Dear Log,
In my reading, I am finding Argentina quite fascinating and worrisome, because I don't understand what happened there to screw it all up; things were looking okay in the 90s, and then FOOM. The basic thing that we ask of our economies is that they note implode and make everyone starve and die. Really.
«Though such cells never posed a serious threat to national security, the Argentinian army used a series of guerrilla attacks on military and corporate targets as an excuse to declare an all-out campaign against the left - the generals called the action "a war on terror", but the name that has stuck ever since has been "the Dirty War".Between 1976 and 1983, Argentina was ruled by a twisted military regime that combined fundamentalist Catholic social control with fundamentalist free-market economics; it banned rock music while it raked in billions of dollars-worth of loans and investment from foreign banks and multinational corporations. The generals saw it as their mission to cleanse Marxist and other "subversive" thought from every school, workplace, church and neighbourhood. At the same time, they also saw it as their right to profit personally from this crusade, not only skimming from public coffers but also stealing private houses, possessions and even children from the people they tortured and killed (the state was eventually forced to pay compensation to many of the victims' families).
[...]Walsh understood that the generals were not waging a war "on terror" but a war on any barrier to the accumulation of wealth by foreign investors and their local beneficiaries. He is proved more prescient every day. Civil trials continue to unearth fresh evidence that foreign corporations collaborated closely with the junta in its extermination of the union movement in the 1970s. For example, last December a federal prosecutor filed a criminal complaint against Ford Argentina (a subsidiary of Ford), alleging that the company had inside one of its factory compounds a military detention centre where union organisers were taken.
[...]The generals understood that the true obstacle to complete social control was not leftist rebels, but the very presence of tight-knit communities and civil society. Which is why they set out to "disappear" the public sphere itself.
In recent months, 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.»
