Piqueteros (Workers/Unemployment Movement in Argentina)

FEDERICO M. ROSSI

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements

Wiley-Blackwell

Año: 2013; p. 929 - 932

The piqueteros, or unemployed workers movement, is the main contentious actor in the resistance to the social consequences of neoliberalism and the struggle for reincorporation of the popular sectors (i.e., the poor and/or marginalized strata) into Argentina´s political arena. The name piqueteros (picketers) is based on the type of protest that made this movement publicly known -- the picket on the national roads. The origin and characteristics of the piqueteros movement are traceable to four main processes: (1) the social consequences of the collapse of industrialization by substitution of the imports model and the application of neoliberal reforms that produced a massive and fast deindustrialization from the 1980s; (2) the territorialization of politics since redemocratization as a result of the dissolution of the main corporatist arrangements for solving popular sectors´ claims; (3) the adaptation to a democratic setting of left-wing groups that had participated in armed struggle during the 1970s; and (4) the creation of territories for political organization without risks for unemployed people, by some unions, human rights organizations, and Catholic Church dioceses in the 1980s and 1990s.