The Piquetera/o Movement of Argentina

Published as part of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID)'s Building Feminist Movements and Organisations (BFEMO) initiative, this 16-page paper explores Argentina's Piquetero Movement. Authors Andrea D'Atri and Celeste Escati explain that the word "piquetero" or "piquetera" comes from the pickets or protests held by unemployed workers, usually to block highways and roads, as they demanded work and opposed the rising unemployment rates during the 1990s financial crisis. Now a combination of groups and organisations that manage the unemployment subsidies provided by the State and occasionally carry out joint street mobilisations, the Piquetero Movement is no longer a key actor in the current social struggles. However, D'Atri and Escati still believe that its methods can be illuminating for other movements.

The Piquetero Movement of the first period, which began in December 1993, was essentially characterised by two methods: the picket, for conducting the struggle, and the assembly, for decision making. With this combative, democratic methodology as a point of departure, participants were able to outline a programme for the fulfilment of their demands, using direct action against the repressive forces of the State as they tried to unite with employed workers. Although women were the majority of those who put their bodies on the line in the blockades and mobilisations, these women had extremely low visibility. These women, the wives of oil workers for the most part, found themselves in a very particular situation: accustomed to their husbands being away from home for several days or weeks, they had experienced a relatively higher degree of autonomy than other women of their class. They took action to incorporate demands related to everyday life into the list of grievances of the Piquetero Movement: gardens tended by mothers, neighbourhood nursery schools, higher budgets for popular dining rooms, health care improvements, and tax exemptions for unemployed families. Furthermore, some of these women were elected as spokeswomen by the assemblies in a process of direct democracy to enter into dialogue with authorities, politicians, and local functionaries, thereby becoming figures recognised by the movement as a whole.

During the second stage, which began in 1997, one of the innovations incorporated by the women of the movement was action against domestic violence. Rather than going to the police in such cases, women in the Piquetero Movement began taking "persuasive actions" towards the aggressor. As part of this practice, several women go to the home of the man who has engaged in violence against his companion to talk to him about what this means, about why he shouldn't continue to act this way, about the way his companion suffers, etc. The first goal is to let him know that his violent attitudes are a public matter, well-known in the neighbourhood, and to insist that he seek out a self-help group or other type of therapy. In some cases, when these measures haven't produced favourable results, the women remove the aggressors from their homes by force. According to the authors, the force behind the incorporation of the women piqueteras into women's mobilisations for the right to abortion or against violence towards women came in part from feminist university students who came forward to offer workshops on sexual and reproductive health and to introduce the need for women's self-organisation in order to struggle for their own rights.

Since 1992, the government of the Buenos Aires Province had organised thousands of unemployed workers to implement assistance plans. The "army of manzaneras" (or, "army of love") of more than 35,000 women acted as coordinators between the food distribution project of the provincial government and the families who benefited from this aid. Their presence caused the Piquetero Movement in Buenos Aires to be seen during this stage as mainly female (70% of the movement were women) although its representatives were almost exclusively men. Contrary to what happened in the first stage, in this case the women piqueteras achieved a significant visibility, but their primary role was essentially reduced to the organisation of tasks related to domestic stereotypes.

During 2001, national demonstrations and blockades by Piqueteros continued. During a crisis of December, when the President was forced to resign in the midst of mobilisations defying government orders, thousands of unemployed people participated in looting supermarkets and other businesses in different cities in the country. More than 30 people were killed. During this same month, women workers at Brukman Textiles demanded the payment of salaries owed them, and the boss promised to go to the bank and take out the money. But he never returned. The business was occupied by the workers who were patiently waiting. For unemployed women, feminists, students, activists, and leftist militants, the "women workers without a boss" became emblematic. Their factory and the tent they put up on the corner outside the factory when they were violently evicted by the police inevitably became places for holding meetings, assemblies, women's rights activities, and other events. They have now recovered the factory and continue to work without bosses, insisting that the government pass a definitive expropriation law regarding the business so that it can be fully turned over to their cooperative.

As part of the third phase, and under the Peronist government of Néstor Kirchner, an effort was made at the beginning of his term of office to control the piquetera organisations through a strong media stigmatisation; this created a rupture in the alliance between the unemployed workers and the rest of the society. It also increased the criminalisation of social protest and, finally, ended up fragmenting the movement.

That said, in the authors' assessment, "[f]or thousands of women, this experience has marked their entry into public, political life and the transformation of their everyday domestic lives....But it's not yet possible to predict what changes there will be in the new generations of girls raised by these mothers who 'put their bodies on the line' in roadblocks, unintentionally confronting ancestral models and stereotypes."