No Peace Without a Fight
by
Naomi Klein
Dissident Voice
March 14, 2003
On a muddy piece of squatted
land in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Florencia Vespignani is planning her
upcoming tour of the United States, where she will be speaking with students
and activists about Argentina's resistance movements.
"I'm a bit
scared," she confesses.
"Of the war?" I
ask.
"No. Of the plane. We
have wars here all the time."
Vespignani, a 33-year-old
mother and community organizer, is a leader in the Movimiento de Trabajadores
Desocupados (MTD), one of dozens of organizations of unemployed workers, known
as piqueteros, that have emerged out of the wreckage of Argentina's economy.
When Vespignani describes
life as war, it is not a metaphor. In a country where more than half the people
live in poverty and twenty-seven children die of hunger each day, she has
learned that to stay alive, you have to go to the streets and fight--for every
piece of bread, for every student's pencil, for every night's rest.
From the perspective of the
International Monetary Fund, the piqueteros are the collateral damage of
neoliberalism--a fluke explosion that happened when rapid-fire privatization
was mixed with "shock" austerity. In the mid-1990s, hundreds of
thousands of Argentines suddenly found themselves without paychecks, welfare
checks or pensions. Rather than disappearing quietly into the scavenged
shantytowns that surround Buenos Aires, they organized themselves into militant
neighborhood-based unions. Highways and bridges were blocked until the
government coughed up unemployment benefits; abandoned land was squatted on to
build homes, farms and soup kitchens; a hundred closed factories were taken
over by their employees and put back to work. Direct action became the
alternative to theft and death.
But that's not why
Vespignani describes life in Argentina as a war. The war is what happens next,
after she and her neighbors dare to survive: the visits by armed thugs, the
brutal evictions from squatted land and occupied factories, the assassinations
of activists by police, the portrayal of piqueteros as menacing terrorists.
Last month Buenos Aires police used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear sixty
families out of an abandoned building near the trendy Plaza Dorrego. It was the
most severe repression in the city since two young leaders of the MTD were
killed by police during a road blockade last June.
The police said they were
concerned about the safety of the squat, but many people here think the violent
eviction was simply part of the latest economic adjustment being cooked up at
the Sheraton Hotel, where IMF delegations have been meeting with bankers and
candidates in the upcoming presidential election for weeks now. The IMF hopes
to assess whether Argentina can be trusted with new loans: whether it will pay
off foreign debts while continuing to cut social spending. But there is another
criterion, left unspoken, that presidential aspirants must meet to merit
foreign capital: They must show that they are willing to use force to control
those sectors hurt by such agreements. Squatters, piqueteros--even the
cartoneros, the armies of scavengers who comb through garbage looking for
cardboard to sell--are under siege. According to the former owner of the city's
largest privatized garbage company, now running for mayor on a platform of
"Let's Take Back Buenos Aires," garbage is private property and the
cartoneros are "thieves."
In short, the desperate
quest of millions of Argentines to stay alive is a threat to the economy's
recovery and must be stopped.
John Berger recently wrote,
"Without money each daily human need becomes a pain." In Argentina,
any attempt to alleviate that pain is becoming a crime. That is the war
Florencia is talking about, and as she travels across the United States, she
will have the difficult task of trying to make that case to activists who are
almost exclusively focused on ending a different kind of war, one in which the
strategy is "shock and awe," not daily brutality and mass
marginalization.
Standing amid the torn-up
cobblestones outside the squat on the night the sixty families were evicted,
with tear gas still hanging in the air and dozens of people in jail, I found
myself thinking about the calls for "peace" coming from Europe and
North America. The antiwar message resonates forcefully here, and tens of
thousands participated in the global day of action on February 15. But peace?
What does peace mean in a country where the right that most needs defending is
the right to fight?
My friends in South Africa
tell me that the situation there is much the same: Families evicted from
miserable shantytowns from Soweto to the Cape Flats, police and private
security using bullets and tear gas to force people from their homes, and, last
month, the suspicious murder of Emily Nengolo, a 61-year-old activist fighting
water privatization. Instead of devoting their energy to securing food, jobs
and land, social movements around the world are being forced to spend their
time fighting the low-level war against their own criminalization.
The great irony is that
these movements are actually waging the real war on terrorism--not with law and
order but by providing alternatives to the fundamentalist tendencies that exist
wherever there is true desperation. They are developing tactics that allow some
of the most marginal people on earth to meet their own needs without using
terror--by blockading roads, squatting in buildings, occupying land and
resisting displacement.
February 15 was more than a
demonstration--it was a promise to build a truly international antiwar
movement. If that is going to happen, North Americans and Europeans will have
to confront the war on all its fronts: to oppose an attack on Iraq and reject
the branding of social movements as terrorist. The use of force to control
Iraq's resources is only an extreme version of the force used to keep markets
open and debt payments flowing in countries like Argentina and South Africa.
And in places where daily life is like war, the people who are militantly
confronting this brutality are the peace activists.
Because we all want peace.
But let's remember, it won't come without a fight.
Naomi
Klein is
a leading anti-sweatshop activist, and author of Fences and Windows:
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate? (Picador,
2002) and No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Picador, 2000).
Visit the No Logo website: www.nologo.org