Argentina adopted the world’s first gender quota law in 1991, mandating that political parties nominate women for 30 percent of the electable positions on their candidate lists.
On July 31st 2014 the clock ran out on the deadline for Argentina’s government to make a $539 million interest payment to the 93 percent of its bondholders which had agreed to debt restructuring in the years since the country’s 2001/2 economic and political crisis. At that time Argentina had been forced to declare the largest sovereign default in world history, but with the latest deadline having been missed, the South American nation is now once again in ‘technical default’ with the doom merchants forecasting profound economic upheaval.
As the specter of economic crisis continues to haunt Europe and the global north, a deepening and simultaneous crisis of representative democracy looks set to bring anti-system parties to power in Spain (Podemos) and Greece (Syriza) in the coming months.
In a recent article I discussed how the death of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman has fomented mass protests and suspicion throughout Argentina that the government might be complicit in his death. In this piece I provide evidence that the handling of Nisman’s death by the Fernandez administration may support the claim that Argentina continues to function as a delegative and not representative democracy.
En artículos anteriores he analizado las modalidades típicas de autogestión, en un caso, y los mecanismos que explican las formas concretas de movilización sobre las que se apoya la autogestión obrera.1 En este artículo se analiza el vínculo que existe, precisamente, entre la movilización social y la autogestión.
In Argentina, and elsewhere in Latin America, members of the middle and upper-middle classes tend to be the main spokespersons in public debates around the issue of citizens’ public safety (seguridad). Public discourse about urban violence tends to be dominated by those occupying privileged positions in the social structure – they are the ones who talk most about the issue because, presumably, they are the ones most affected by it.
The production, circulation and consumption of printed texts drew the contours of the political culture of socialism in times of the Second International.1 With the advent of mass politics, processes of institutionalization and nationalization of the Socialist Movement were facilitated by the growing presence of printed matter in the daily lives of an increasing number of people, linked to increased literacy rates and unprecedented expansion of journalism and publishing.
