Reports from Argentina, by Dzhon Rid

Reports from Argentina
by Dzhon Rid

Election Round-Up Pt. I: History of Peronism

Posted: Jan. 26 2003, 20:17

I really need to work on the titles I give to these posts. For example, my last post had the title "le misc," which would indicate a hodgepodge of random information, even though that post was clearly about the Zanon factory occupation. Oh well.

Carlos, the guy who works for Microsoft, is also a video director for the Contra-Imagen art collective. Yesterday we spent hours and hours adding English subtitles to a documentary about Brukman; that documentary will be sent to the USAS congress in Los Angeles and hopefully USAS will begin to support the occupied factories in Argentina.

The Contra-Imagen documentaries are quite good, and Carlos is copying a number of them for me as I write, so I'll have some cool video material when I get back.

The presidential elections tentatively scheduled for April are approaching and I can't really figure out what's going on – there are a million candidates and the people hate them all.

Here's what I do know:

- Duhualde
current President, of the Partido Justicialista a.k.a. the Peronists, will not be a candidate

- Menem
President throughout the 90's, also of the PJ, notorious neoliberal and proud privatizer, is the most noticable candidate

- Saa
President for one week after the fall of De La Rua last year, replaced by Duhualde, also of the PJ, is also a candidate

- Kirchner
Duhualde's pick for the presidency, also of the PJ, currently the favorite in opinion polls

So you might have noticed that the PJ has three separate candidates! How does this work? I have no idea. Apparently they decided they didn't want a single candidate this year.

- De La Rua
that's right, the guy who was kicked out by massive protests last year is running again

- Carrio
this lady wants to give Argentinian capitalism a more human face, help the poor without hurting the profits of multinationals. she's doing surprisingly well in the polls.

So that's what I know. I'll be working on a more thorough report in the coming days, but right now I'm out of time.

-- Dzhon Rid

Reply

Posted: Jan. 27 2003, 13:05

John,

Can you get us a copy of the video for the UK Revo.

"Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win."

Reply to Reply

Posted: Jan. 27 2003, 16:52

Sure, videos for everyone!

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