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URBAN PICKETEERS BLOCK FINANCIAL DISTRICT
Por chegringo -
Thursday, Dec. 19, 2002 at 5:48 PM
"Change? Social change?"
At 9:00AM this morning, a group of about 1,000 people have kicked off the day's events with a "piquete urbano" in which they have blocked off part of the Buenos Aires financial district and are now singing, drumming and chanting Que Se Vayan Todos.
The mood is festive but determined, with four separate groups performing street theater, waving flags, and carrying signs that say Love vs. Capitalism, Picket Your Destiny, Another America is Posible, and other slogans. On one corner, the names of each person killed in Buenos Aires one year ago was called out while the crowd responded "Presente!". Then the crowd formed a circle and broke into a lively rhtymic version of Que Se Vayan Todos Este Pueblo Puede Solo, each person si nging out a different part of the chant.
An invocation was performed, and an elderly woman lay on the ground banging two pots while the crowd above her created a web with black and yellow streetblock tape. One man spray painted Hombres Devastando on the sidewalk in front of a nearby bank. (Men Devastating.) A young man with a t shirt saying What Are We Going To Do ABout the United States? clapped his hands, ,and a woman held aloft a cooking pot filled with holes that looked like it had been to every demonstration in Buenos Aires in the past year.
Two men and a woman wearing underwear and fig leaves danced through the crowd, while several people imitated the financial district street moneychangers, calling out "change? Social change? Change? World change?"
Despite warnings of repression, this is a joyful, lively demonstration in which even the rows of police guarding the banks are smiling and laughing.
"We wanted to organize something that was irrepressible," said one of the organizers.
The demonstrators plan on staying until 4PM.