Fw: ARGENTINA: UNEMPLOYED WORKERS FIGHT PRIVATIZATION, COPS

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg at tin.it>]

 -------------------------
 Via Workers World News Service
 Reprinted from the July 19, 2001
 issue of Workers World newspaper
 -------------------------
 
 ARGENTINA: UNEMPLOYED WORKERS FIGHT PRIVATIZATION, COPS
 
 By Gery Armsby
 
 For over two weeks some 200 unemployed workers have occupied
 the main plaza of General Mosconi--an oil-producing town in
 the Salta province of northeast Argentina.
 
 They have set up improvised shelters, kitchens and
 facilities and refuse to leave until their demands for an
 end to repression and solution of economic problems gripping
 the province are met. Mosconi's population of 20,000 faces a
 crushing unemployment rate of 40 percent and rising.
 
 Heightened repression has attempted to halt a series of
 militant picket lines and roadblocks held since early June
 by employees of an oil refinery. They lost their jobs when
 the formerly state-owned facility was privatized and
 acquired by Repsol, an oil company based in Spain. Repsol-
 YPF outsources management of the Mosconi operations to a
 mishmash of small firms. Other local people who are also out
 of work in Argentina's devastating unemployment crisis
 joined the picket lines, shutting down a major highway for
 prolonged periods.
 
 The encampment was organized after an incident in which
 federal border police fired rubber bullets, then live
 ammunition into a crowd of protesters June 17, seriously
 wounding dozens of people and killing one man. Another teen-
 aged protester was so overcome by tear gas that he collapsed
 and later died. Over 40 were arrested and nine are still
 being held in jail.
 
 Police reported switching to real bullets based on rumors
 that some demonstrators were armed.
 
 On June 19, police positioned snipers and riot-gear-clad
 storm troopers along the route of a burial march honoring
 the fallen comrades. Through threats, intimidation and
 unprovoked attacks on the funeral procession, they tried to
 disrupt the people's political memorial ceremony.
 
 In response, a detachment from the march broke away to fight
 off the cops with stones, slingshots and bottles. Some
 reports tell of police casualties from gunfire.
 Subsequently, border security forces sealed off and
 blockaded the town.
 
 In the ensuing unrest, a building was set on fire and the
 blaze spread precariously toward the refinery. A police
 battalion was dispatched to "protect the refinery from the
 protesters at all costs."
 
 Unions, student groups and left organizations marched in
 Buenos Aires June 21 in solidarity with the encampment in
 central Mosconi. The march included participation from the
 CTERA teachers' union and Congress of Argentine Workers
 (CTU). They demanded the government end its brutality
 against the protesters, pull out border police from the
 Salta province, and hear the just demands of the unemployed
 workers there.
 
 Inspired by protesters in the "Battle of Mosconi,"
 unemployed workers elsewhere in Argentina have blocked roads
 outside Buenos Aires, raising similar demands that
 Argentina's President Fernando de la Rua address the
 economic crisis by halting privatization and reversing anti-
 work labor reforms.