Popular Upheaval and Capitalist Transformation in Argentina

In March 1997, as summer was ending, Argentina exploded in a bout of social conflict and popular upheaval that was unexpected to the average observer and lasted until October. Throughout those six months there were riots in townships such as Cutral Co and Plaza Huincul in Patagonia, Tartagal and Jujuy in the Northwest, and La Plata and Buenos Aires on the coast. National highways were blockaded by pickets, students demonstrated and confronted the police, workers and farmers went on strike, and the Colla community in Salta besieged a huge tract of land bought by a U.S. corporation. Incredibly, while all of this was going on, the flow of foreign capital into Argentina was at a record high, and President Carlos Menem spent more time traveling than dealing with social unrest. It was emblematic that, visiting Argentina in October 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton praised the Menem administration while, outside, police went on a rampage beating up demonstrators and onlookers alike. The contradiction is too flagrant to be ignored. Socially Argentina has all the characteristics of an unsafe haven for any kind of investment (whether productive or speculative), and yet it continues to grow. In a transnationalized world, local or even regional social upheaval seems to have little impact on government and investment policy. However, the uprisings such as those of Cutral Co and Tartagal had an effect on the popular imagination and on the left, which felt reinvigorated. Each new conflict helped to set off others. Innovations in modes of struggle spread from one to the next, suggesting both informal networks of communication and a willingness to confront neoconservative state policies. Over the past decade social scientists and political analysts have suggested that Argentina's working classes had undergone a process of fragmentation as a result of both the 1976-1983 dictatorship and the neoconservative policies of the Menem government. In addition, social disorganization had