Argentina:
Drop the Charges Against Polo Obrero,
Stop the Persecution of the Piquetero Movement

Eduardo Belliboni (center), main leader of Polo Obrero and target of the judicial attack, in the 20 December 2023 march against anti-worker measures of the Milei government.   (Photo: Polo Obrero)

BUENOS AIRES – Ultra-rightist Argentine president Javier Milei’s “shock” program of brutal austerity, massive cutbacks, layoffs and wholesale privatizations¹ has gone together with criminalizing protest and escalating repression against the left and broader social movements. Shortly after his inauguration, on December 20 the new regime unleashed emboldened police against leftist protesters and issued an “anti-picket protocol,” under which anyone who participates in blocking streets, including by marching, would lose their social benefits.² Then on the day that Milei’s budget was approved by a pliant Senate, June 12, dozens of those protesting outside Congress were arrested. And on September 11, as demonstrators gathered to protest Milei’s veto of a bill raising retirement benefits, the police beat protesters, pepper-sprayed a 10-year-old girl and opened fire on the crowd with rubber bullets.

This campaign to “retake” the streets from protesters has been accompanied by a judicial offensive targeting above all organizations of the left. This included a number of threats to make protesters pay the cost of policing protests. The most prominent recent offensive has been an indictment of leaders of the Polo Obrero (Workers Pole), the mass unemployed organization of the Partido Obrero (PO – Workers Party). The “piquetero” organizations like Polo Obrero are a unique Argentine phenomenon going back to the 1990s as thousands of unemployed workers blocked highways. They mushroomed after the severe economic and political crisis of 2001, the Argentinazo, as the successive governments, both Peronist³ and conservative, sought to buy social calm by funneling state and federal welfare benefits through the piquetero organizations, which then distributed them through clientelist networks.

As these social plans were regularly pared back, there have been frequent protests in Buenos Aires seeking to pressure the government and compete for limited resources. Getting the piqueteros off the streets and cutting away their base of support has been a major political goal of Milei’s government. This resulted in the indictment on July 29 of 15 members of the Polo Obrero, headed by its main leader Eduardo Belliboni, and two of the dissident Peronist Barrios de Pie movement, all accused of fraudulent administration of government funds and supposed “extortion” of unemployed workers, allegedly requiring them to attend piquetero demonstrations. On September 24, there will be a court hearing on an appeal by Polo Obrero to present evidence refuting the charges presented by Judge Sebastián Casanello. In conjunction with this, the day before (September 23), international protests have been called in a number of countries.

The League for the Fourth International will be participating in the protests in Mexico, the United States (Oakland) and Italy, demanding: Drop the charges against the Polo Obrero! Stop the persecution of the piquetero movement!

The case against the Polo Obrero, accused among other things of using funds to support Partido Obrero election campaigns, has been full of abuses. In a June 3 raid of the Polo Obrero civic association offices, the police disconnected security cameras so there would be no record of their marauding. The claims of requiring Polo Obrero members to attend demonstrations or lose their benefits are based on testimony of unnamed “repentant” members, but the testimony was not presented in the indictment so that it could be examined or refuted. The judge refused to allow PO to present evidence of 43 soup kitchens and unemployed centers it had set up in 18 provinces, or of the publications printed and equipment acquired (with government approval) with the funds. Meanwhile, the “Ministry of Human Capital” has been withholding food from the soup kitchens (ollas populares), keeping it locked in sheds until the sell-by date almost runs out.

The regime’s politically motivated attack made PO’s Belliboni a target from the beginning, as the leading voice of the sector of the piquetero movement which has most sharply protested against the government. At a July 30 press conference where he presented publications and bills for material purchased, refuting the charges against the Polo, Belliboni said “they are treating us as enemies.” In fact, he went on, “we are enemies of the government” of Milei which “is going to lead the country to a disaster as we have never seen before, even worse than in the 90s.”⁴ Cases of corruption and clientelism can surely be found among the various piquetero organizations – which seek to pressure and make deals with local and national politicians to obtain the money and goods to redistribute to supporters. But this is most apparent in the Peronist organizations allied to the Kirchnerist opposition,⁵ which abide by the rules of the new government. They are not being raided or hauled into court.

The left and labor must solidly oppose all attempts to persecute and prosecute those who resist the depredations of the capitalist state, including the deeply corrupt judicial caste, both under the ultra-rightist Milei government and its Peronist and conservative predecessors. At the same time, it is necessary to draw a balance sheet of the “strategy” of acting as a recipient of government funds. Most of the Argentine left has, over the course of the last two decades, accepted a role of a conduit for welfare distribution and thus as an intermediary for the capitalist state. This integration is visible in the charges against Belliboni and the PO, accusing them of diverting funds from a state welfare program, Potenciar Trabajo (Promoting Work), which they were helping to administer. That role eventually opens the way to such charges, and subordinates the left and workers movement to the state of the class enemy. If the funds are cut off, it’s over.

While some left groups like the PTS (Partido de Trabajadores) have not engaged in direct administration of welfare plans, they are still highly dependent on government financing for their apparatus via Argentina’s election finance laws, as part of the reformist United Left and Workers Front (FIT-U) electoral lash-up.⁶ (Hence the absurdity of charging Polo Obrero with channeling government money into the electoral campaigns of the Partido Obrero, also part of the FITU, which are already heavily financed by the state.) Moreover, when the Partido Obrero split in 2019 between the leadership (including Belliboni) and the old guard around Jorge Altamira, who went on to form Política Obrera, the current PO leaders went to the bourgeois courts to seize control of the organization in Tucumán. And while Altamira (rightly) called the “official” PO a “spare wheel of the state” for calling to keep the right-wing government of Julio Macri in office in 2019, hoping to keep the pesos flowing,⁷ Polo Obrero got plenty of government funds when he was running the show.

The battle cry of proletarian revolutionaries, and all class-conscious workers, must be to keep the capitalist state out of our organizations. This can hardly be raised if we have been acting as a part of that state’s administration, using it to resolve internal disputes or being on the take for election campaigns. This “strategy” has paved the way for the bourgeois state to now launch an offensive against the organizations of the working class. As we fight to defend Polo Obrero and its members against this latest ruling-class attack, we must insist on the political independence of the workers movement from the bosses’ state. It will take independent, mass workers mobilization to tear even a shred of justice from the ruling class and its courts.

As we called to drop the trumped-up charges in the case of the judicial vendetta against PO militant César Arakaki and Daniel Ruiz of the PSTU (United Socialist Workers Party), facing several years in prison following the bloody police repression of December 2017 protests against the International Monetary Fund,⁸ today the League for the Fourth International calls to:

Drop all charges against Eduardo Belliboni, “Tango” Dotti, Jeremías Cantero and other leaders of Polo Obrero!

Stop the repression of the piquetero movement!

Hands off Polo Obrero and Partido Obrero!

For complete independence of the workers movement from the capitalist state!

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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