The different faces that show the piqueteros

Groups under a same name, but with opposite objectives

It is time was not a route cut, but the evacuation of a bridge that unites the Federal Capital with Great Buenos Aires. The result of the violence is same, the dead ones and hurt.

Like in Cutral-Có in 1997 or, more here in the time, Mosconi. The events of the 20 of December were another thing and their protagonists did not enlist themselves in the generic definition that changed the form of protest in Argentina: the piqueteros.

Under that denomination they are grouped who found in the transit interruption the form to be made notice, to establish some type of relation with the power. And before crossing his internal lines, with few meeting points beyond the modality of the reclamation, it will serve to establish his general characteristics.

After the outbreak in Cutral-Có, the Current Clasista and Combativa decided to organize to the groups of unemployed people with an idea: to prop up those spontaneous reactions in the towns with a structure that allowed its continuity.

The intention was that the return did not finish to the act in a fury explosion later and to just like generated that outbreak. The leaders of the CCC were of first in visualizing that the unemployed people would be the detonating of fight in the next years.

Then, they thought how to make specific a strike with those who does not work. They looked for where to strike to the productive system that did not contain them and found the route. He did not interest to block the people passage, but of merchandises, with which, they speculated, they would force to make negotiations. For that reason they appear the poles.

From 1997 they follow one another courteous of route, that specially affects the rear area. The city was far from that movement that was exotic and few civil employees dedicated themselves to study it. Carlos "the Dog" Santillán visualized too much far in Jujuy like closest touching the heart of the power with his CCC. Until in the middle of 2000, after the social explosion in Tartagal-Mosconi, the pole in the Slaughter appears in society, and, consequently, with greater mediatic repercussion. The piqueteros began to grow.

In 2001 the negotiations between the piqueteros leaders, Juan Carlos Alderete and Luis D´Elía, and the government of Fernando of the Rúa was very hard, with Patricia Bullrich as registered of the group with less intentions to seat them in a same table with civil employees. There they gave the last jump when trying that all the small groupings that gained the routes came together in a unique movement.

It arrived the first piquetera assembly and the coordination from cuts of route for a same moment in all the country. Several times tried, but they showed its ceiling of 20,000 demonstrators reunited in a hundred of poles. The union lasted little, almost died at the same moment in which it was tried.

The referring ones of the Slaughter wanted to approach the CGT of Hugo Moyano, because after all the CCC it is a union federation. Impossible that they followed the groupings that respond to the left parties, like the Working Pole (Started off Working) or the Territorial Movement of Liberation (Started off Communist). They began then to walk separated, but mote of piqueteros reunited them in the popular image.

The call Block Piquetero Nacional grouped the left unemployed people. And its position was hardest. Alderete and D´Elía never accepted that poles without allowing alternative ways settled. They know that a situation therefore moves away them of the people who Integra its movements and does not leave the way to a confrontation with the security forces open. The Block Piquetero Nacional made its axis in that modality of total cut. And every time more sticks and hoods in their marches were seen. Their members accuse the CCC to announce the Argentinazo and to lack in the December events.

Today the exigencies in the poles very are varied, with greater political tendency. In his first times of action, the piqueteros made like fundamental reclamation the order by social plans. Each conquest in the routes allowed an increase in the number of its members. Also it allowed to fortify his structures, since of a way or another one, part of those subsidies had to be given for the collective financing.

How they obtain to its adherents? With a work of base in establishments. The CCC, by case, make a census of the chosen place and visualize the necessities. Later an assembly organizes and a cut of route or a food order is decided. The participation in those acts appears in a puntaje notebook. And the obtained thing is distributed between first in that list of activity. Those beneficiaries happen at the end of the list and the circle continues.

In both grouping-mother it is said that its system of distribution of the obtained thing in a cut (eaten, social clothes or plans) is against the system of political leaders, although also have forms to maintain adherents captive. The certain thing is that the appearance of the piqueteros organized in the political scene produced changes in the form of the social protest. But also violence.