Mauricio Macri fights Argentina’s tradition of handouts for votes
The president is changing the country’s political culture
JUST off Leonardo da Vinci Avenue, a long street of modest shops and foul-smelling gutters in the district of La Matanza outside Buenos Aires, stands La Juanita, a co-operative. Founded by unemployed workers in 2001, it occupies a former school. It runs a free kindergarten, a microcredit programme, a call centre and, nearby, a large community bakery, all with the aim of helping the unemployed get work. Since Mauricio Macri, a former businessman of the centre-right, was elected as Argentina’s president in 2015 La Juanita has become part of a political experiment.
La Matanza is in the heart of the conurbano, a sprawl of poor and crime-ridden suburbs around Argentina’s capital which contains some 10m people. It was a bastion of support for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the populist Peronist president from 2007 to 2015. Peronism long controlled the conurbano through clientelism, providing handouts in return for political loyalty. This system stopped offering social mobility, argues Héctor “Toty” Flores, a founder of La Juanita. The conurbano has become home to an underclass preyed on by drug gangs and dirty cops.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "The battle for the conurbano"
From the March 24th 2018 edition
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