to the fight: the "self-employed truckers”, which in terms of the conflict meant “grain-transporters who weren’t allowed to circulate, ergo work and earn a salary, so were blocking the road to stop traffic and thus get attention to reach a solution”.

Things heated up again in Gualeguaychú so I had to go back to that city. Three months later, the situation was very different. The initial respectful disagreement of the farmers had become an outrageous fury. In the middle of the fertile pampas you could smell anger.

Farmers and truckers were mixing their protests in such an informal and spontaneous manner that the result was anarchic. Sometimes six or seven people would vote in “assemblies” to decide for how many hours the road would be blocked. There were no defined leaders, nor did they want them to be defined. They’d just talk to the press using nicknames; they wouldn’t say where they were from or how their measures would continue. Everything depended absolutely on eventualities.

The farmers weren’t just the farmers anymore. There were many of them, and they’d take turns to go to the roadblock, spend the night by the fire (the winter can be really harsh in the middle of the pampas) and keep the protest alive.

But there were many other people as well. Like Gustavo, an accountant who’d anxiously and angrily wait for the Government’s speech, which was supposed to announce new decisions on the issue. While waiting he’d drink beer and relieve his anger at the only restaurant near the block, in the middle of nowhere.

“I have nothing to do with agriculture, but I’m here to complain about these people who are ruining us. We can’t go on like this, they have to resign”, he told me with little patience about the president and her government.

I tried to propose a milder position regarding the conflict by saying we needed to find a solution for it. But I quickly switched from conciliation to fear when all the young people there looked at me exuding anger against the slightest justification of the Government’s measure.

Then José, a more moderate nurse who worked at a nearby hospital, added to the conversation: “I don’t have agricultural businesses either, I have nothing to do with farmers. But I’m here to support them because we can’t go on like this”, he said more patiently though just as sick of it as everyone else.

From the ring to the circus

The president’s announcement that she’d send the resolution to the Congress to discuss and legitimate it cooled things off. There were no more strikes, nor truckers or farmers blocking roads. But the show had to go on, so it moved.

Plaza de los Dos Congresos (Square of the Two Congresses), in front of the legislative building, became the new arena. Supporters of the government set up giant tents. Not camping tents, but enormous tents that are usually used to hold, for example, a wedding. Though there wasn’t a happy couple in this case, but legislators to convince.

The farmers set up their own, the “green tent”, surrounded by signs with slogans in favor of their position and their struggle. A lot of debate. There were gauchos all over the place, who’d sneak at the trenches at the other end of the square: there were six (yes, six!) tents supporting the government. Later on an additional “red" leftish tent was set up to support the agricultural sector.

The camp had a little bit of everything: Workshops, mini-concerts, lectures by professors or small-time government officials who were tempted by all the media attention, which was a lot. And almost at the end, just what the situation needed to become completely ridiculous: a horseback parade on the streets near the square, just to add a bit more pampas to the dark concrete of the big city.

The conflict was taken to the Congress for a solution. First, the House of Representatives partially passed the president’s plan, but in one of the longest and most dramatic sessions in its history, the Senate rejected it after a very close vote, 36-36, when vice-president and leader of the Senate Julio Cobos cast the deciding vote against the tax. People are now calmer, although the government is having a hard time trying to assimilate its first big defeat.

The show is over, at least in its first tragicomic version. And the actors finally get off the stage. Let’s hope for the audience to remember the play, so boring and dramatic, to avoid seeing it again.