NEW YORK - In previous articles for Seeing Red I have surveyed in detail the economic, social, and political crisis in Argentina, summed up as an unfolding pre-revolutionary situation absent a credible, mass-based, revolutionary proletarian leadership.

Subsequent months have not changed this essential reality.

The Peronist regime of Eduardo Duhalde, lacking popular support and the legitimacy of a bourgeois-democratic election, has remained in nominal power through day-to-day inertia. After some initial populist bombast, Duhalde and his string of economy ministers got down to the business of steady capitulation to the ever-escalating demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Duhalde’s government pegs its political survival entirely on concluding an abject deal with the IMF (which fronts for Washington and the European Union) that would slash state budgets and the few remaining paltry relief measures, increase unemployment dramatically up from its current 20-25 per cent, and resume interest payments on the $150 billion foreign debt. The 50 per cent of Argentines officially living in poverty, now growing at the rate of 15,000 a day, is clearly insufficient for the IMF. In exchange, the IMF would "loan" (draw on an existing "credit line") the Argentine capitalist state new billions to resume interest payments on the permanently outstanding billions and billions.

Delinked from the U.S. dollar, the Argentine peso has lost 75 per cent of its "value," that is its purchasing power in dollars. The Argentine economy has contracted 16.4 per cent so far in 2002. Prices for consumer goods were up 30 per cent in the first quarter of the year. On 15 July, the IMF deferred a due interest payment of $985 million for one year, the second consecutive deferral, avoiding a formal default between Argentina and the imperialist agency. A total of $5 billion in interest payments is due in the next five months, $2.9 billion in September. Of course, paying any of this as malnutrition is spreading in the country, would unleash further mass outrage. The demand to cancel the debt and throw out the IMF has become popular and central in street protests.

So far a deal has not been cut, and mass protests have continued unabated. Duhalde finally conceded his political impotency and lame-duck status by decreeing that presidential and perhaps legislative election will be moved up six months to March 2003. It is doubtful that he will make it even to that shortened finish line for his pathetic interlude in power.

Duhalde is a spent force in inevitable demise. His only base of support had been within the pro-Peronist trade-union bureaucracy, and that has largely washed away. He is down to 8 per cent approval in bourgeois opinion polls.

Nothing has been resolved in Argentina. The political equilibrium between the leaderless mass radicalization and protests; the demoralized and crisis-ridden bourgeois central state apparatus (embodied in the military and police commands); and the executive and parliamentary government (the Duhalde presidency, the Congress, and the bourgeois Peronist and Radical parties) remains a shaky, high-wire act.

There is a growing breakdown in the ruling-class consensus and the stability of previously-accepted juridical norms imposed following the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1983. This was sharply highlighted by the arrest of General Leopoldo Galtieri, the last ruler of the bloody military regime, in early July after a court ruling that essentially cast aside the neoliberal Carlos Menem regime's amnesty for military murderers and torturers. Galtieri’s arrest, seen as a victory by the legendary fighters of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo --the mothers and grandmothers of young people "disappeared" by the death squads of the military dictatorship, who have led the fight for human and democratic rights in Argentina-- is likely to open up the floodgates and lead to a wave of arrests which will further weaken the army and its ability to credibly crush the resurgent mass movements any time soon.

The growing weakness of the repressive bodies of the bourgeois state was also underlined by the utter failure of the Duhalde regime’s attempt to employ stepped-up police repression to contain and push back the permanent, widespread protests and demonstrations that have swept the country since the ouster of former president Fernando de la Rua and his hated Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo on December 19-20, 2001. Hoping to drive a wedge between various groups and between working-class and middle-class protests, Duhalde and his Interior Minister had begun threatening to prevent highway blockades and other militant actions which "threaten public order." Such blockades by unemployed workers organizations and their supporters have been a continuous feature of the resurgent social movement in Argentina, and indeed a tactic employed throughout Latin America in anti-neoliberal protests by workers, peasants, and indigenous peoples for several years.

On 26 June a demonstration and peaceful highway blockade was viciously attacked by riot police, with two protesters murdered in cold blood by police bullets. As has been the pattern in Argentina for the whole past period of proletarian and popular upsurge, assaults by the police have not cowed protesters, but spurred counterattacks. According to a Reuters dispatch, the workers regrouped and "fought pitched battles with police in the worst riots since an elected government was toppled in December."

At first the police denied they used live ammunition, saying demonstrators had been armed and killed their fellow activists while firing at police. This big-lie campaign collapsed when photographs emerged of police dragging off and shooting both workers dead.

A broad wave of indignation and fresh protests followed and Duhalde was forced to issue statements strongly attacking the same police he had unleashed against the protesting working people. The entire fiasco pushed Duhalde to announce the new pushed-up election date.

Meanwhile the "Argentine contagion" --economic collapse-- threatens to spread to Brazil and Uruguay.

To be continued......

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