Piqueteros
Piqueteros
In response to the worsening Argentine economic crisis of 1998–2002, protest groups of impoverished long-term unemployed workers organized piquetes (blockades) of strategic roads and bridges to force government officials to include them in relief programs nominally available to all who met certain requirements. In time, the national piquetero movement fragmented ideologically among a variety of community-based leftist entities, most loosely affiliated either with nontraditional labor union confederations or with small Marxist political parties. The eventual economic recovery and the growth of employment left a shrinking movement polarized between those now co-opted by the government and those more radical, still challenging government authority.
See alsoArgentina: The Twentieth Century .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Epstein, Edward. "The Piquetero Movement in Greater Buenos Aires: Political Protests by the Unemployed Poor During the Crisis." In Broken Promises? The Argentine Crisis and Argentine Democracy, edited by Edward Epstein and David Pion-Berlin. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.
Svampa, Maristella, and Sebastián Pereyra. Entre la ruta y el barrio: La experiencia de las organizaciones piqueteras. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2003.
Edward Epstein