The definitions used were many and varied: “looting”, “piranha robberies”, “attacks on shops” and even the legal accusation “robbery in a town and in a gang”. Each protagonist of political news chose a different description to explain the events of the last week where different groups of people were seen entering shops and taking everything in their path. The image was a latent memory of the looting of 2001, which accompanied the end of Convertibility.
This time they multiplied in different provinces. They began in Córdoba and Mendoza, during the long weekend, and then shot up through Chaco, Neuquén and Río Negro, and had their maximum explosion in the Buenos Aires suburbs on Tuesday the 22nd. That night, the Minister of Security of the Province, Sergio Bernisummoned an important part of the police to prevent looting.
Crack
Politics once again became an all against all after the looting. Sergio Massa, from the United States, said that these were crimes that were going to be investigated and even encouraged merchants to report them in order to access “non-reimbursable” aid of up to 7 million pesos so that they can replace the stolen merchandise. The idea of removing the word “looting” and framing the facts as a crime seeks to prevent the robberies from being associated with despair due to the economic crisis and being attributed, instead, to criminal gangs that steal for pleasure and not for hunger .
In a more extensive twist, the presidential spokeswoman Gabriela Cerrutti first he accused that it was “false images”, of previous looting, and then he said that it was “an operation armed by the people of javier milei whose objective is to generate destabilization”. He also accused Patricia Bullrich. Milei responded and said that Cerruti’s comment was “a matter of projection: they have some experience in this type of looting operations to overthrow governments.” Accusations without evidence were commonplace these days.
The governor Axel Kicillof He spoke on Wednesday the 23rd and said that they had arrested 94 people and that the looting had begun “to be encouraged with false complaints on social networks.” Patricia Bullrich took aim at the piquetero leader Raul Castells. “If he said: I was the one who looted, let the police go look for him, let a prosecutor act, because a confession from one party, a survey of evidence, he himself is saying so,” he said.
The looting in Argentina is within the possible. It is a reality with which one lives and a phenomenon that is revived at each stage of crisis. There were in 1989 with hyperinflation, then in the 2001 crisis, then in 2012 and 2013. And in all the years in which there was no looting, they were still expected.
looks
historians Gabriel Di Meglio and Sergio Serulnikov They wrote the book “The long history of looting in Argentina, from Independence to our days.” They remember a revealing episode about how politics came to naturalize the phenomenon. “On the first business day of 2017, a short box titled ‘Controls, dialogue and fresh money, the recipe for a year-end without looting’ appeared in the Clarín newspaper. It reported that Mauricio Macri government officials admitted having distributed some 10 billion pesos to mayors, “piquetero bosses” and social organizations in the Buenos Aires suburbs as “insurance” –as they defined it– to avoid social spillovers”, the historians wrote and later reflected: “What is suggestive of the news is less the negotiation, which in effect guaranteed an uneventful end of the year, than the fact that the looting, or the threat of looting, had become a component of the public conversation about budget allocation and social order”.
The decision of the macrismo to cover the social movements with banknotes thinking that this way they would avoid conflicts could have been a mistaken policy if seen from the prism of the CONICET researcher, Francisco Longa, author of “History of the Evita Movement”. Longa maintains that in 2001, in the municipalities where there were social movements, the possibility of looting was reduced, because the mission of organizations such as the Evita Movement is restrain that citizen so that he does not join a mob that is going to rob for hunger.
Why looting is possible? The sociologist and researcher at Conicet, Mariana Heredia, a specialist in inequality issues, takes this theme as a central theme among the structural variables of Argentina. “Inequality added to poverty are structural conditions in Argentina that, during periods of high inflation, break out in the form of looting,” he maintains. “In the world there is inequality, even in Norway there is inequality, but the difference with regions like Argentina is that this inequality is added a very great poverty that worsens the picture”, synthesizes.
From historians to sociologists, they understand that looting is a complex phenomenon and that it must be approached from different perspectives. Meanwhile, in politics they only manage to blame each other.
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