ARGENTINE CRISIS

Latin American Newsletters 8 January 2002

New unemployment benefit leaves 14m in the cold.

The President's wife, Hilda González de Duhalde, launched the new 'heads of household' programme yesterday, which will give 200 pesos per month to 1m unemployed heads of household with children under the age of 18. But, say grass-roots activists, with 15m poor and 4m people living in extreme poverty, the coverage will be woefully inadequate.

González de Duhalde gave few details of the programme and there is still uncertainty over its starting date, but thousands of people have already put their names down in the hope of receiving the monthly sum. Isabel Zanutich, the president of the Sindicato de Amas de Casa de Santa Fé (SAC), a grass-roots organisation that campaigns for government aid to be given directly to female heads of households, predicts trouble when thousands discover that they have not been chosen.

'There were middle-class people there as well as the poor. There was an unemployed bank clerk in a suit standing next to a poor woman with no shoes,' she said.

While the situation has cooled since the 20 December protests that toppled President Fernando de la Rúa and the subsequent outburst that wrested power from Adolfo Rodríguez Saá a week later, a 'tense calm' still pervades.

On Monday, protesters set fire to a Mendoza province government building. There are still sporadic reports of workers taking over factories and office blocks, and of planned public-sector
workers' marches.

The budget for the unemployment benefit is 200m pesos for the year (US$143m). This is dwarfed by the US$5bn that the government expects to raise with a new tax on oil exports in order to compensate banks for losses when 'peso-ising' debts under US$10,000.

In good times, SAC campaigned for wages for women's housework, but its priority is now to secure sufficient food for all families. The price of bread, meat and milk has already crept up, and
inflation is expected to accelerate as the peso depreciates following the end of the convertibility
régime, which has pegged the peso one-to-one with the US dollar for the past ten years.

UNACCEPTABLE CAVEATS: The first lady gave few details of the unemployment benefit, although she did mention that beneficiaries would have to commit to sending their children under the age of 18 to school. With more than 40% of the working population employed in the informal economy, where the legal working age is frequently overlooked, this could rule out poor households with adolescent wage earners.

A greater fear for many of those who are lining up to register is that, like the work-scheme plan before it (the so-called 'planes trabajar'), recipients may be asked to work for their pay. 'Women, some with six or seven children, don't want to work for four hours a day in exchange for their 200 pesos, which is now worth only about US$170 per month', the head of SAC said.

And like the 'planes trabajar', another fear is that the new subsidy will be used politically, and
confined to more volatile areas, such as the outskirts of Buenos Aires or Rosario, to mollify the most vocal of protesters.

NO ALTERNATIVES: Zanutich, echoing the protesters' posters and banners over the past few
months, speaks of there being a lack of confidence in the current régime, but admits that there is
currently no viable alternative. At least one Buenos Aires restaurant has banned politicians from
entering.

Anti-corruption campaigner Elisa Carrió of the left-wing opposition party, ARI, holds some sway
with a population tired of seeing the same politicians recover from damming allegations of
corruption or mismanagement, only to be wheeled back into power. But when it came to voting in the legislative elections last October, she won little popular support.

Latin American Newsletters- 08/01/2002 @ 16:37:25
Email: diana.rodriguez@latinnews.com 

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