Seven years after an economic collapse brought misery to millions and toppled the Government, Argentina is facing renewed social unrest and empty shops as a farmers’ strike nears the end of its third week.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the country’s first elected woman President, has been forced to pull out of a summit of left-of-centre leaders in London — at which she intended to discuss the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands with Gordon Brown — to deal with the crisis, which has brought violence to the streets only four months after she took office.

Last night Ms Fernández gave an impassioned speech before 100,000 people in the Plaza de Mayo, the historic main square in Buenos Aires, imploring the farmers to end their strike.

“I would like to thank the presence of the people who have not come to support any political persuasion or party. They have come to defend the country,” she said. “Free the roads so that Argentinians can get access to food, companies to their merchandise and factories to their supplies.”

The strike began after Ms Fernández’s Government raised a tax on exports of soya to between 43 and 49 per cent, up from 35 per cent, and placed new duties on other farm exports in an attempt to improve the Government’s worsening fiscal balance.

Hundreds of thousands of farmers used their tractors and lorries to block more than 400 roads in the country and supermarket shelves emptied of meat, cereals and milk.

The strikes have cut Argentina’s enormous exports of soya beans — it is the third-biggest exporter after Brazil and the US — as well as meat, and are likely to have a big impact on international prices.

Matters got worse for Ms Fernández last Tuesday, when she gave a speech at the Casa Rosada — the famous pink presidential office in the heart of Buenos Aires — in which she accused the farmers of forming a “picket of abundance” and holding the country to ransom.

The speech was regarded by many Argentinians as divisive and unleashed the worst social turmoil for seven years. In scenes reminiscent of 2001, when Fernando de la Rúa, then the President, was ousted, the middle classes immediately took to the streets of Buenos Aires and other cities in a show of support for the farmers.

Violence broke out in the centre of the capital as the farmers and their supporters clashed with pickets and trade unions allied with Ms Fernández. “This is the worst ideological confrontation between social classes, ranging from rural producers to the picketeers, since the Seventies,” Professor Marcelo Leiras, a politics expert at San Andrés University in Buenos Aires, said. “The strikes are taking place because the design of the new tax was poor and the way it was presented was ever poorer.”

Elisa López, 73, a retired nurse from Buenos Aires, said: “I have not seen anything like this since the last crisis, of 2001. Even during that dreadful period there were never any food shortages. Cristina Kirchner has been making speeches that remind me of those of Juan Perón \, when he talked of a class struggle in Argentina. We have not heard a president say this kind of thing for 30 years and I am not sure if it’s appropriate nowadays.”

The farmers called off the strike for 24 hours over the weekend while they held talks with the Government, but resumed it on Sunday after the President said that she would not budge on the new tax.

Yesterday the Government appeared to get tough again. Florencio Randazzo, the Interior Minister, said that the country was growing weary of the shortages and that they would not be allowed to go on indefinitely. The Government has attempted to divide farming groups by offering subsidies to small producers so that they do not feel the full impact of the new tax.

Ms Fernández, who took over from her husband, Néstor, in December, is no stranger to confrontation, having forged her political ideals in opposition to the military dictatorship in the 1970s. She easily won the presidential election, with about 45 per cent of the vote, but has since drawn sharp criticism for her uncompromising style.

The farming sector is the backbone of the Argentine economy and has expanded dramatically during the past five years, fuelled by increasing demand from China and India for soya beans and other agricultural goods. The overall economy has grown by an average of 8.2 per cent a year during the past five years but inflation has become a big problem, reaching more than 20 per cent.

Nation of discontent

— In 1955 President Perón was overthrown by General Eduardo Lonardi, whose Administration was itself replaced months later by a military dictatorship

— In 1976 soldiers deposed Perón's widow, Isabel, who had become President two years earlier, after devaluation, a steep drop in wages and high inflation. Under the junta up to 15,000 Argentines were killed, often after imprisonment and torture, in the Dirty War

— In the economic crisis of 2001-02 a succession of presidents tried to battle rampant inflation, record unemployment and a rapid decline in living standards that pushed more than half the population below the poverty line. The crisis was precipitated by street protests after 312 years of recession

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

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