BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – Last night was a hot night in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, as a crowd surrounded the Obelisk in the city's center, waving signs and Argentine flags.
Many carried pots and pans, which they hit with wooden and metal spoons as they marched to the beat during this nationwide “cacerolazo,” a protest that draws its name from “cacerola,” which means “pan.”
The protesters streamed into the city center from various neighborhoods at 8 p.m. to voice their discontent with the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Hundreds of thousands of people in the capital participated, while protests occurred simultaneously in various provinces across the country.
One family holding hands advanced with signs on their chests. Resting against a stoplight, another woman in her 50s pounded a pan persistently. Others standing atop low roofs wielded signs and photographed the crowd.
Speakers mounted on a van blared the national anthem, and the crowd sang along.
Andrés Titarelli, 24, stopped singing to say that he joined the protest because the country needs a change.
“I come because there are certain things of Argentine reality that aren’t bearable anymore: the inflation, the insecurity, the lack of respect for institutions, the permanent lie,” he says. “Like so many people, I am here protesting simply so that there’s a reconsideration of how to solve the problems.”
Inflation, restrictions on buying U.S. dollars, insecurity, concerns about freedom of expression and fear of a third presidential term for Fernández drove hundreds of thousands of people to stage a cacerolazo last night. Opponents say it was a protest of the upper-middle class defending its own interests rather than the well-being of the country. Other opponents say that major media outlets promoted the protest in order to attack the government.
The cacerolazo is a form of protest in which people take to the streets banging pots and pans. Marcela Alejandra Perez, who has a degree in sociology, says that pans give a protest an everyday feel.
“The cacerolazo is a form of protest characteristic of the actual society in which we live,” she says. “The pan is a fun and loud symbol. It’s a symbol of the everyday.”
In cacerolazos, people come together from various parts of the city at a chosen hour and start to bang pots and pans, interrupting traffic. On some occasions, the protesters march in columns from various directions to converge in the center of the city, as was the case with this cacerolazo.
The government of Fernández, who assumed the presidency in 2007 and won re-election in 2011, has seen various cacerolazos, with major ones in March and June 2008 and June and September 2012. But last night was the country’s biggest anti-government protest in more than a decade, according to The Associated Press.
The protest was organized via social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Some 45 groups promoted the cacerolazo online, according to La Nación newspaper.
One of these groups was Argentinos Indignados.
“Enough with the insecurity,” it states on its website. “Enough with cutting out liberties. Enough with lying to us.”
The group says it rejects the possibility of Fernández running for re-election in 2015, though the president hasn’t announced plans to run again.
For Titarelli, a member of the Partido para una República con Oportunidades, an opposition party, rising inflation was the key issue that drew him to the cacerolazo.
“For me, the principal problem in Argentina today is inflation,” he says. “That doesn’t give people the possibility of saving. And those whom it affects most is the poor. The social plans are temporary help.”
Fernando Botinelli, 52, has participated in several of these protests. He accuses government officials of falsifying inflation rates for their own benefit. He also criticizes government restrictions on buying U.S. dollars unless specially approved.
“The only thing that interests them is perpetuating their power,” he says. “The clamp on the dollar is an embarassment particularly because it’s the product of the deficits of their policies, and I am sure that, yes, they have dollars. They trick us with the rate of inflation.”
Inflation was 17.2 percent in 2011 in Argentina, according to the World Bank.
Horacio Esteban Prado, 52, disagrees. A resident of a lower-middle class neighborhood in the southern part of the city, he says that the demands of the protesters aren’t fair because they block social policies that benefit the working class.
“They have every right to express themselves,” he says. “But I think that they demand that the same as before comes back – first, the rich, after, the poor. They don’t allow the state to help the community, that there is health care, schools. They want the liberation of the dollar.”
He says it’s common to see well-dressed women at these protests accompanied by their domestic workers, whom they force to bang pots and pans alongside them.
“I saw a woman obligating her employee to accompany her to bang pots,” he says. “I realized it by their clothes.”
Botinelli, on the contrary, says that the protesters come from all social classes.
“Look at the face of the people,” he says. “You have people who live in expensive neighborhoods and you have people who come from all possible neighborhoods.”
Luis Alberto Troche, 37, who supports La Cámpora, a youth political organization that supports Fernández, says that some protesters reject the policies of the government because they don’t understand them or find them economically inconvenient.
“There can be people who don’t like the model because they don’t understand, they don’t know it,” he says. “There are also others who don’t like the model because they are familiar with it and it’s not convenient for them.”
Perez says that it’s normal for each social class to participate in protests that defend its own interests. She says people from lower-income areas didn’t participate in this protest because they are not affected by the restrictions on the dollar.
“The protests are expressions of the people, characteristic of groups,” she says. “The different social classes mobilize for the class’ own interests. Those who don’t have a problem with the clamp on the dollar, it’s because they could never buy it.”
Perez also links this protest with the fear that Fernández will try to change the Argentine Constitution’s two-term limit in order to run for a third term.
“It seems to me that there is the work of political structures in the background,” she says.
But both Troche and Prado say that Argentina’s dominant media outlets were behind this cacerolazo. Major media outlets and the government have been at odds since a 2009 media law imposed restrictions on media companies to prevent them from becoming monopolies.
“Some demands will be valid,” Troche says. “But they are enflamed by the media. They are enflamed in order to continue creating opposition.”
But Botinelli counters that the people's own will drove them downtown last night.
“I come because I am sick of the bullying of this government,” he says.
Perez says that beyond people’s specific demands, every protest is healthy because it forces people to be heard. But she cautions people to understand who is behind the protests.
“The protest is healthy,” she says. “A protest in the street should never be taken as negative because the other only wants to be heard so that something changes. What can be taken as negative is what operates in the shadow. That’s what you have to be afraid of.”
Titarelli says that the goal of the cacerolazo is not to remove the government.
“We want the way of doing things to be reconsidered,” he says. “As long as the will of the people is not listened to, the people are going to continue protesting.”