A former agent of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile has been living in Australia avoiding justice for her role in the aggravated kidnapping, torture and murder of at least seven Communist Party activists in the 1970s. 
Adriana Rivas is accused of being part of a government campaign of terror and genocidal violence unleashed on the left and the workers’ movement by the dictatorship after the coup of 11 September 1973. 
Rivas lived as a free woman in Australia from 1978 to 2006, working and living in Bondi, Sydney. While visiting Chile for a family wedding in 2006, she was arrested and later charged for her role in Pinochet-era crimes. But while released on bail in 2010, she fled Chile, making her way back to Australia. 
In 2014, Chile formally requested her extradition. The Australian government failed to act on the request for five years before arresting her in 2019. While several Australian courts have confirmed the legitimacy of her extradition, Rivas and her lawyers continue to appeal the extradition order in the High Court. 
In 1970, Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition were elected to office in Chile, promising to carry out a parliamentary road to socialism. The election of a left-wing government, and the resistance of the Chilean capitalist class to its progressive reforms, unleashed a wave of strikes across the country. 
The struggle reached revolutionary proportions in 1973, when workers began to form industrial cordones, institutions of working-class power and industrial democracy independent of the government, to coordinate struggle, defend workers’ gains and pressure the government to implement the promised nationalisation of industry, which Popular Unity had retreated on. 
Tragically, the revolutionary process was drowned in blood. In August 1973, Allende invited General Augusto Pinochet into his cabinet in an attempt to appease the Chilean and international capitalist class. On 11 September, Allende was murdered in the Presidential Palace. Militants from the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the revolutionary MIR and working-class activists were rounded up in their thousands, ushered into the National Stadium of Santiago to be tortured and summarily executed. 
The regime continued to hunt down left-wing workers and socialist militants for nearly two decades, while receiving the full diplomatic support of Western governments, including Australia. 
In 1974, the Pinochet dictatorship passed Decree Law 521, which created the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), a Gestapo-like secret political police force reporting directly to Pinochet. DINA became infamous for its apparatus of repression. This included torture centres, extrajudicial murder and the forced disappearances of thousands of civilians. 
The murder of prisoners sometimes occurred through suffocation, the experimental use of sarin gas or injection with cyanide. Survivors have testified that prisoners were killed through beatings, their bodies disposed of in lime mines or thrown into the sea via helicopter in notorious “death flights”.
US support for these crimes is well known. In August 1970, a month before Allende and Popular Unity were elected, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser for President Richard Nixon, had discussed the feasibility of the US supporting a military coup against Popular Unity. 
After the coup, the US supported DINA significantly. In 1974, CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters hosted a luncheon for DINA Director Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda at CIA headquarters in Virginia. The following year, the CIA briefly put the DINA director on its payroll as a paid asset.
Between 1973 and 1977, Adriana Rivas worked for DINA as part of the Lautaro Brigade, operating under the name “La Chani”. The Lautaro Brigade was an intelligence unit within DINA that targeted Communist Party activists with the aim of liquidating the underground leadership of the resistance to the regime. Rivas was the personal secretary of Army Colonel Contreras, who oversaw DINA. 
Many of the Lautaro Brigade’s crimes and its agents were not exposed until 2007, when a former agent gave evidence as part of the Conference Street I and II judicial processes. These two cases covered the aggravated kidnapping and disappearance of Fernando Ortiz, Fernando Navarro, Lincoyan Berrios, Horacio Cepeda, Hector Veliz, Reinalda Pereira and Victor Diaz, secretary of the Communist Party at the time. Rivas is accused of being a participant in the disappearance of all seven. 
In 2007, a former DINA waiter turned witness, Jorgelino Vergara—whose own guilt led him to expose the Lautaro Brigade torture centre—claimed that Rivas participated fully in the torture as well as the administrative side of the Lautaro Brigade’s work. In an article in El Dinamo, Vergara claimed he saw Rivas in the gym hitting one of the detainees, who was sitting in a chair with his hands cuffed behind his back.
While Rivas denies involvement in kidnappings, beatings and disappearances, she remains unrepentant about the violence of the Pinochet era and DINA. In a shockingly candid interview with SBS Spanish in 2013, she claimed that the torture of Communists was “the only way to break people” and described her time at DINA as “the best years” of her youth. In the interview, she proudly recounted guarding Pinochet’s hotel room door. 
It is a travesty that the Australian government allowed Rivas to live freely in Bondi until 2019 despite knowledge about her crimes coming to light as early as 2006. The Australian government’s indifference to justice for the Chilean victims of Pinochet’s agents should not be surprising, given Australia’s past. 
Despite having a reputation for welcoming Chilean refugees, Australia gave full diplomatic recognition to the Pinochet regime for its entire existence, and Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) spies aided and abetted the CIA in destabilising the Allende government and cultivating conditions for a military coup. 
In 2021, declassified Australian documents revealed that, in 1970, Liberal Foreign Minister Billy McMahon approved an ASIS request to open a base in Santiago. The heavily redacted papers show that Australian spies operated in concert with the CIA, but very little detail has been revealed—in line with Australia’s secretive approach to security documents. 
In 1972, Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ordered the closure of the Santiago office, while working strenuously to avoid “embarrassing” the CIA. But after his dismissal in 1975, Whitlam suggested his orders to ASIS may have been ignored. 
The next High Court hearing for Adriana Rivas is on 10 March 2025. Chilean militants with Movimiento Anticapitalista, including Camilo Parad—the grandson of one of Rivas’ victims, Fernando Ortiz Letelier—have called on the <a href="https://anticapitalistas.cl/2024/11/20/el-caso-de-la-represora-adriana-rivas-la-impunidad-como-legado-dictatorial/">Australian left to mobilise to pressure the courts to extradite Rivas</a>. 
The attorney general must act to extradite Rivas without further delay. Every day that she remains in Australia is another insult to the people of Chile, as well as the thousands of Chilean Australians who fled to this country as refugees. In addition, all records relating to ASIS operations in Chile in the 1970s must be fully declassified and released. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Chloe Rafferty

Australia must extradite Pinochet agent Adriana Rivas

In Buenos Aires, the Workers’ Socialist Movement (Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores, MST), a Trotskyist party, is holding a day school for militant workers from the Italian Hospital. It’s 8:30am and the worker militants are trickling in, carrying pastries, sandwiches and maté gourds (a local tea). They are here to discuss everything from the history of the Argentine workers’ movement to the concept of exploitation and the legal framework in Argentina under which unions operate. Some comrades are dressed in their hospital scrubs.
These workers are facing a fierce offensive from President Javier Milei and the hospital bosses and are struggling for their own living conditions and the rights of their class. 
Argentinian workers have experienced a protracted crisis for most of the 21st century. Hyperinflation has eaten away the purchasing power of workers’ salaries as much as it has eaten away the credibility of the major political parties. This includes Peronism, the nationalist party that historically has attracted working-class allegiances. Since last year’s election of Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist and far-right outsider, a new offensive has been launched against every aspect of working-class life. In the first six months of the Milei government, poverty levels rose by more than 11 points to reach 53 percent of the population. 
Two significant sectors facing attacks are health care and universities. Nurses and medical professionals from the Italian Hospital are discussing the history of the Argentine workers’ movement to prepare for the struggles of today. Between sips of maté they give thoughtful answers to questions about labour history and thought experiments about how left-wing trade union militants should respond in various scenarios.
One of the questions passed around on slips of paper and discussed in small groups is something like: “You’re creating a new trade union. What principles should it adopt to prevent bureaucratisation?” Another is: “A local factory is being shut down. What political and legal tactics do you adopt?” 
These are not purely hypothetical questions. In 21st century Argentina, there have been waves of working-class struggle resulting from debt crises, hyperinflation and a series of bosses’ offensives attempting to radically restructure government and society in favour of capitalists. In 2001, under President Fernando de la Rúa, a wave of protest known as the Argentinazo
was unleashed. Protests, strikes, factory occupations and unemployed workers’ struggle partially pushed back a government offensive and toppled five presidents in the space of two weeks. 
Today, the workers are answering very practical questions, and some have direct experience of trying to figure out how to respond to workplace closures. A discussion about the limitations of workers’ cooperatives ensues. They also talk about the possibility of demanding the government nationalise private firms. 
In the crisis of the early 2000s, a range of strategies were adopted by Argentine workers, many of whom were left with factories and workplaces abandoned by the bosses. Some were occupied and transformed into cooperatives, but most of these could not last after government subsidies were withdrawn. As one comrade comments, “The market forces us to exploit ourselves”. Other workplaces struggled for nationalisation: “That workplace closed down, but each worker was guaranteed a job”. 
Our translator, Frederico, tells us the period during and after the 2001 Argentinazo was important in rebuilding the influence of Trotskyist groups, including the MST, in the trade unions. Influence was built through hard-fought battles against the entrenched Peronist leadership. When Frederico says “hard fought”, it is not a metaphor. Going against the hegemonic Peronist leadership in trade unions is no small thing in a country where Peronist trade union bureaucrats are willing to cheat, collude with the bosses and threaten the left with hired muscle. 
On our lunch break, the comrades share pastries, including those named by the anarchists of the early Argentine workers movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were given outrageous titles, which parodied the villains and methods of the workers’ and radical struggles: bolas de fraile (“friar’s balls”), facturas
(“bills”) and bomba (“bomb”), so named after the anarchist penchant for individual violence. Cesar, a socialist militant introducing the discussion, references these pastries as an example of the hidden history of the working-class struggle that existed long before the arrival of Peronism in the ’40s and ’50s. 
A revolutionary socialist lawyer joins the second half of the meeting to teach the delegates about their rights and the relative and always conditional protections of capitalist law. The lawyer comrade is conscious of conveying the gulf between the pretty words of the law and the reality of workplace exploitation. As she says of a UN convention on labour rights, of which Argentina is a signatory: “The bosses use this paper to wipe their asses”. 
Delegates, she says, should know their rights so they can be steadfast defenders of the workers they represent. She is quick to demonstrate, through legal precedent and a wealth of practical examples, that the courts cannot be relied on: they enshrine only those rights that are backed by the organisation and force of the workers.
On Wednesday, we head to the Hospital Garrahan, the largest paediatric hospital in Argentina. Norma Lezana is chairing a meeting of health workers from across the country. Norma is another MST militant and secretary general of the union. They meet in a room in the hospital; others join on Zoom. Worker after worker rails against the inaction of the dominant trade union bureaucrats. One says:
“Enough of controlling the nurses and saying that we are doing politics; the truth is the bureaucracy should be ashamed. We don’t want more [leaders] who don’t represent us. We want true union representation that defends the workers and the entire health team, of course, but for us nurses, as the most discriminated against in the entire health system, there is total disgust and total indignation.” 
Another comrade from the province of Río Negro talks about the collusion of the provincial governors with Milei’s austerity plan, including Peronist governors: 
“Their relation to the privatising project is explicit. The governor of our province? He invited us to withdraw from the public health system if we are not satisfied with that. And this has been happening. The [health] teams are empty in the mountains. They’re closing! They’re closing the intensive care services.”
In attendance at the meeting are activists from the universities. Two socialist students from the medical faculty of a Buenos Aires university speak on the importance of linking the struggles of the public health sector to the fight for public universities. The students are preparing for a march on 12 November, building from a wave of university occupations last month. They invite the health workers to their demonstration and explain that the medical school is discussing the struggle taking place at the Hospital Garrahan. 
Another speaker, Luciana Franco, from the nursing graduates’ association, talks about the struggle of Buenos Aires nurses to win official recognition as “professionals”. Nurses from the association are about to attend the Buenos Aires legislature to pressure politicians to adopt their plan for professional recognition. They have been invited there by Cele Fierro, a deputy from the Workers’ Left Front—an electoral coalition of revolutionary parties from the Trotskyist left. 
After the meeting, Norma invites us back to the hospital later in the week. From 10 in the morning to 10 at night workers from the Hospital Garrahan will be on strike. A festival will take place all day as part of the struggle. As Norma says, this fight is to defend three sectors: the public health system, the families of the patients who rely on the hospital and the workers inside it. 
On Wednesday morning, we wake to the news that Donald Trump has won the presidency in the United States. What this means for workers in the US and around the world is still unclear. Surely it will give a boost to far-right projects the world over, including the government of Javier Milei. Milei believes, or hopes, that Trump will waive debts that the Argentine government owes to the US. If delivered, this could significantly boost the credibility and success of the Milei’s economic shock plan. 
The left the world over could learn a lesson from the serious, hard-headed organising taking place in hospital wards and tyre factories, on the streets and in the universities in Argentina. In the face of rising inequality around the world, a climate crisis and the surging influence of the far right, no-one is coming to save us but us.

In Argentina, the struggle continues

The same scene is playing out in more than 70 university campuses across Argentina: students fill gymnasiums, outdoor spaces, lecture theatres and streets. They sit, stand, drape themselves, drink maté, a herbal tea. They’re occupying their universities, and they’re planning a fight. “The students have awoken”, hospital worker and socialist Cesar Latorre told Red Flag via WhatsApp.
In February, far-right President Javier Milei cut university funding by 71 percent. Students responded with mass protests, including a million-strong march in April. In early October, Congress passed a bill to increase funding for state universities and to raise staff salaries to deal with the effects of inflation, which reached an annual rate of 236 percent in August and left many university staff impoverished. Milei threatened to block the bill, so students and staff held another set of nationwide mass rallies to defend it on 2 October. In the early hours of the following day, Milei vetoed the bill.
And so, on 5 October, at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Philosophy and Letters campus, students crowded around Ari, a young socialist holding a microphone. “They tell us we need to take the money from someone else”, she said. Milei has insisted that if universities want proper funding, Congress will have to take it from other sections of the budget, likely pension or welfare payments.
“If you want to know, in the opinion of the students, and of the teachers, where the money will come from for the increase in the budget for universities”, Ari declared, “we have to take it from the IMF, the church and the multinationals!” The crowd of students and teachers roared.
The occupations began in early October in the Philosophy and Letters faculty and the Psychology faculty of the UBA. The banners hanging from the buildings read, in big black letters, “tomada”, meaning “taken”. It’s more apt than “occupied”, because what the students are doing goes beyond a conventional sit-in. They’ve taken over the running of the faculties, establishing committees to take responsibility for cleaning, security, holding lessons and organising food.
During the day, they bring in supportive teachers to give lessons in the street, blocking off roads with their desks. Staff are allowed to clock in for their shifts (so that they get paid) but are promptly sent home. Senior staff, like the faculty deans, are banned altogether. As it gets dark, crowds move to the thrum of street drums, and barbecue smoke lingers.
When Milei vetoed the bill, students in Buenos Aires convened mass assemblies and debated what to do. They overwhelmingly voted to “take” despite their lack of experience in doing it: the last occupations of this scale happened in 2018. Socialist groups have a significant presence at universities nationwide, leading the argument for occupying alongside independent left-wing students. Now, they’re trying to draw more unaligned students into the committees and leadership of the occupations.
Student unions across Argentina are run by students from right-wing political traditions. In many places, the student union leaders argued against occupations while attempting to portray themselves as oppositional to Milei. Some of these leaders are Peronists, a nationalist political current that dominates the trade unions and ran the government before Milei came to office, presiding over an inflation crisis and austerity for workers.
The most significant political group in the student unions is the Radical Civic Union, a traditional centre-right party. But despite the weight of these groups in official student politics, videos posted online show vote after vote being carried nearly unanimously for occupying, from Buenos Aires to the remote provinces, with glee on the students’ faces and cheers filling the gymnasiums.
Universities are one of Milei’s favourite punching bags for his right-wing culture war rhetoric. In a speech to the World Economic Forum earlier this year, he said that public education is where “leftist educational curricula proliferate, openly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal, in a country where what is needed is more capitalism and more freedom”.
His attack on public education stems partly from his ideological opposition to universities, but more from his desire to slash and burn as many public services as possible—from hospitals to airlines, oil refineries to cinemas. In fact, at the same time as the students were marching in defence of the Congress-approved education bill, Milei was <a href="https://twitter.com/wolfofwallst/status/1841516226272784774">meeting</a>
with Jordan Belfort, the criminal stockbroker turned free market culture warrior whose fall from grace was depicted in the film The Wolf of Wall Street.
Milei has systematically tried to divide the population and turn them against each other to dampen the prospects of a fight against his government. He’s tried to turn workers and middle-class people against the poor by complaining that they don’t work hard enough to deserve welfare benefits.
He has attacked state employees by using the “drain the swamp” rhetoric of former US President Donald Trump, painting public services and those who administer them as a bloated bureaucracy stealing from the country.
When cutting funding to the arts, he painted them as luxuries undeserving of public support. Now, he’s portraying universities as elite institutions that serve “no-one but the children of the rich and those of the upper-middle class”.
It isn’t true. According to economist Daniel Schteingart, Argentina’s university population has <a href="https://twitter.com/danyscht">increased</a>
from just 275,000 in 1970 to nearly 4 million today, and the expansion of higher education has overwhelmingly benefited the working class. For example, at the National University of La Matanza, in the outer suburbs of Buenos Aires, around 80 percent of students are the first generation in their families to attend university, according to the vice-chancellor.
Argentina’s working class remains highly organised compared to most other countries, with a unionisation rate of around 40 percent for formal workers. This, along with a considerable presence of socialists in some important unions, helped to push union officials into calling two general strikes in January and May. Those strikes defeated some of the harshest aspects of Milei’s program, including the privatisation of the state airline and the state oil company.
But since then, the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), Argentina’s main union body, has refused to call a third general strike. The CGT is linked to the centre-right Peronist party. Milei’s draconian attacks on the right to unionise, compulsory union membership and dues, and union control over pension funds threaten the social position of top CGT officials. Yet the CGT officials prefer to negotiate with the government while Milei’s attacks devastate workers’ living standards.
The poverty rate is now at a two-decade high of 53 percent. Substantial public spending cuts have slowed the rate of consumer price inflation but also caused a recession. In addition to Milei’s mass lay-offs in the public sector, there have been huge job cuts in the private sector. Without the call for a third general strike, which could unite the union movement, resistance has become increasingly restricted to the better organised sections of the working class like healthcare workers, public sector employees, teachers and aviation workers.
The failure of the CGT to continue a serious fight has emboldened Milei. He sees an opportunity to privatise industries he failed to sell immediately after taking office. For example, the important victory that the first two general strikes achieved in stopping the privatisation of Aerolineas Argentinas is now at risk of being undone. Aviation workers are well organised and have held several days of strike action, causing major disruption to the economy.
In a significant act of solidarity, the Brazilian aviation workers’ union declared that it would not allow its members to operate domestic Argentine flights. And on 30 October, broader layers of transport workers will hold a 24-hour national strike. This will be supported by a 36-hour national public sector strike scheduled to start the day before and carry over into the next.
There has been an ebb in action since the general strike in May. But the students have provided a new spark to the broader movement and have pulled university workers into the fight. On 21 October, university workers began a 48-hour national strike. Workers in one of the big university unions voted to extend the 48-hour strike to an entire week and said that supporting the student movement was one of the main reasons for extending the strike. And while a recent 24-hour strike was passive and didn’t include a march, the week-long strike will include open, public classes held in the streets.
Student assemblies in the streets outside university buildings will decide the future of the occupations over the coming weeks. Can they sustain the movement into November—and will workers’ strikes spread?

Tom Sullivan

Jasmine Duff

Student occupations bloom across Argentina

Students are occupying more than 70 different faculties of 30 public universities across Argentina. At least twelve faculties in Buenos Aires, the capital, are tomada (taken). The occupations stretch into remote areas in the far north and south of the country. 
The events mark a new stage in an ongoing fight against far-right President Javier Milei, elected last year promising mass privatisations and budget cuts to pay down government debt owed to the International Monetary Fund, while funnelling money to the rich through tax cuts. 
At the beginning of the year, Milei took a chainsaw to public university spending, cutting funding by 71 percent. This provoked mass protests involving 500,000 students in Buenos Aires and large numbers in the rest of the country. 
Last month, politicians voted to increase university workers’ salaries, the purchasing power of which has been undermined by rampant inflation—consumer prices have increased by more than 200 percent in twelve months. 
When Milei threatened to veto the bill, more than 1 million people marched to fight for its passage. But in early October, the president confirmed he would block it. That sparked a wave of protests and occupations by students across the country. 
Carlos Barros, a student activist at the University of Buenos Aires and a member of the Socialist Workers’ Movement, spoke to Red Flag’s Jasmine Duff about how things look on the ground.
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Why are students occupying?
Students decided to occupy universities because of the ongoing defunding of public education, which has been taking place for several years by all governments but has reached a new level with Milei’s administration. Universities don’t have sufficient funding to increase the salaries of professors and university staff (which are far behind inflation), or to improve the conditions of the buildings used by students. It could result in the eventual cutting of jobs and closure of universities altogether. 
The occupations started when Milei vetoed a bill to increase the funding for universities. The Congress approved the veto with the complicity of representatives from the Radical Civic Union [a liberal political party] and even some of the Peronists [the main political current in the country, dating from the rule of Juan Perón immediately after World War Two]. 
This enraged students all over the country and led to the calling of assemblies at universities. The first were at the faculty of Philosophy and Letters and the faculty of Psychology of the University of Buenos Aires, where hundreds of the students voted to occupy the faculties. In the following days, the occupations spread to other faculties and to universities in the rest of the country. We are witnessing the rise of a new Argentinean student movement, which many have said has been in decline for years. 
Videos circulating online show students taking mass votes, holding debates inside their faculties, and setting up desks on public roads to hold teach-ins. What’s it like inside a faculty occupation?
Basically, an occupation means that students take control over the university. We undertake all of the tasks of the administration of the university, including cleaning, organising lessons, providing food, security, etc. For each task, there are different commissions that students can join and participate in. 
Regarding security, there are always students at the door to stop the dean and other members of the faculty administration from entering the building. The staff of the faculty are only allowed to enter to clock on, but they cannot perform their usual tasks, since they are being performed by the students. Professors cannot hold lessons inside the building, save for a few exceptions. 
Every day, a soup kitchen provides food for the students at the occupation and people who may need it in the neighbourhood. The soup kitchen is supported through donations. Every night, we do activities to entertain ourselves and strengthen our sense of community. There are film screenings, live music, karaoke, games and obviously lots of political discussion. We’re having a great time. We sleep inside classrooms with sleeping bags or mattresses. It is kind of like camping. 
All lessons that students would normally have inside the faculty building are taken outside to the street. Students bring seats and blackboards outside and block the street. We want to continue studying while also protesting and bringing more visibility to this conflict. All lessons must be held outside, save for the cases where specific elements of a classroom are needed or for exams.
Socialist organisations are prominent in the struggle, but many student unions are run by political tendencies and parties that are part of Milei’s government. What role have these student leaders played in the movement, and what debates are taking place?
We are having many debates with the bureaucratic student union leaders and the grassroots of the students movement about how to advance the struggle for our right to public education. Most student unions are led by Peronists or Radicals. They are political forces of the capitalist regime. As such they try to avoid losing control over the student movement and demobilise it while posing as critical of Milei. 
They call for few or no assemblies at all in some cases, decide things without consulting the students or, worse, negotiate with the university authorities behind the students’ backs. 
The Socialist Workers’ Movement and the left are doing our best to radicalise the student movement, and to bring more independent students to participate in their respective assemblies so they can overcome the bureaucracies. 
We are also campaigning for inter-faculty and inter-university assemblies. And we are coordinating actions with the rest of the working-class sectors so we can all agree on a unified plan of struggle to stop this attack by the government.

Inside Argentina’s university occupations

The following is a translation of a statement by Marea Socialista (Socialist Tide) on the recent presidential election in Venezuela. Amid widespread protests and accusations of fraud across the political spectrum, the country’s National Election Council declared current President Nicolás Maduro the winner with a little over 51 percent of the vote. 
A member of the International Socialist League grouping of revolutionary organisations, Marea Socialista opposes Maduro’s government and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela. The statement appeared on the leftist <a href="https://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a332950.html">Venezuelan news site Aporrea</a> on 30 July. It has been translated by the International Socialist Project.
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Although we continue to argue that the working class had no candidates in this presidential election, we defend the people’s democratic right to know what the real result was. We demand that the National Electoral Council (CNE) audit the vote and report on all polling places and electoral data.
Sectors of the Venezuelan people in Caracas and throughout the country have taken to the streets to protest what they feel is the government’s disregard for the great majority of voters. There is a generalised popular demand in the country that large mobilisations from the neighbourhoods express. We defend their right to demonstrate and denounce the repression of a false “revolutionary” government that acts like the repressors who massacred the Venezuelan people on 27 February 1989.
Marea Socialista also does not believe that the results the CNE reported are true. We say this because, in the first place, what is clearly seen and felt on the streets is mostly discontent with the Maduro government and the overwhelming desire to get out of the terrible situation in which it has plunged the Venezuelan people. The CNE has not presented official results and has instead rushed to proclaim Nicolás Maduro the winner, without any transparency in the data tabulation process and with the CNE’s website offline.
Irregularities and arbitrary rulings have plagued the process and the electoral system itself from start to finish. Although they insist that the machines and their data management are “invulnerable”, we all know that the government has engineered a system shot through with manipulation and favouritism, disqualifications, roadblocks to legalising opposition parties, seizure of the assets of civil society organisations, the government’s corrupt use of public resources, censorship and blockading the media, persecutions and imprisonments ...
These measures aren’t solely confined to the conflict between the ruling right wing (Maduro, PSUV, the military and the corrupt bureaucracy) and the traditional right wing, but they are also applied to sectors of the working class and organisations on the left that adopt critical positions or oppose government policies. Added to this are the obstacles to campaigning, retaliations, extortion and threats to voters, especially if they are public sector workers or have some kind of dependence on the state-government.
In addition, there is the curtailment of the right to vote for millions of forced migrants, Venezuelans who are abroad and who have left because of the government’s policies, and who remain angry with it. And to cap it off on election day, the government seized boxes of ballots cast, grabbed official totals from polling stations and engaged in multiple irregularities that would take too long to name. In the end, they give us shoddy and unreliable reports that constitute an outrage and an insult to the voters. That is why people cannot square what they saw at the polling stations and polling centres with what the CNE reported later.
The people have the constitutional right to know how their votes were treated and to have them respected. Let us demand transparency: we must defend the right of the people to have their real votes known and respected. We do not say this to defend votes in favour of a right wing that we know we oppose, but in favour of the people having access to reliable electoral information and to be fully able to exercise their vote, as an elementary matter of democratic freedoms. That is why we demand a thorough electoral audit with citizen participation to verify the results, which is also a constitutional right.
At the same time, we reiterate that, for us, the working class had no candidates in these elections. No candidate faithfully represented its interests. Both leading candidates are right wing, anti-worker and capitalist. The government candidate is the destroyer of the best conquests and rights achieved from the Bolivarian revolution. He stands for anti-worker, right-wing, authoritarian politics that have nothing to do with socialism. What’s more, he is not genuinely anti-imperialist, but is aligned with other capitalist powers that are in competition with the US (Russia, China, etc.). 
Maduro expresses the interests of a new “lumpen bourgeoisie” that lives off the embezzlement of the state. Meanwhile, María Corina Machado [the leading opposition candidate, whom the government disqualified from the election] represents the traditional bourgeoisie and the big private employers. This capitalist sector opposes the political power of Maduro’s “Chavismo” but benefits from its policies with the exploitation of an ultra-cheap or practically semi-slave labour force that has been deprived of its salary. Despite vague and opportunistic promises to address this situation, they have no intention of solving it. 
We are with the people in the streets to defend their vote. We are on the side of their democratic demands. But at the same time, we mark distance with the political leaderships that are trying to manipulate them or use them as “cannon fodder”. We have seen how the message of Edmundo Gonzalez [the right-wing opposition candidate who ran in Corina Machado’s place] and Maria Corina looks first to the military, as if seeking a decree from the armed forces. The popular response is slipping through their hands.
Whether one or the other [Maduro or the traditional right] governs, from Marea we insist on the autonomous organisation of the people without bosses, without bureaucrats and without corruption. We have said that it is an illusion to think that the “way out” or solution to Maduro’s authoritarian government will come from the opposition of the traditional right wing, whose background we know. Although they fight Maduro for power, they support his policies that have offloaded the economic crisis onto the workers. Maduro accomplished what they always wanted to do. The real solutions that the working class needs will not come from there. If we do not have organisation, political consciousness and strength as a class, we do not have a chance. That is why we cannot follow the politics of those who would subjugate us to the government or exploit us in the factories and workplaces.
Starting with the demand for democratic freedoms and respect for their vote, which is mobilising people onto the streets today, let’s accumulate forces in the struggle for our rights—with unity, consciousness and class independence.
Marea Socialista has called for a united stand of working-class forces, trade unions, activists in defence of civil rights and political organisations that we have convened under the Conference for the Defence of the People’s Rights (PPT-APR, PSL, LTS, PCV-Dignidad). In the election, we and other members of this group campaigned on the slogan of “The Working Class Has No Candidate—Spoil Your Ballot”. 
With the Conference for the Rights of the People, we presented common proposals on several points and organised united protests for wages, for the freedom of workers imprisoned for fighting against corruption or in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We aim to sustain and to develop these alliances for unity in action for labour rights, social rights and democratic rights for the Venezuelan people.
We trust only in the mobilisation of the workers and the exploited, and we urge the struggle to recover rights taken away, without believing in bureaucrats, bosses or corrupt people.
Let us build our own political vehicle without selling our conscience to either of the two anti-worker rightists fighting for power and resources.
Let us democratically raise our plan of struggle for our demands, rights and liberties.
The working class and the popular sectors need their own strength both against the authoritarian starvation government of Maduro and the parties and leaders of the capitalist right who are also hangmen disguised as “saviours”.

Oppose both the government and the opposition in Venezuela

The Argentine working class is not backing down from its struggle against conservative President Javier Milei. A general strike called by the major union confederations on 9 May, the second since Milei came to office in December, paralysed the economy and major cities. Urban transportation came to a standstill, nearly 300 flights were cancelled, banks and shops were closed, and government operations were massively reduced. One study found that the lost economic activity was equal to 1.1 percent of annual GDP.
The second general strike took on Milei’s new austerity package, which has just been passed by the Senate and will now return to the lower house. After he withdrew his first one (known as the Omnibus Bill)—which aimed to slash public spending, privatise state-owned firms and pass anti-labour legislation—he introduced a new, watered-down, version, colloquially referred to as the “Omnibus Bill XS”. Despite only containing around a third of the provisions of the original bill, the new one still includes significant anti-labour legislation and privatisations.
Milei has faced significant difficulty in passing any of this through Congress because he lacks even a sizeable minority parliamentary bloc—his party was founded only in 2021. Unlike other far-right figures, like former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro or Donald Trump, Milei does not have a cohered and loyal base. He was backed by the Argentine ruling class in the second round of the election and won 56 percent of the vote. However, this was considered to be a vote against the incumbents—it’s unclear how loyal this base will remain.
“The government is very determined to move forward, but this also generates significant resistance”, Cesar Latorre, a union delegate at a major hospital in Buenos Aires and member of the Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST), said to Red Flag. “The government has not given up and, where another government might have backed down, it tries to keep pushing forward.”
 This was clear when a journalist recently said to Milei, “The people can’t make ends meet, Mr President”, to which he responded, “If people couldn’t make ends meet, they’d already be dead”.
Milei’s intransigence reflects that, despite decades of economic turbulence, Argentina’s rulers have not succeeded in smashing the organised working class and the welfare state as fully as elsewhere in Latin America. Large sections of the economy are nationalised, and the unionisation rate remains around 40 percent. Milei’s whole political project is about fighting on behalf of the bosses. His labour measures would weaken workers’ ability to fight for better wages, his budget cuts would remove subsidies to households, his privatisations would hand public companies to private bosses, and his tax proposal would make workers’ pay a greater share of the state’s finances. 
But after Milei faced stiff opposition in parliament for the last six months, it now looks like some of his opponents are willing to negotiate and approve sections of his agenda. This includes the main parliamentary opposition, the Peronists, a number of whom voted in favour of the second Omnibus Bill. 
Peronism is a political current unique to Argentina. It has a strong base in the unions. Its origins lie in a coup led by Colonel Juan Perón in 1943. Perón sought a base in the organised workers’ movement but was no working-class hero; he worked to control and restrain the rising working-class militancy of the time. Perón severely attacked the left, jailing and murdering hundreds of leftists and unionists. More recently, the Peronists were the first to try to implement neoliberalism in the 1990s and, while in power for the four years prior to Milei, oversaw the deaths of more than 100,000 people during the pandemic. Outside of the various periods of military rule, the Peronists have governed Argentina most of the time since the 1940s.
The union bureaucracy consistently subordinates the interests of the workers it’s supposed to represent to the electoral interests of Peronism. Currently, while the Peronists are out of power and there’s a significant attack on the unions themselves, the unions have been pressured to organise protests and strikes. 
 “Peronism has a division of labour. On one hand, they make speeches in parliament, complain and denounce the law”, says Latorre, referring to the austerity package. “On the other hand, they discuss with La Libertad Avanza [Milei’s party], as is the case with the CGT [General Confederation of Workers], which is trying not to mobilise seriously to avoid destabilising the parliamentary session.” 
The union bureaucracy and Peronists have negotiated with Milei to protect, among other things, union funding sources, such as automatic union membership at workplaces. Whilst it is right to defend this measure, the bureaucracy has been far more interested in negotiating with the government over it than sustaining protests and strikes to defeat the brutal attacks on workers. 
The Peronist parliamentary leaders want to wait out Milei’s four-year term in a way that causes minimal disruption to Argentinian capitalism, whilst contrasting themselves as the steady hand against Milei’s chaos. 
The second general strike was not due to any enthusiasm from the bureaucracy and Peronist leaders for a prolonged battle against Milei. Rather, it was called in response to pressure they are under from their own members and seen as a bargaining chip in negotiations to protect the unions’ structures. 
Nonetheless, the strike was an opportunity to reunite the full force of the working class after many unions had ceased their industrial action while they returned to negotiations following the first general strike. However, its impact was contradictory. Whilst it had very strong participation, its political impact was not fully realised because the union leaders refused to call a centralised protest.
Despite the lacklustre efforts of the CGT leadership, Milei has so far failed to make workers pay for the crisis. Instead, resistance remains strong. Since the second general strike, teachers have held a national strike, healthcare workers have taken industrial action, train drivers organised a 24-hour national strike just a week after a national transport strike, and even judges struck for 24 hours. And on the day the second austerity package was being voted on in the Senate, public sector workers held a national 24-hour strike, the university sector began a 48-hour strike, and other unionists struck and joined protests outside the Congress.
On 24 May, a textile company fired hundreds of workers in two of its factories. When it attempted to remove the machinery, workers occupied both factories, one of which continued functioning for more than a fortnight.
Students have also joined the fight. On 24 April, around 1 million people marched across the country to defend higher education from Milei’s cuts. A few days later, he caved and increased the budget. 
The rising social tensions reached even greater heights in the province of Misiones, an underdeveloped region in the north-east with a small but important agricultural sector. There, teachers, healthcare and other workers have been protesting and striking for months. In recent weeks, the protests have become more aggressive, marching on the provincial congress and clashing with security forces. Students and workers have blockaded roads across the province. Even the local police went on strike for a pay increase and set up an encampment outside their headquarters. The federal government, for the thirteen days of the police strike, had to call in other state security forces.
The police temporarily breaking ranks and joining the protests is a clear sign of how deep the crisis is. Combined with the increased levels of industrial action, it shows that Milei’s approach is a risky one. Previous conservative presidents have failed in similar attempts to implement austerity. For example, during Mauricio Macri’s term from 2015 to 2019, the unions thwarted his anti-worker changes with five general strikes. The other risk for Milei is that the Argentinian ruling class grows tired of the social conflict and returns to the Peronists. After all, they can offer something Milei cannot: social peace. A recent opinion piece in the Argentinian paper La Nación expressed this sentiment:
“The growing labour unrest, combined with social organisations joining the protests, threatens to reach record levels during Milei’s short presidency ... Curiously, many of the unions that today have adopted a belligerent stance ... remained silent during the last four years [when the Peronists were in government].”
The situation in Argentina is unstable. Even if Milei passes his watered-down austerity package, the mass mobilisations will likely continue. Union leaders are under serious pressure to continue mobilising, Peronism is highly discredited, and workers are eager to fight. 
If Milei wins, his victory may embolden other far-right leaders. But if Argentine workers manage to defeat him, they will send an important message to workers facing similar attacks in Europe and elsewhere: that it is still possible to defeat a ruling-class offensive with a mobilised and combative workers’ movement.

Another general strike in Argentina challenges Milei

The struggle of the Argentine working class against ultra-conservative President Javier Milei continues to evolve. Public sector workers are one of the key groups leading the resistance. Through strikes, protests and occupations of government buildings, state workers have pushed back against Milei’s plan to sack up to 70,000 people.
Milei took office in December and went straight on the offensive against the working class, moving to cut government spending, limit the right to strike and privatise state-owned industry. He also enacted draconian anti-protest laws that deemed any gathering of more than three people an illegal protest.
“They seek to destroy the public sector”, Leonardo Rando, a delegate in the State Workers’ Association (ATE) and a member of the Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST), told Red Flag. “They are not interested in continuing any public policy that improves the quality of life of the people.”
In many cases, management did not even tell workers they were sacked. Instead, they found out only when their access cards did not work one morning.
Fortunately, working-class resistance has thwarted major aspects of Milei’s plans. Argentina’s working class is strong, with a unionisation rate of around 40 percent in the formal economy and a large left. The resistance began almost immediately, with huge protests and strikes kicking off across the country. This culminated in a general strike on 24 January, in which half a million people joined the accompanying protest in the capital Buenos Aires.
Shortly after, Milei withdrew his proposal from congress when it became clear it did not have the votes to pass. The huge protests over the last five months have defied the anti-protest laws and rendered certain aspects of them a dead letter.
With his initial attempt to unleash a major attack on the entire working class defeated, Milei has changed tack. He is now targeting specific sections of workers, such as the public sector, while trying to pass a watered-down version of his original bill. 
The Argentine public sector has a proud history of resistance and remains well unionised. Over recent years it has won progressive reforms, such as minimum employment quotas for women and transgender and disabled people.
In response to the attacks, some public sector unions have gone on strike and taken direct action. During a national day of protest on 3 April, ATE workers pushed through police lines and occupied several government buildings in various cities, where they held open assemblies. Two days later, ATE followed up with a nationwide strike and a march on the Ministry of Economy.
State workers from the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA) have held large assemblies and protests for several months. Argentine cinema is world famous and plays an important cultural role in the country. Employing around 700,000 people, INCAA has long been in the firing line of conservatives for economic and ideological reasons.
“There is a tradition of independent cinema in our country that is also recognised and valued globally, which allows for storytelling from a diversity of perspectives, including critiques of the current political power”, wrote a group of INCAA delegates in a recent press release. “All of this is what they want to destroy in order to reduce Argentina to a cheap location for Hollywood productions.”
Inside the union movement, the socialist left has built itself into a considerable force. For instance, in Córdoba, the second most populous province, the left ran together in union elections last August and won the capital city section of the Union of Educators of the province, defeating two other campaigns. This section of the union has 16,000 members, and the whole union has 43,000 members out of around 80,000 teachers in the region.
But despite some victories for the left, the union movement is overwhelmingly dominated by Peronism, the political movement that occupies the space from centre left to centre right and has governed the country most of the time since the 1980s.
Socialist organisations, including the MST, are attempting to organise the unions’ rank-and-file members and encourage a more combative approach. Since Milei’s election, they have called public meetings, participated in large assemblies of workers and marched as a strong column independent of the union bureaucracy at the general strike in January.
“We believe that it is necessary to go to a large assembly of all state workers to define the necessary plan of action. There should be a new strike of 48 or 72 hours in the coming weeks. No action should be ruled out; we must continue to grow and think about the radicalisation of the struggle”, said Rando.
Public sector workers are not up against just Milei’s government. They face significant obstacles in the union bureaucracy, which is intimately tied to the Peronists. It has refused to call strikes in certain workplaces and industries, and even when it has called them, has not seriously organised and prepared workers. Instead, it routinely tries to channel workers’ anger and frustration into electoral campaigns for the Peronists, much as the Australian union movement does for the Labor Party.
The bureaucracy also overrides decisions made by the rank and file. For example, in the week prior to Milei taking office, delegates from ATE Capital (the Buenos Aires section) voted for a protest. But three days before it was to begin, the union’s general secretary announced that it would be replaced by a press conference in which union leaders simply requested a meeting with Milei.
 Despite this approach from the bureaucracy, the unrelenting attacks on key sections of workers have compelled it to call a second general strike for 9 May.
The political situation in Argentina remains open. Milei is determined to attack workers, the union bureaucracy refuses to organise a prolonged strike campaign, and the misery of mass poverty is a heavy burden on workers’ shoulders. But two general strikes in Milei’s first five months signal the willingness of the working class to resist his agenda.

Argentine public sector workers take on Milei

Haiti’s most powerful gangs launched an insurrection in the capital, Port-au-Prince, last month. More than 50,000 have been displaced from the capital as homes, schools, libraries and more have been destroyed by fire and bullets.
Gangs already controlled 80-90 percent of Port-au-Prince and various arterial roads across the country. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime estimated in 2023 that “23 major gangs operate in Port-au-Prince ... and alongside these, another 70 smaller”. While usually at war with one another, many have united in a political front called Viv Ansanm.
Viv Ansanm raided and burnt police stations and prisons on 29 February, releasing thousands of prisoners. Gang members launched an ongoing siege of the Presidential National Palace. A week later, an attempted takeover of the Toussaint Louverture International Airport forced the resignation of de facto Prime Minister and acting President Ariel Henry.
Henry, a widely despised figure, travelled to Kenya in late February hoping to secure armed personnel for deployment in Haiti. Armed international support has been a long-term goal for Henry, whose power rested on police repression and diplomatic support from the West. The airport siege left Henry stranded in Puerto Rico. With no ability to govern and security forces overwhelmed, the USA and Caribbean regional organisation (CARICOM) dropped Henry in favour of a new Presidential Council (CP).
The CP is a national unity government including members from parties aligned with a recent anti-government movement, business representatives and politicians from the pro-Henry camp. As personalities from all sides have withdrawn multiple candidates and appealed various sections of its mandate—alongside delays by Henry himself in handing over official power—the CP has inspired little confidence that it will end the crisis.
Viv Ansanm is the main obstacle to the CP. Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, the group’s leader, hasn’t ruled out taking part in the political transition with the CP, saying to Sky News that he “respects CARICOM a lot”.
Despite seeking a seat at the table with business leaders and the USA, Chérizier casts himself and Viv Ansanm as Guevarist revolutionaries fighting imperialism. But he has not pulled the mass of Haitians behind him—the gangs rule the working-class slums with an iron fist. Their power comes from controlling many borders, ports and roads across Haiti, as well as being allegedly contracted out by right-wing governments.
This is not a new situation for Haitian workers and the poor. Their poverty has long been enforced by imperialist domination and authoritarian regimes that rely on secret police or paramilitary forces. 
The dynamic can be traced all the way back to the revolution of the 1790s and Haitian independence in 1804. In one of history’s most heroic mass revolts, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans overthrew the French plantation system. The French responded by sending “the largest expedition that had ever sailed from France ... 20,000 veteran troops, under ... Bonaparte’s ablest officers”, as Trinidadian activist and historian C.L.R. James described in The Black Jacobins.
The Haitian slaves defeated France, but the prospect of eternal French invasions eventually forced Haiti to agree to pay 150 million francs in compensation for property lost in the revolution (that property being the slaves). The debt “remained shackled” to cash crops, while “education, healthcare and infrastructure went practically unfunded”, wrote Anthony Phillips in an article for the Canada-Haiti Information Project. The resulting political instability left “a series of despotic presidents ... and assassination, foreign sponsored coup d’état or civil insurrection”.
This instability provided cover for the US to launch a military occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. This began as an operation to ensure Haitian payment of France’s debt and, the US argued, to create stability. Yet Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood describes how the US military “abolished an ‘undemocratic’ clause in the constitution that banned foreigners from owning property in Haiti, took over the National Bank ... expropriated land to create new plantations ... and forced labor that accompanied it”. 
All of this required murdering thousands of Haitians who rebelled against forced labour and the end of independence, and the establishment of forces that would keep the new, pro-US political system in place. That was primarily the Haitian military, which assumed “power for themselves ... following the election of a mildly progressive government in 1946”, as Hallward describes. 
Yet in 1957 the US found its most trustworthy strongman in François Duvalier, who took power when radical workers and students threatened the military regime. Duvalier, and his successor and son Jean-Claude, ended the instability through economic and military warfare.
The Duvalier dynasty was an anti-communist bulwark in Latin America and seen as an essential counterweight to Cuba. It was backed by the US, which sent warships to Haitian ports to ensure the smooth transfer of power from François to Jean-Claude in 1971.
The Duvaliers sold public industries to multinational sweatshops and abolished import controls to allow cheap US goods to flood the markets. Workers’ wages fell by 50 percent by the end of the 1980s. To maintain this system of extreme exploitation, the Duvalier dynasty established its most infamous institution of political repression, the Tonton Macoute.
Originally created as a personal paramilitary for Duvalier, the Macoute were drawn from the impoverished towns of Haiti with the promise of money and power. At times unofficially, but often openly, the Macoute acted as the nation’s secret police, brutalising and disappearing dissidents and murdering tens of thousands of students, workers, peasants and leftists.
Revolution eventually toppled the dictatorship in 1986. The strikes and popular organisations that smashed the Duvaliers terrified ruling-class interests in Haiti, and years of unsuccessful counter-revolution by the Haitian military forced the imperialist core to act.
In 2004, the United Nations sent a “stabilisation” mission to Haiti after, in its own words, “President Bertrand Aristide departed Haiti for exile in the aftermath of an armed conflict”. Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, who came to power through the mass movement against the Duvalier dynasty, “departed for exile” after a military coup that the UN defended by targeting those resisting it.
“After a demonstration of ten thousand people demanding the return of [Aristide] ... UN forces attacked the community and killed close to 30 people”, found a report by the North American Congress on Latin America and the Haiti Information Project in 2006. UN troops, led by Brazil and politically backed by Canada and the US, left behind death and disease (including a cholera outbreak caused by dumping sewage in drinking water), and not an ounce of democracy.
Since then, successive Haitian governments have implemented IMF austerity programs, stolen money allocated to public infrastructure and sold land to multinational companies. A telling example is the 2018 Digneron free-trade zone, which boasts of lacking corporate taxes and housing a golfing range. That same year, the government implemented IMF-advised cuts to fuel and food subsidies. The poverty resulting from these policies is “leading both girls and boys to join armed gangs, with 30-50 percent of gang members estimated to be underage recruits”, according to a Plan International report released last month.
These right-wing governments have brutally repressed the Haitian working class to secure their own rule. Assassinated ex-President Jovenel Moïse had police using live ammunition and tear gas against anti-government demonstrations and is alleged to have consistently used gangs as a personal paramilitary force, much like François Duvalier. A Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic study on the Moïse government’s ties to organised crime alleges that multiple government officials either “furnished weapons and vehicles” to the gangs or paid them “to put an end to anti-government protests”. 
The provision of public services and welfare has been handed to foreign aid missions and NGOs that provide little to those who need it. Following the 2010 Haitian earthquake, the largest recipient of US aid was the $300 million Caracol industrial park designed for sweatshops. The Red Cross, according to a 2015 NPR article, “says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 [Haitian] people, but the number of permanent homes the charity has built is six”.
The current crisis is linked to years of foreign powers underdeveloping Haiti and backing corrupt, authoritarian regimes that have fostered the growth of powerful gangs. All that has changed is that the gangs have outgrown their benefactors and asserted their role as power brokers. None of these forces want to improve the lives of regular Haitians or engage the mass popular movement that has been fighting for a more dignified life for the last six years.
Just as the crisis recalls Haiti’s colonial and imperial history, the solution will have to recall Haiti’s formidable revolutionary traditions.

Johnny Gerdes

Who’s to blame for the crisis in Haiti?

Amid extreme social and economic crisis and a brutal austerity package proposed by far-right President Javier Milei, the Argentine working class won an important victory last month: the government withdrew a bill that proposed sweeping privatisations of state-owned firms, budget cuts and attacks on labour rights, among other things. 
On the day of the vote in the lower chamber of the Congress, there were tense scenes in Buenos Aires. Thousands of protesters in front of the building, led by the left, resisted pepper spray and batons from police. Inside, Milei’s party, Liberty Advances (LLA), and its congressional allies, who lack a majority, tried to convince a centrist bloc to support the bill. Initially they were successful, with the bill passing “in general”. But when it came to a vote on each chapter, resulting in successive defeats, LLA withdrew the bill.
The bill was the centrepiece of Milei’s austerity package, which makes its defeat a significant setback. Further, to get the bill passed “in general”, he had to water it down and remove more than half of the articles in the original version.
But despite the government’s defeat, which was propelled by a huge general strike followed by mass protests around the country, Milei’s far-right agenda is by no means buried.
Annual inflation is running at nearly 250 percent, and the poverty rate has increased from 45 percent in December to 57 percent. Almost every day, there is a new attack on workers’ living standards. After the legislative setback, Milei announced cuts to public transport subsidies, which will result in bus and subway fares rising by more that 360 percent in coming months. He has also announced cuts to pensions. The most reactionary LLA legislators also introduced a bill to criminalise abortion. While Milei distanced himself from this, it gives an indication of the type of social policies his party wants to impose on Argentina.
The government retains the backing of a considerable section of the Argentine capitalist class and has strong support from the international capitalist class. For example, the International Monetary Fund has released billions of dollars in emergency loans and has praised Milei. Further, a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece was titled “America needs a Javier Milei”, while other articles talk of global investors’ enthusiasm at the prospects of getting their hands on Argentine public assets.
This is why they support Milei’s no-holds-barred austerity drive. But he faces obstacles. First, several of his proposed laws or aspects of them have been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. Second, his lack of a congressional majority means he has to rely on a centrist bloc to pass legislation. This bloc has proved difficult to win over. Even members of the coalition allied to Milei voted against the bill. However, they largely criticise the means rather than the ends, seeing his approach as authoritarian by trying to assume legislative powers and govern under a state of emergency.
The biggest obstacle for Milei, however, is arguably the working class. But it is far from a unified opposition. Large sections of workers voted for Milei and accept the idea that he should be allowed to implement his proposals. Milei has made direct appeals to this group by claiming that a monthly inflation rate under 25 percent should be a cause for celebration and proof his plan is working. In January, this was achieved with monthly inflation at 20.6 percent.
However, there is a sizeable minority of the working class, not uncommonly under the influence of the socialist left, that views Milei’s plans for what they are—an attempt to make the working class pay for the crisis of Argentine capitalism and give public assets to international capitalists. A key group within this minority are cultural sector workers, who have held large, open assemblies in which debates are held about how to organise resistance to the government’s attacks. Similar processes are playing out among other groups of workers.
But the working class also faces obstacles—principally the trade union bureaucracy, which has so far refused to call a second general strike. Despite the left being strong enough independently to move into action a minority of the most combative workers, a full-scale general strike still requires a call from the major union confederations. Consequently, the slogans of the left continue to be demands on the bureaucracy (“General strike and plan of action”) and against Milei (“Until Milei’s defeat”).
Ultimately, the struggle to defeat Milei and his far-right agenda will not be won easily or quickly, nor through the withdrawal of any particular bill. It will be a drawn-out process involving partial victories and defeats, and lasting throughout his presidency.

The fight continues in Argentina

A general strike against Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, rocked the country on 24 January, just 45 days into his new government’s term. By mid-morning, the plaza outside the National Congress building in Buenos Aires, the capital, was packed. More than half a million people turned up to protest—striking workers, the unemployed, representatives from neighbourhood assemblies, people mobilised by social justice organisations and left-wing political groups. 
Streets leading to the plaza were packed so tight with people that it was hard to move. Cheering and singing tyre factory workers, throwing water across each other, were half drowned out by drumming and chanting from all different directions of the mobilisation. Amid the chanting, smoke rose from barbecues, carrying the smell of choripán (a type of sausage), schnitzel, bacon and eggs. Vendors hawked Coke bottles carried atop platters balanced on their heads; workers crouched to pour maté, a staple Argentinian tea. 
The country is in crisis, inflation being in triple figures and the country now the largest debtor to the International Monetary Fund. In late December, Milei announced privatisations, closures of government departments, attacks on workers’ rights and crackdowns on civil liberties. He is supported by the Argentine capitalist class and the country’s creditors. 
Previous presidents have attempted to wind back economic, social and democratic rights, but have been stymied by mass opposition. Milei’s attacks are an attempt to settle everything—to do in Argentina what conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did in Britain in the 1980s: destroy the confidence of the working class and defeat the unions so that the rich can shape the economy and society without opposition. 
On the day of the strike, nothing else was news. After the trains carried the stragglers home before grinding to a halt as the drivers finally got to participate in the shutdown, television screens across the country were filled with commentary. Security Minister Patricia Bullrich insisted that the demonstration was small and insignificant. But according to the main trade union federation, the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), more than 1.5 million participated in protests across the country. 
The strike was a show of force by the diverse social layers that have entered the struggle against the new president. For example, most of the plaza in Buenos Aires was filled by huge contingents of piqueteros—unemployed and precariously employed people who rely on subsidies, including food and social services, distributed through government schemes known as social plans. It’s possible there were equal numbers of piqueteros and organised workers at the strike demonstration in the capital.
Large parts of the country were paralysed by the strike. The nationalised airline, Aerolineas Argentinas, was <a href="https://www.semana.com/mundo/articulo/paro-nacional-en-argentina-vuelos-cancelados-bancos-cerrados-y-una-multitud-frente-al-congreso/202427/">forced to cancel</a> more than 300 flights and reschedule another 26. Banks closed their doors from noon. State department workers had a huge presence, and many teachers and health workers joined the strike. Ford, Toyota and Peugeot car factories were shut. 
Yet there were limitations. It was a huge show of force, but it was also considerably smaller than what the unions have been capable of mobilising in the past. 
The CGT announced the strike a month in advance, and other trade union federations announced that they would join it. But the CGT is highly bureaucratic and run by industrially conservative Peronists. “Peronism” takes its name from Juan Perón, a military officer who governed Argentina several times between 1946 and 1974. Ideologically, Peronism is associated with state intervention into the economy and “national independence”. Politically, it spans the spectrum from the centre right to the centre left. The more left-wing variants add social justice and human rights into the nationalist mix. 
When in government, Perón handed big concessions to the workers’ movement while forcibly taking over the unions, killing and kidnapping left-wing rivals. But two Peronist governments were overthrown by right-wing military dictatorships, which has given Peronism a democratic gloss. Photos of Perón’s wife Evita are everywhere in Argentina, especially in the homes of progressive women. 
Peronism is comparable to Laborism in Australia in that it maintains a tight hold over the union bureaucracy. But there are important differences. While the Labor Party and the European social democratic parties emerged from, or were part of founding, the workers’ movement, Peronism has always been dominated by members of the ruling class.
The Peronist union bureaucracy didn’t do the detailed organising work necessary to convince large sections of workers to participate in the strike. In many places, the CGT mobilised only union delegates rather than the entire workforce. The bureaucracy is afraid of its own working-class base and doesn’t call demonstrations that might get out of its control. It wanted the demonstration on the day of the strike to be weighted towards workplace delegates, who are more loyal to the leadership.
So while the strike and demonstration were big in absolute terms, in relative terms they were still modest—half a million out of a population of 15.6 million in Buenos Aires, for example. 
Argentina has various revolutionary socialist organisations. Their membership numbers are in the thousands, rather than tens or hundreds of thousands, making them substantially weaker than the Peronist machine. But when the groups work together, they have considerable influence and are capable of meaningfully intervening into mass politics. That the general strike was held at all was partially a result of the left’s pressure on the CGT leaders. 
The Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST) is a useful case study. The three main projects of its members before the strike were: convincing as many of their workmates as possible to join the strike, leading mass rank-and-file assemblies and protests of arts sector workers and building a coalition of diverse groups to provide ongoing political leadership in the struggle. 
Mobilising workers for the strike wasn’t straightforward. More than 50 percent of people, including large numbers of workers, voted for Milei in November. Because most of his attacks haven’t been implemented yet, and because the economic crisis long preceded him, many don’t view the new president as a threat to their wellbeing and haven’t broken from him. In the lead-up to 24 January, union delegates from the left put in long, detailed work to convince their workmates to attend. 
“As soon as the strike was announced, we began to hold meetings and tours through the workplace discussing the need to strike”, Cesar Latorre, an MST member and lead delegate at a private hospital, told Red Flag. “In the first weeks, the debates were minor, but as the date approached, the debates became highly politicised.”
Latorre and his delegate team spent hours in each hospital department responding to questions and explaining the purpose of the strike. 
“The first difficulty was the refusal of one sector to mobilise and stop work because the strike was being called by the CGT after a long time of the federation doing nothing. Then there were other workers who supported Milei’s government and said we had to let him govern”, Latorre said. 
Some sections of workers joined the independent contingents, or “columns”, led by the revolutionary socialist parties around the country. In Buenos Aires, many thousands of people joined the left-wing “multi-sectoral” column organised through meetings and assemblies prior to the strike. It was initiated by Syndicalismo Combativo, a forum of union delegates who are members of socialist organisations. It is normal for that group to march together, but at the general strike they were joined by an unusually large number of others. 
Syndicalismo Combativo planning meetings included representatives of social justice organisations, unaligned piqueteros, retirees, neighbourhood assemblies and human rights organisations. 
Days before the strike, a prominent rank-and-file group of arts sector workers, in a mass assembly of more than 600, voted to join the left contingent. Members of the MST led the argument in the assembly. This led to other organisations, including a prominent abortion rights group, announcing they would also join the contingent. Tyre workers voted in assemblies to join it, as did a section of railway workers. Around 3,000 people from various neighbourhood committees met early to join the left column, but couldn’t get through the packed crowd to reach it.
Claudio Mora, an MST member delegate in the National Directive Commission of the tyre factory union, explained to Red Flag during the strike: 
“The strike was voted on in assemblies in each of the factories. Our strike won’t end at the same time as the CGT’s action—we will stay out until tomorrow at six in the morning. We are in the independent column because there is a need for a continuity of the struggle until we defeat Milei’s plans.
“The tyre union is strong, so we have a safeguard in our contracts to protect us from inflation, which means that we don’t lose as much from our salaries as the other workers. But our fundamental task is to be present and to lead, and try to give confidence to all the other sections of workers. That’s partly in terms of economic outcomes, but also in terms of organisation. We want to help encourage other workers to overcome the situation that they are in today, where the union bureaucrats control their workplaces. Instead, we are encouraging new delegates, new internal commissions, a new body of fighters to emerge, who also dedicate themselves, in addition to the union, to politics.”
A new cycle of struggle has begun in Argentina. On 20-21 December, enormous and spontaneous night-long protests shocked the wealthy. After that, however, there were no mass mobilisations until the left and the unions called demonstrations. But neighbourhood assemblies emerged in scattered suburbs of Buenos Aires and other parts of the country. They were much smaller than during the radicalisation of 2001, but undeniably real. The 24 January general strike was led by the union bureaucracy, but it opened a space for rank-and-file assemblies and for debates in some workplaces, into which the socialist organisations intervened. 
Struggles have risen and fallen in the last twenty years all over the world. But without revolutionary parties, even the bravest militants have been confined to a role akin to foam on a raging ocean. In Argentina, the construction of revolutionary socialist organisations is under way. To beat the conservative mass political forces, they will need to grow significantly. But they are of a size that enables them to intervene meaningfully. This makes the situation in Argentina more dynamic and open than in many other parts of the world.

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