One of the most notable social and political transformations in Argentina in recent decades has been the growth of urban poverty and the organization of the poor into a powerful new social movement: the piqueteros. Federico M. Rossi has written what is certainly the definitive, most thoroughly researched study of the piqueteros from their origins to the present. Both exhaustive and exhausting in its detail—the welter of groups, acronyms, changing tactics, and shifting political alliances is at times overwhelming—it will stand unchallenged for some time as the essential point of reference for any study of the piqueteros and Argentine politics in general for these years.
Though the book begins with a theoretical discussion and review of the social movements literature, for most of the chapters it is a more of a history than anything else. The granular analysis of the piqueteros and their manifold organizations with distinct strategies and ideologies is among its most salient contribution. The story is surprisingly complex, beginning rather modestly with small protests in distant provinces such as Neuquén and Jujuy and then spreading to greater Buenos Aires, where the history has been played out most consequently though its geographic spread, constituting a truly nationwide social movement, perhaps the most important Latin America has seen in the last three decades. In both prose and many tables and diagrams, Rossi dissects the diverse piquetero organizations and the political networks they were enmeshed in. The story is also dynamic because a volatile economy and political instability led to the constant revising of strategies by state actors and the piqueteros.
The book offers many revelations: the Partido Justicialista's “deunionization” in the 1990s that provided opportunities for both a formerly marginalized left to insert itself into movements rooted in local struggles and local Peronist political bosses (punteros) who distributed government monies and administered anti-poverty relief programs; the” territorialization” of politics which empowered mayors and other local officials to negotiate alliances with the piqueteros and together serve as formidable interlocutors with the federal government; and the very success of the piquetero strategy which bred organizational divisions that undermined collective action, perhaps most dramatically revealed in the absence of the piquetero groups in the violent national protests of late 2001.
The book concludes with an interesting discussion of social movements in other Latin American countries and their differences from the piqueteros. In Brazil, that country's most important social movement was a rural-based one, the so-called Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST). The MST avoided the fragmentation of Argentina's piqueteros, but its modest achievements in land reform paradoxically differed from the massive program of unemployment subsidies won by the splintered piqueteros. In Argentina, a much deeper economic crisis, a weaker state, and greater political fragmentation permitted myriad alliances, combined with direct action tactics, that allowed the piqueteros to pressure for and acquire programs that were eventually adopted in Brazil, too. In Brazil, the state largely abandoned land redistribution, but in a more neocorporatist fashion, centrally directed by the federal government. On a more theoretical level, the contrast in trajectories highlights the political dimension and offers a signal contribution to the social movement literature pioneered by Sidney Tarrow and others discussed in the early chapters, making Rossi's book a noteworthy contribution, both theoretical and historiographical.
