The Argentina Experiment

Yorgos Avgeropoulos
2010-07-01

0
13 min

In December 2001, in Buenos Aires, great crowds of people are heading towards the historic square Plaza de Mayo. Argentina, once amongst the richest economies in the world, has gone bankrupt. The government has resigned and Argentina’s president, Fernando de la Rua, flees from the presidential residency in a helicopter, amidst a storm of enraged people clashing with the police, breaking banks, looting super markets and shouting “Out with the lot of them!” The 2001 social explosion marked the end of a neoliberal economic model which lasted 10 years and left a toll of 35 deaths (murdered by the police and the private guards of the banks), 30,000 collateral damages (suicides, heart and brain attacks) and approximately 20,000,000 (over half the population) submerged in poverty and misery.