The Piquetero Movement of Greater Buenos Aires: Working Class Protest During the Current Argentine Crisis

Abstract

At a time when traditional Argentine labour has become debilitated, a new social movement has emerged representing parts of a working class now characterized by mass unemployment and job instability. The piquetero movement of the Buenos Aires region constitutes a highly successful effort to mobilize parts of the growing body of impoverished individuals without jobs into a new type of working class community. The controversial political tactics most commonly utilized by emerging piquetero groups consist of the temporary blockage of strategic roads in or near the capital as part of a bargaining technique meant to induce the national government to concede places in its nominally universal unemployment relief program to particular piquetero groups. Such political bargaining with a vulnerable government seems an adoption of traditional tactics employed by Argentine trade unionists when jobs were more easily available. Organized around certain well-known concepts taken from the version of the social movement theory developed by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, this essay incorporates insights gained from the study of the Argentine case to clarify how such factors are able to produce this type of popular mass mobilization.