Argentineans are obviously no strangers to organized political protest,  and even relative political stability doesn’t seem to have quenched their flames. While strolling around the government buildings in the Centro district – the Casa Rosada, the Cabildo, etc. – we noticed vanloads of police setting up crowd control barricades, news trucks, and all the other signs of a Big To-Do… but all we saw in the park was a makeshift stage, and a set of posters (that were actually quite informative, even in Spanish) about the Falkland War and about Pinochet’s collusion with the British during said war.

“Huh,” we thought, then sat down for some mate. After our break, we decided to check out the sitch,  and things had changed considerably. A phalanx of police was arranged down Rivadavia, facing the Cabildo.

But what were they waiting for? Immediately next to us, a group of young men and women were aggressively tagging the white walls of the Cabildo with political slogans.

The walls were already be-sloganed, but the cops didn’t seem to give a damn one way or the other. Then we figured out why:

About three or four blocks down was the beginning of a  long procession of thousands of chanting and sign-waving people, seeming to stretch kilometers into the distance – students, teachers, retirees, children and parents, and many, many, many socialists. It was much better organized than any US protest I’d seen before, even the biggest anti-Iraq ones. Instead of lots of people with giant puppets or fringe organizations like ‘Vegans for Palestine’, it was massive and official-looking banners, drummers, and of course, security:

Don’t know whether the police had any issues with the balaclava-wearing, lead pipe- and wooden bat-wielding segment of the crowd, but I was amazed at how calm things remained on both sides… although we didn’t follow the march all the way back to the source to see the final outcome, we also didn’t hear about any massive riots or police brutality, either. I do give the city some credit for allowing this to run its course, instead of taking the typical US option of corralling people with barricades and horse cops, and randomly letting off steam with an occasional burst of tear gas, batons and mass arrests just for shits and giggles.

As expected, there was a lot of general venting about lingering government corruption and economic problems as usual (even if they look to be in better shape than us, these days). But the specific spark for this protest was the arrival of the second anniversary of the disappearance of Jorge Julio López, a witness testifying in a major human rights abuse case against a former government official – and this was further amplified by the apparently general dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of past human-rights abuses and the issue of los desaparecidos.

I’ve still found fairly little English-language information about the nature of the case, and I’m moderately puzzled at the confusing tangle of local politics. For example, lots of angry graffiti at the Cabildo about Mauricio Macri, Head of Government for the city of BA – including the hyperbolic “Macri es hijo de Franco” – although I can’t for the life of me figure out what exactly he’s done to piss off the balaclava-wearing set. Guess I’ve still got some Googling and reading to do… but I’ll also be curious to see if this is this gets any notable coverage in the local outlets, or if this sort of thing is just business as usual around here – a means for venting steam without actually going so far as toppling the government…