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Related: About this forum'They don't think we're human': Buenos Aires market traders fight eviction
'They don't think we're human': Buenos Aires market traders fight eviction
Amy Booth
Mon 25 Mar 2019 10.06 EDT Last modified on Mon 1 Apr 2019 08.16 EDT
An unsettling quiet has fallen over a stretch of the usually noisy Feria de San Telmo Sunday market. Artisans should be lining these cobbled streets selling intricate macrame jewellery and Argentinian leather purses to crowds of tourists from all over the world. Deafening percussion bands, accompanied by dancers, and street vendors selling empanadas and arepas should be making their way up the road.
The market is one of the largest handicrafts and antiques fairs in Buenos Aires, popular with tourists and locals alike, and runs the length of Defensa, the main thoroughfare in the barrio of San Telmo.
But now the kerbs at this end of the fair are empty. The city government is evicting sellers in the name of “ordering” the space. Some had worked here for as many as 12 years.
Since sellers received the news in January that the authority had passed the reorganisation plan, they have held regular protest marches along the blocks where they used to work.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/25/they-dont-think-were-human-buenos-aires-violence-market-traders-protest-eviction
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sandensea
(21,639 posts)This is another big similarity Macri has with the last dictatorship:
Their policies drove thousands of employers - from corner stores to large factories and entire office buildings - into the ground within five years or less.
But when many of the laid-off inevitably tried to make a (meager) living in street fairs, they were often brutally pushed out by police.
Suffice it to say, benefiting speculators and large landowners, to the detriment of the real economy, creates massive poverty - and consequently, more need for an informal economy to help those impacted make ends meet.
Not that Macri could care less. He's reportedly yelling at his subordinates that "I don't need this. I could be in Sardinia!"
Well go on, Mauricio - live a little!
Thanks for posting this, Judi.
Judi Lynn
(160,545 posts)The last economic catastrophe shocked people around the world as a colossal wreck, inflicting so much suffering, hardship on multitudes of citizens. The fascists gave the next government just enough time to put the country back on solid ground and then started savaging the very people who rescued the economy, got them out of office and clearly is right back at work repeating the trip to hell in a handbasket.
Macri's odd complaint to his subordinates had to have been his subconscious way of informing them he already has plans to make himself scarce at any time, getting outta town before things get too hot for him.
That seems to happen a lot with dictators, doesn't it? Pinochet, suddenly appearing in London, Panama's Martinelli suddenly appearing in Italy, with no plans to return, Uribe, suddenly teaching classes at Georgetown, Fujimori, appearing in Japan, and resigning long distance, Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada & his Minister of Defense Carlos Sanchez Berzain surfacing in Florida after they massacred 50 indigenous Bolivians, etc., etc., etc. Macri unknowingly just unknowingly announced to lower officials that he'll be "in the wind," himself.
If they are so sure they are doing right by the people, why do they all vanish in a puff of smoke without a formal transition?
"I could be in Sardinia." Priceless!
