An American Lion

Argentine Protesters Crying Out for a Riot Control Vehicle

I don’t profess to know a whole lot about Argentina. The few times I have been there were over thirty years ago. I think I might have gone there in 1982. I cannot recall. I remember that the food wasn’t that great and the Artgentine demand for riot control vehicles was insatiable. Rogers Defence Industries sold them at least 200 riot control vehicles, and we weren’t even in the top five in suppliers for their government.

I do know one thing—if you make it your life’s work to be a picketing striker, you’re not really accomplishing that much:

In Argentina, a street demonstration is more than a political act – it’s a profession.

Ever since the country’s economic crisis of the late 1990s, unemployed workers have taken advantage of their free time to form organizations to demand the return of their jobs – usually in the form of street blockades. The well-organized and often hierarchal groups can act as pseudo-employers, sometimes even tapping the laid-off workers’ welfare payments to fund their protest activities and logistics.

Besides serving as a common excuse for tardiness to work, the piqueteros (picketers) have grown to become a well-known and potent force in Argentine politics, sometimes used or co-opted by parties or other political movements.

But any publicity gained by piquetero roadblocks is often outweighed by public backlash from frustrated motorists. Violence can erupt on either side, as in the case of an enraged trucker arrested two years ago for trying to run over a demonstrator.

Fueled by a labor dispute at a local Kraft Foods factory, more than 100 street blockades occurred in September, the most in a month since 1997. Piquetero tactics reached a new level in early November, as several hundred people set up tents and camped out – in the middle of the largest avenue in the capital. Chaos ensued.

We have an easily co-opted and very vocal advocacy group here in this country, and they’re called bloggers. Bloggers don’t brave the truncheons and the pepper spray—they brave the Google ads and the sores that come from sitting on their dead asses all day long. They react and over-react, gin up phony outrage and suppress memories of days gone by. They ignore their own hypocrisy, wear hip clothes and T-shirts with crumbs and cuss words on them, and say snarky things as if they’re the first to have said them. They take to their blogs when needed, writing when howling drunk on their own importance and they never hesitate when berating someone who doesn’t think exactly the way they do.

It’s really a charming life we have in this country now.