Revisiting the Argentine Economic Crisis

In 2001, Argentina faced its worst economic crisis in more than a century. After some $20 billion left the country and bank deposits were frozen, rioting groups of unemployed workers took to the streets. In the following recession, more than half of all Argentines dropped below the national poverty line. In 2002, income per head was 22% below its level of 1998. Unemployment soared, peaking at 18 percent.

The roots of the crisis are complicated, dating back to debt from wars and misguided infrastructure loans from the days of the military dictatorship, and the state’s bailing out of corporate loans.

The Economist described the reality of the crash:

Venture out of those packed restaurants at night, and the streets and parks of Buenos Aires, so elegant in the daytime, have been taken over by an army of the poor, picking over the city’s rubbish or sleeping rough.

The crisis brought factories across the country to a standstill, and thousands of workers lost their jobs.

In the documentary filmThe Take, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis followed one grop of laid off workers in their process of taking control and cooperatively managing the plant where they used to work. Through a process of ‘expropriation,’ after a company enters bankruptcy, workers can establish a cooperative and ask a judge to give them control of a factory.

Naomi Klein described the efforts of the workers:

The “fabricas tomadas” (literally, “taken factories”) have begun to network among themselves and are beginning to plan an informal “solidarity economy”: garment workers from an occupied factory, for example, sew sheets for an occupied health clinic; a supermarket in Rosario, turned into a workers’ cooperative, sells pasta from an occupied pasta factory; occupied bakeries are building ovens with tiles from an occupied ceramic plant. “I feel like the dictatorship is finally ending,” one asamblista told me when I first arrived in Buenos Aires. “It’s like I’ve been locked in my house for 25 years and now I am finally outside.”

The particular group of workers that the film follows successful took control of their factory. Unemployed workers took other approaches to sustaining themselves, including establishing community gardens, which eventually evolved into a government-run urban agriculture program. Some 7,000 people who were out of work before entering the program have joined forces to clear the land, plant and harvest vegetables, and sell their produce in street market stalls.

The case of Argentina and the effects of the economic downturn illustrates the fragile nature of economic systems; how many other governments out there are poised on the edge of collapse, one failed loan away from economic chaos? The cases of worker-controlled factories and reestablishment of community in times of crisis hint at alternatives to our current way of running things. As mentioned in a previous undergraduate study abroad program. I’m curious to see how things have changed since the crisis: economically, culturally, and in the physical landscape, what was the impact of the economic crisis on the Argentine landscape? I’ll be visiting one of the fabricas tomadas in Buenos Aires, so stay tuned.

For a more complete summary of the crisis, see the Wikipedia article. BBC news also has a pretty basic Q & A.

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