By IWU-FI
Against all attacks on working people, we join the Federal March of Anti-fascist and Anti-racist Pride
Milei’s statements at the Davos forum against the LGBTQI+ community and women’s rights provoked a massive reaction of repudiation. The assembly held in Lezama Park overflowed with comrades who resolved to call to take to the streets and bring the repudiation of the government to the centre of national political power in the so-called ‘federal march of anti-fascist and anti-racist pride’. Together with the assembly in Parque Lezama, massive assemblies were held all over the country. The day before these aberrant statements, Milei threatened to chase ‘the lefties’ ‘to the last corner’, a direct attack against all of us who are proudly left-wing.
Milei’s government has been carrying out an attack, not only in his speeches, but also with measures against the working class, the popular sectors, the youth, the environment, health, education and culture. This ranges from massive and discriminatory layoffs, reduction of public budgets and elimination of entire departments, including the emptying of hospitals like the ‘Bonaparte’, an unprecedented attack and persecution of the independent ‘piquetero‘ movement, layoffs at the ‘Lieu de mémoire‘, the devaluation of wages, and an incessant growth of poverty, added to the breaking of collective agreements and closures of entire plants with the collaboration of the union bureaucracy of the CGT (General Confederation of Labour) and the CTA (Argentine Workers’ Central Union). And it has deployed a plan of criminalisation and repression of protests and demands to impose these measures. The attack on the pensioners is another example of the generalised attack on all workers in Argentina.
With regard to the LGBTQI+ community, the government is proceeding with the emptying of support spaces, such as the 144 call-line, dismissing workers from the trans labour quota, removing the right to HIV treatment and limiting access to hormones, which leads to the death of many comrades. They have already announced the presentation of a project to liquidate the classification of gender violence (femicide) in the Penal Code, giving the green light from the highest political power to intensify the murders of women and dissidents due to sexist and patriarchal violence, guaranteeing impunity for hate crimes.
The fact that the President has made homophobic, transphobic, misogynist and sexist statements at an international forum is no coincidence. It is in line with Donald Trump and other far-right governments, who have also attacked the women’s and diversity movement. In the same way, he has taken from Trump’s script the initiative to launch an offensive against immigrants, announcing a fence on the border of Salta (where Bullrich’s gendarmerie murdered the smuggler Fernando Gómez in December), insisting on excluding migrants from free public health and education, and presenting a bill that would make it difficult for migrants who live and work here to obtain residency. While the La Libertad Avanza government’s viciousness towards the LGBTQI+ community, women and the left is nothing new, it is very clear that it is unloading the economic crisis and the brutal adjustment on the backs of all working families.
The struggles of women and the LGBTQI+ community have won many victories through mobilisation and protest. However, over time, the application of the laws that were won has been undermined. The policy of co-opting and institutionalising the struggles to take them off the streets and, as a consequence, the paralysis of the application of the conquests in the last government of Alberto Fernandez, which led to the emptying and lack of response from the former Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity, laid the foundations for today’s libertarians to try to sweep away all the rights won through struggle.
In this sense, we denounce the parties that actively collaborate to defend the ‘governability’ of Milei, voting for his laws – including the change of the electoral calendar as part of a reactionary political reform in the service of the ultra-right government – and disappearing from any action of protest to confront him. This is true for its political representation, but also for its actors in every movement of struggle, from the trade union bureaucracy to the politics of the sectors linked to Peronism, the PRO Party (Republican Proposal) and the radicals (Radical Civic Union), who ended up accepting the proposal of mobilisation on February 1st in the face of the massiveness and combativeness of the assembly in Parque Lezama on January 25th with thousands of activists.
The Left Unity Front (Frente de Izquierda-Unidad) is mobilising massively this Saturday, February 1st, to confront all the attacks of Milei’s government, to confront this government and its policies as a whole. The banners and actions of struggle are trying to be diverted towards parliamentarism by the same people who have already governed behind the backs of the workers, youth, women, dissidents and all the exploited. But the fight is now.
This Saturday let us mobilize massively towards Plaza de Mayo and all the squares of the country against this obscurantist and McCarthyist advance, and to support each and every one of the hard fights that the working class is facing. We raise the necessity for continuity with new united measures and preparing massive street mobilizations for 8M (International Women’s Day) and 24M (Day of the Military coup in ’76).
We propose the need to unite these struggles with all the causes of the exploited and oppressed people, on the road to preparing a national plan of struggle and a general strike to defeat the policies and brutal austerity measures of the ultra-right government of Milei and the IMF, along with the entire regime on which it relies upon to impose its reactionary and repressive policies of hunger and surrender.
We propose the need to unite these struggles with all the causes of the exploited and oppressed people, on the road to preparing a national plan of struggle and a general strike to defeat the policies and brutal austerity measures of the ultra-right government of Milei and the IMF, along with the entire regime on which it relies upon to impose its reactionary and repressive policies of hunger and surrender.
