Thousands protest Macri's 1000% utility rate hikes across Argentina.
Argentine President Mauricio Macri faced the largest demonstrations against his administration yet, as large crowds gathered yesterday in dozens of public squares and intersections across the county to decry the steep utility rate and fare hikes imposed by the government since April.
The “Ruidazo” (big noise) protests followed a series of decrees by the right-wing Macri administration that that both rescinded subsidies used by utility companies to keep rates down, as well as deregulating the rates themselves. The result has been rate increases that, despite administration assurances that they would be no higher than 300% and a separate Macri decree limiting them to 400%, have often reached 1000% or more above last year's rates.
The first protests were seen in the small but central Plaza de la República square, at the Corrientes and 9 de Julio intersection where the Obelisk stands. Leftist parties and Kirchnerist organizations initially joined unaffiliated individuals and groups with banners against the hikes. The protests, however, later spread to intersections across Buenos Aires - including many middle-class areas that had strongly supported Macri until recently.
Protests were also registered in the Greater Buenos Aires districts of Lanús, Avellaneda, and La Matanza, as well as in cities such as Bariloche, Córdoba, La Plata, Mar del Plata, Mendoza, Salta, San Juan, Santa Fe, Santiago del Estero and Tucumán. On Twitter, the #Ruidazo hashtag was the number one trending topic in Argentina for several hours.
It is currently winter in Argentina, and numerous protesters showed news cameras their current gas bills - often 2000-3000 pesos ($135-200), or approximately ten times more than the same time last year. The median monthly full-time salary in Argentina as of March is 16,500 pesos ($1,100).
Macri's Chief of Staff, Marcos Peña, justified the hikes, chastising his fellow Argentines for “using gas like rich people.”
Much of the public's ire, however, was focused on Energy Minister Juan José Aranguren, who has come under fire not only for the severity of the rate hikes; but also for having manifest conflicts of interest as a longtime CEO of and large shareholder in Shell Argentina, which has raked in record profits as a result. Aranguren still has the backing of the president, and changes in the cabinet are not seen as likely in the short term.
The Macri administration remains opposed to canceling the hikes despite a number of court injunctions ordering utility companies to roll back rates to March levels. In each case, the courts have pointed out that the increases are not only “unreasonable” but illegal because they were never submitted to public comment, as the law requires for all large rate hikes.
The rate hikes are part of a broader, IMF-endorsed austerity package which Macri defends as a way to trim the nation's growing budget deficit, which reached $25 billion last year (4% of GDP). Critics, however, point out that because the massive rate hikes also affect schools, hospitals, government buildings, and many other public institutions, the net savings would be at most $1 billion - a figure dwarfed by the $10 billion in tax cuts Macri enacted for agroexporters, large corporations, and the well-to-do.
The rate hikes have also contributed to a doubling in overall inflation to 47% a year as of June - twice the rate under Macri's populist predecessor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Macri had made inflation a key campaign issue in last year's election, which he won narrowly.
The Church and Peronism
Two of the biggest sources of potential dissent since Macri took office last December, Peronists and the Catholic Church, also spoke out against the hikes yesterday, denouncing their impact on the middle and lower classes and on small- and medium-sized companies.
“Hikes this big in utility rates affect all the population; but especially in the lower-middle class, because they have a fixed income but no access to the benefits that protect the poorest,” the president of the Pastoral Commission of the Argentine Synod (CEA), Jorge Lozano, said yesterday.
The leader of the Justicialist Party (the party representing Peronism), José Luis Gioja, had even stronger words. “The governors are all fuming and it is not because their heating systems are switched on,” he said in reference to Macri's recent assertion that “Argentines like to turn their heat on in winter so they can walk around the house in their t-shirts and underwear.”
At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/218096/thousands-protest-rate-hikes-across-country
