As a person that spends much of his life organizing and participating in demonstrations, I had an extraordinary experience today (Friday, September 2, 2022), taking part in the biggest demonstration I’ve ever seen.

We just happened to be in Buenos Aires in Argentina, in a family visit. Yesterday’s evening we were sitting at Adam’s apartment when, suddenly, his room-mate went in and informed us that some Neo-Nazi tried to shoot Argentina’s vice president and former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Soon we were watching videos of the assassination attempt on several TV channels and social media. Adam said there might be a general strike the next day, but then Argentina’s president spoke to the shocked and angry people and said the next day will be “a national holiday to allow Argentines time to express themselves”.

In the subte

The next day we had to find out what this holiday would mean. Schools were closed and we’ve seen only a few of the endless fleet of buses that are usually buzzing around in Buenos Aires. They said the subway (locally known as “subte”) would run a limited service, but it still seemed the safest bet.

The “A” line to the city center was crowded at its utmost capacity. I had to actually push the people standing near the doors to create some small space for my body. And I was also pushed in my turn into the compressed mass by the people that joined us at the next station.

Travelling in an overcrowded subway, pressed body to body against complete strangers, is not a pleasant experience, bringing to the extreme the alienation of our city life. But then something miraculous happened. Somebody at the other side of the car started singing, and soon most of the people on the car joined. It came out that we were all going to the same demonstration. We were not complete strangers anymore; we had our common cause and purpose.

How big it was?

I thought we were going to demonstrate in Plaza de Mayo – the traditional place for Argentina’s demonstrations in front of Casa Rosada (the Pink House), the president’s office. When Adam said we will go off the subte two stations before, I suspected that he wanted to avoid the crowd. But when we emerged from the subway station to the street, it was already full with thousands of people on both sides, all marching toward Plaza de Mayo.

Usually, when you try to evaluate how many people took part in a demonstration, you measure how much space it occupied. Did it fill the square? If there was a march, how far were the last marchers from its beginning? But today’s demonstration in the center of Buenos Aires didn’t fit into any of these measures. People filled the square from the morning, and filled the streets around it. When we arrived there in the afternoon there were still endless streams of thousands of people coming to join the protest.

When the street was blocked with demonstrators and it seemed we will never make it to Plaza de Mayo, we switched to a parallel street. It was also full of people marching with flags and slogans, singing, shouting, jumping and dancing.

I felt like the kid that was all his life playing football in the neighborhood, and now came for the first time to see a match in the top league.

Some background

I don’t know Spanish and don’t claim to have deep knowledge of Argentina’s class struggle and politics. And this post is not intended to try to summarize what (little) I’ve learnt about it from reading the news… I will just mention here some basic facts, to help the readers that need this background. If you’re familiar with Argentina’s basic politics, you may skip this section.

Argentina is a third world country, suffering from imperialist super-exploitation. It is still traumatized from a murderous CIA-sponsored military dictatorship that ruled and terrorized the population between 1976 and 1983, murdering tens of thousands of political and social activists.

Argentina’s politics is dominated by Peronism, a heterogeneous political current named after Juan Peron, who was Argentina’s elected president for 3 (non-consecutive) terms, until his death in 1974. Peron was widely supported by the working class and is identified with important social reforms, but he was not a socialist. In fact, Peron explained that improving the lot of the workers and poor masses was the best way to prevent a socialist revolution. There are many different Peronist political currents, both right and left.

The election of Nestor Kirchner as president in 2003, in the middle of deep economic crisis, and his replacement by his wife Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in 2007 – 2015, consolidated “Kirchnerism” as the main current of Peronism. Kirchnerism represents a more coherent “left-of-center” approach: staying within the capitalist political framework, but attempting to strengthen the local economy and improve the lot of the working class.

Argentina under the Kirchners saved itself from economic collapse by refusing to pay its external debt, much of which was accumulated by the military dictatorship buying weapons to murder Argentine’s people. In spite of attempts by the imperialist powers to punish Argentina, the Kirchners led it through a decade of fast economic growth and improving social conditions. But finally the tightening economic siege had its effects and the government lost popularity. In the 2015 elections Cristina could not stand again for presidency, after serving two terms. The Peronist candidate lost and Argentina entered a period of destructive neo-liberalism under right wing president Macri.

Before the next elections in 2019, the United State tried desperately to prevent the Peronists from coming back to power. The IMF gave Macri the biggest ever loan in its (the IMF’s) history – 57 billion dollars. This money disappeared without any visible benefit to Argentina’s economy. Cristina, still under constant attack from the capitalist media and elements of the “law enforcement” establishment, agreed to a role as vice president under more “moderate” (i.e. bluntly pro capitalist) President Alberto Fernandez (no family relation). They won the elections, but their government suffers the combined pressure of the IMF paralyzing debt, the economic devastation from the pandemic, the constant resistance of local capitalists and its own internal divisions.

If there was ever a “debt trap”, the IMF’s loan to Macri is probably one of the most damaging types of it. Under Macri, the IMF’s dollars were used to enable the local and international capitalists to draw their money from Argentina in hard currency, driving inflation up and depriving the country of much needed investment. When the new Peronist government came to power, it was paralyzed by the impossible demand to pay back the loan. As of now, after long negotiations, the government reached an agreement to repay the debt gradually, which forces it to perform an austerity program at the expense of the basic needs of the population. The left wing within the Peronist coalition objected to the agreement, but it was approved in parliament with the votes of the right wing opposition.

Thinking about Peronism

Once again, I must emphasis that I only bring my impressions as a stranger that doesn’t speak the local language, and not any studied analysis.

We were slowly navigating along the long columns of marchers that were stuck in the streets and avenues leading to Plaza De Mayo. Moving in the narrow human streams through the crowd, we made it all the way to the center of the Plaza. The crowd was very heterogeneous, bringing together workers, students and the capital’s professional classes.

Looking around I’ve seen many different group of demonstrators, many of them carried carefully prepared flags, slogans, pictures and shirts. I was impressed by the fact that I didn’t see any dominant groups or slogans. Of course, support of Cristina against the assassination attempt was a common theme, and pictures of Peron, Evita, Nestor and Cristina were held by many groups. But you could see also Che Guevara, Chavez, Evo Morales and others. The signs and slogans indicated the presence of trade unions, different political groupings and grass root movements. The slogans were mostly left wing, demanding social justice, speaking about struggle, revolution and people’s power.

I thought about the transformation that happened in many countries around the world, where in the twentieth century the struggle for social justice was dominated by few hegemonic political parties. Mostly it was the pro-imperialist Social Democracy and the Stalinist Communist Parties. In the twenty-first century we witnessed the fast decline of many of those traditional parties, and the emergence of new types of grass-root based wide coalitions, with no single ideology or organizational central control.

Could it be that the Peronist movement succeeds to stay the dominant force in Argentina’s Left because it was such a kind of loose heterogeneous coalition in the first place?

In recent Argentine history, shifts in the political balance were, several times, expressed in shifts in the internal balance within the Peronist movement. In the nineties of the previous century, the heydays of the unipolar world, Argentine was led by Peronist president Carlos Menem, who carried neo-liberal policy. After neo-liberalism led to economic meltdown, the Latin American “Pink Wave” leftward was expressed in Argentina by the shift inside Peronism and the emergence of Kirchnerism as the main tendency. After losing the elections to the anti-Peronist Macri in 2015, and still under pressure from imperialism and local capitalists, the Peronists succeeded to regain power in 2019 by an internal shift to the right, under current president Alberto Fernandez.

Now, that Latin America is experiencing its second Left Wave, with popular struggle bringing more leftist movements to power, from Mexico in the north through Colombia and until Chile, could there be another shift to the left inside the Peronist movement?

The political moment

We were speaking with friends in Argentina, trying to understand how they see the assassination attempt and the public response to it.

From our small sample of opinions, it seems that the strongest feeling was the shock and fear at the prospect that political violence might return to Argentina. The country is still traumatized by the terror of the military dictatorship. Many people came to the demonstration not out of support to Peronism, but in an act of solidarity against the attack.

But the attack was not an isolated act by a loony individual. The attacker, as was found later in the investigation, was part of some wider conspiracy. And it came on the background of endless incitement and hate speech. Now there is danger that the counter-measures would include new laws to limit the freedom of expression. Historic experience teaches us that such laws are likely to be used mostly against people that struggle against oppression and exploitation.

The attacks on Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, whether the assassination attempt, the capitalist media’s hate campaign or the endless efforts to criminalize her, are basically not directed against her personally, but are part of the capitalist class attack on the important social gains of the Argentine people.

Now Argentina is faced with a renewed economic crisis. The IMF imposed austerity and the resurgent capitalist class are eroding living standards and social rights. If the Peronist government continues its retreat in front of the international and local rightist pressure, its working class and popular base would be farther frustrated and alienated, and it is likely to be defeated in the election next year. Some of the people we talked with in and around the demonstration expressed the hope that by standing up to the assassination attempt, the leftist forces within and outside the Peronist movement will regroup for a renewed struggle for social justice.

A comment about the BBC

After taking part in a demonstration, I surf the web to see what was written about it in the press. It is a good way to “calibrate” my view of the media, to expose bias and learn from it how to regard reports about events that I couldn’t view in person.

Writing about the assassination attempt, the BBC described Cristina’s supporters, who prevented the attacker from shooting her, as “a mob”!

Nobody knows exactly how many people took part in the solidarity demonstration. I heard different estimations, ranging from the hundreds of thousands to more than a million people. But the BBC reported about it in a few lines, saying only “thousands”…

So far as objective reporting is concerned…