“If they touch one of us, they touch us all” – The Left Berlin

Charly Fernandez is an Argentine activist and member of FOL (Frente de Organizaciones en Lucha), a social organization that works to strengthen the most marginalized families within the Argentine working class. FOL strives to organize itself and defend the rights of these families, with the aim of improving their material, social and cultural living conditions.

Since the election of Javier Milei, known for his feverish anarcho-capitalist fantasies, there has been a widespread media and discursive campaign against social organizations. The attack is centered on the belief that individuals receiving social assistance do not work, and they are portrayed as barriers to Argentina’s attempts to overcome its socio-economic challenges.

Nevertheless, FOL remains steadfast in its goals, which include advocating for fair employment with decent wages and working conditions, promoting gender equality, the empowerment of women and dissidents, and fighting for improved access to health care, education, housing and adequate living conditions. In addition, FOL is committed to defending the rights of indigenous peoples, children and youth, and advocating for human rights, access to culture and recreation.

Tell us more about yourself and when you started organizing and advocating for the rights of marginalized groups.

I have been an activist since I was quite young. I started during the process that began in Argentina with the meetings of 2001. This was during the closing of the convertibility cycle, the first wave of strong neoliberal measures and globalization.

Argentina’s exit was an exit from many social conflicts – very different from what is happening now. At that time there was a tendency to the left, with people registering in popular assemblies, taking over factories, and organizing soup kitchens and work cooperatives.

It was a time of great political participation and I was one of those young people who joined resistance meetings. We started to organize ourselves in a situation where our neighbors and families were suffering the consequences of years of neoliberal policies and unemployment.

What was the political movement like at that time? How did it develop?

These meetings rotated from more central locations to neighborhoods and the countryside, especially the slums of the city. My activism, however, was in Buenos Aires. The process in other provinces and even in the metropolitan area of ​​Buenos Aires was different, so we began to form a bond with comrades who came from movements of unemployed workers who had been organizing long before.

From that experience I got involved with a group of comrades until we formed FOL, Frente de Organizaciones en Lucha. This front is a mix of movements: the MTD (Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados), the MTR (Movimiento Teresa Rodríguez – also an MTD), and others. We are talking about the year 2000, 2001.

Today we are developing our organizations, but now we are present in almost all the provinces of the country. We have developed work cooperatives where many comrades work, from services to productive units to housing. We also have comrades who live in rural areas, and in these cases there are also food production cooperatives and other kinds of things that do not exist in the cities.

How are you today?

Today, social movements, and we in particular, do complex territorial work. It’s not that we just go to a soup kitchen or a popular dining hall. We have a framework of different spaces of intervention and spaces of health, gender and environment that promote rights and articulate struggles.

For over twenty years we have been winning partial victories. From those partial victories we have acquired rights that have often been transformed into instruments or government policies.

Are these organizations an alternative to what the state should do and provide for the population?

The lack of fundamental rights for colleagues to enter the formal labor market and access housing or health care means that social organizations are beginning to take over this role. We have often been accused of being a “para-state” or an outsourcing of the state. But what happens when we are not there? There is nothing. In reality, the alternative is narco-criminal gangs, as has happened in other places in Latin America.

One of the things we are discussing today with all politicians is: look, the pandemic has shown it. If social movements do not build territory, do not build community and are not part of the social network, narco-criminal gangs will emerge. We, the social organizations, have limited the development of these gangs and acted as a barrier. The most robust movements are more rural than urban.

Do you see similarities between the Argentine form of civil society organization and other social movements in Latin America?

I have had the opportunity to travel to other countries in Latin America and talk to comrades about this. The role we play is not against the state apparatus. The problem is that there is a territorial, armed, millionaire power (narco-criminal gangs), and the state is impotent. So, what we tell them is: do you think the drug traffickers will intervene, and then they will not try to play politics and to lead the country or the states?

That is what is happening in many places in Latin America. We see that there is a minimal democratic consensus, the realization that organizations are not part of the problem, but part of the solution.

What is the situation of the social movements in Argentina and Milei?

We have achieved child benefits, access to resources for gender-based violence in businesses, education, and funding to build popular neighborhoods. All of this has not been achieved because of the goodwill of the government in power, but because comrades have died fighting for it in the streets.

They call us the “CEOs of poverty.” We’re “poverty managers.” That’s the problem, right? But if you look at how the picketing movement started, how the social movements started, and all the rights that have been won in the neighborhoods over the years, of course they want to destroy us.

There was a minimum wage and all we did was raise the salary cap over all these years. We achieved child benefits, access to resources on gender violence in companies, education and funding to build popular neighborhoods. All this was not achieved because of the goodwill of the government in power, but because there were comrades who died fighting in the streets for this.

And, well, this is what the political class, the establishment and capital seem prepared to do: destroy and eliminate these rights. Milei has been sent to carry out this plan. But if we ask other sectors of politics, they will say exactly the same thing.

Is there a possibility of cooperation between these grassroots movements? Does it make sense to work together, even with these structural differences?

It is necessary. There is a clear coordination of the global far-right. It is not a coincidence that Milei comes to Spain to meet Vox (the far-right party in Spain), goes to meetings in the United States or is invited to Austria to receive an honorary title.

All of these societies and think tanks are part of the apparatus of these digital militias: devices and networks created to wage a cultural war of aggression and social control.

There is coordination, a kind of global far-right international action, financing itself, taking over states where they can. And they say it everywhere. Milei said it in Davos: we have to break with everything progressive, gender culture, ‘woke’ or whatever you call it.

What is your wish or hope for the international left movements and those in Germany? How can they show solidarity with the popular movements in Argentina?

We see that there are no such networks of articulation on the side of left progressivism. If there are, they are old, bureaucratized and institutionalized, as we see in the social movements in our region, in Latin America and here in Germany. We need to strengthen these ties. The progress we make in Argentina, or here in Berlin or Brazil, will depend on the level of resistance we can build.

We must build on the idea that “if they touch one of us, they touch us all”, an old slogan of the international left, emancipation movements and national liberation. All movements try to survive, to resist and to face state repression on a daily basis. But we must take on this task, because it is on a global scale.

The mission now is to talk to other comrades and ask ourselves: How do we build a roadmap, understanding our origins and the different ideological perspectives in the international movement? This is a central task.

We strengthen the ties with the comrades of El Bloque Latinoamericano in Berlin, of course because we are close. Many of us have been activists and we know each other and our comrades in their countries of origin. Our actions range from concrete help to raising awareness about what is happening in Latin America.