Argentinian pensioners, workers, and football fans face brutal repression

The Organización Comunista Militante, the Revolutionary Communist International in Argentina, repudiates and condemns the disproportionate and cowardly violence committed by the Federal Police and the Police of the City of Buenos Aires against the march of pensioners and football fans on Wednesday 12 March.

[Originally published in Spanish at argentinamilitante.org]

The weekly marches of pensioners, who have been hit hardest by Milei’s austerity, have been a show of determination against the regime. They are becoming a reference point for the movement, in stark contrast to the collaboration and negotiation by the bureaucracies of the Peronist trade unions and political parties.

Austerity against pensioners

The pensioners have been gathering every week to protest the removal of essential medicines from being covered by public insurance for retirees, and the lowering of pensions to levels of destitution for those on the lowest tiers. The lowest pension is only 280,000 pesos, which, with a bonus of 70,000 pesos, equals 350,000 pesos or US$285 monthly. 7 out of 10 pensioners receive this pittance.

On 23 March, Milei is set to definitively remove the pension moratorium, which allowed workers to receive a pension upon reaching retirement age even without having completed 30 years of contributions. This was needed by workers who had worked all their lives but who were not employed in the formal economy and therefore didn’t receive labour protections, vacations, or pension contributions. It was also used by housewives. Around 9 of every 10 retired women receiving a pension are doing so through this moratorium.

Incredibly, the pensioners, many in their 70s and 80s, have persisted in protesting every Wednesday in front of the national congress despite continually being shoved, beaten and pepper sprayed by the police. All this as the government tries to stamp out their protests and seal their austerity policies through brute force.

Football fans and workers join the struggle

In the march on Wednesday 5 March, the pensioners were accompanied by fans from Chacarita Juniors, who joined the protest after having seen a 75 year old supporter of the club attacked by the police at the previous week’s rally. Fans from clubs across Buenos Aires and the whole of Argentina pledged to support the marches this week, after witnessing the police violence towards the fans of Chacarita.

The fans who have joined the struggle against the attacks on pensioners and Milei’s austerity are rank-and-file supporters of their clubs, workers guided by a class instinct of solidarity with the pensioners. They are the living spirit of Diego Maradona’s famous words during Menem’s brutal attacks on pensioners in 1992: “Yo defiendo a los jubilados, cómo no los voy a defender. Tenemos que ser muy cagones para no defender a los jubilados. A muerte estoy con los jubilados” (“I defend the pensioners, how could I not? We would really have to be chickens not to defend them. I’m with the pensioners to the death.”)

The phenomenon of workers entering the political struggle through football clubs indicates the crisis of leadership in the organisations of the working class. There is a desire to put up serious resistance to Milei in the ranks of the working class, who are tired of austerity and attacks on their living conditions. But this is not given a political expression by trade union or Peronist political leaders, who are restraining the masses from entering the struggle and thereby making the system governable for Milei.

In these conditions, struggles seem to appear spontaneously, through self-convened assemblies in workplaces and neighbourhoods, or even through sporting associations, since they can’t be expressed through the traditional organisations of the labour movement.

A column of workers from the Morvillo printing plant – who are occupying the factory in defence of their jobs after the bosses declared bankruptcy and tried to close the plant – began protesting in front of the Argentine Industrial Union and moved from there to Congress, where they joined the crowd in support of the retirees.

Police brutality

As the march was going to be supported by football fans, there was a dedicated campaign in the media to demonise them as barras bravas (groups of football ultras), with connotations of criminality and hooliganism. The security minister Patricia Bulrich threatened repression and arrests long before the march started.

The violence against the protesters was a premeditated manoeuvre to try and cut across a movement which is gaining steam. The police started attacking demonstrators before most workers had finished work in an attempt to scare them away from joining the ranks of the protest.

There is no dirty trick in the book that the police didn’t try. There are reports of infiltrators throwing stones to provoke repression. Fake flyers advocating disorder and the provocations were distributed, carrying the name of the FIT-U, the coalition of left parties. An image of this fake flier was published by the president’s spokesman, Manuel Adorni, on X.

A video shows police deliberately leaving a pistol on the ground to be grabbed by protesters. Another shows that a police patrol car, which was set alight, had been left unattended and with its doors open as a provocation. The police used batons and tear gas indiscriminately and aimed rubber bullets at protesters’ eyes to clear the Plaza de Congreso.

Over a hundred protesters were chased and detained at random, dozens were injured, and representatives of organisations supporting the protests were followed to their offices and intimidated by armoured police. In one of the most serious incidents, a reporter, Pablo Grillo, had a tear gas canister fired directly at his head and is now fighting for his life in hospital as a result of his injuries.

This repression dispersed demonstrators through the streets around the centre of Buenos Aires until they regrouped in the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace, where they continued to be met with repression.

That night, workers joined in spontaneous cacerolazos (the banging of pots and pans in protest) in the Plaza de Mayo and throughout the city to denounce the police violence. Among their chants was the slogan of the Argentinazo of 2001, “que se vayan todos” (“Kick them all out!”). Protests and conflicts between police and protesters for control of the streets lasted for hours.

The violence against the protesters was a premeditated manoeuvre to try and cut across a movement which is gaining steam / Image: mframirezs1973, Twitter

Kick them all out!

The behaviour of the police forces makes a mockery of the ‘law and order’ that Bullrich and Milei claim to defend. What it reveals is the true purpose of the police and the state in capitalist society: the defence of the domination of the capitalist minority over the great majority of the workers and poor.

The panicky response of the government reveals not their strength but rather their weakness before a movement of the working class, which isn’t under the control of the bureaucracies of the trade unions or political parties and can’t be easily diffused into safe channels.

The movement must not be intimidated by this repression into lowering its banners. It must redouble its efforts and organisation, in self-convened assemblies, in rank-and-file union committees, and neighbourhood assemblies. Austerity and state repression can be beaten by the weapons of the working class: strikes, marches, factory occupations, and organising committees.

This protest comes in the context of increasing mobilisation against Milei’s government. It comes less than a week after a historically large march for International Working Women’s Day, which took on the character of a political protest against Milei’s attacks on working women and the working class generally.

24 March is the annual Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice, a commemoration of the crimes of the last civil-clerical-military dictatorship. It is normally the most massive day of protest of the year. This year, it will undoubtedly be larger than normal, as many more workers join in to express their anger and fatigue with this government.

Milei claims to have solved Argentina’s economic crisis and to have fixed the problem of inflation. In reality, he has created an unstable equilibrium, paid for with the suffering of the working class and by burning through dollar reserves. The lowering of inflation that he boasts about is a product of a massive drop in consumer spending as the working class suffers the effects of austerity, as well as intensive manipulation of foreign exchange rates, as Milei spends the central bank’s reserves to keep the value of the peso artificially high. Milei compensates the big capitalists for a loss of sales with easy profits speculating on government debt through the ‘carry-trade’, as well as labour counter-reforms to lower wages and increase workers’ precarity. He has built a house of cards which a shock could send tumbling down.

As communists, we will always defend the pensioners, our grandparents and our parents, in their fight for dignified conditions of life in their old age. We will fight until the end for a communist future, which is the only one which can guarantee dignified retirement for all, free from the vices of poverty and abandonment that plague the elderly in capitalist society.

Down with the repression!

Justice for Pablo Grillo!

No to the termination of the pension moratorium!

For an emergency increase of pensions to cover the cost of living!

Kick them all out!

For a workers’ government!