By Luis Bruschtein on April 25, 2024.
Massive march in Buenos Aires for education
The first march was of the labor movement, on January 24, against the DNU, the omnibus law and labor flexibilization; the second was on March 24 for human rights. And this latest one has been the third big march against the government of Javier Milei, mobilized by the educational community in defense of public education. And they are getting bigger and bigger. The spirit of production and work represented in the workers, the moral and ethical spirit symbolized by the Mothers and Grandmothers and the cultural spirit of the country nurtured by the schools, colleges and universities, were the ones attacked by this government and the first to react. There are more than three marches at stake, among the three, in addition to their massiveness, they express the essence of a country. For this government, everything is corruption, except the corrupt, whom it conceives as “heroes” who flee with millions, abuse prices or speculate in the financial bicycle.
The government despised this march because -they said- it was organized and participated by those who do not want the audit of the universities. “They are those who favor themselves with this system of corruption and do not want to lose their benefits,” they said on television. And Minister of Security Patricia Bullrich called it “weird”. Defending the university that the government wants to close is “weird”. The whole story is mounted on big lies that are reproduced in the networks to infinity, because universities have their own auditing systems.
But everything is considered corruption, except the corrupt. Just like Mauricio Macri, they talk about the human rights scam and when they cannot buy off the trade unionists, they accuse them of corruption. But the real corruption, the one that is equivalent to a GDP, is the one that leaked 400 billion dollars, the owners of the offshore companies that receive Milei at the Llao Llao, the ones that strategically placed their managers in the economic policy decisions and in the State-owned companies.
The invisible hands of the market are not so invisible, but they hide behind the attacks on the most sensitive points, such as workers, human rights and education. This country would cease to exist, it would collapse, if those pillars were destroyed.
Yesterday’s huge mobilization was the largest in many years. The aerial photos reaffirm it. The Plaza and the side avenues, plus all of Avenida de Mayo up to part of the Plaza de los dos Congresos, the diagonals streets, Rivadavia and Irigoyen, packed. Plus the large mobilizations that took place in Mar del Plata, Córdoba, Tucumán, Misiones, Mendoza and others, made it clear that the government will have problems if it seeks to destroy public education.
In the three marches there was a part that went to all of them, but in each one many new demonstrators are added. And once you go once, you never leave, because the physical encounter with other people who think alike and act in common destroys preconceptions and dilutes the prejudice on which the whole anti-popular or even anti-militant or anti-political discourse is built, which are the antis that work as glue of the disarming narrative of the right wing.
In this march there were a lot of people who did not join the ranks. And there were columns that have almost never shared the street, such as those of Peronist student groups and the Franja Morada of radicalism. The same mix was present in the crowd.
It is likely that the mobilizations do not move the ammeter to Milei, who spent the afternoon in the networks, just like his vice-president who tried to humiliate the legacy of Hebe de Bonafini and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Milei trusts more in his mathematical models that, as such, are never reality, but its representation: a model of numbers without human beings, like the ones he showed in the national radio and television network on Monday. He is interested in those flying numbers and not in human beings, imperfect and corruptible. But beware, cold mathematics is manipulable and manipulated in this case.
One detail that highlighted the diversity of the demonstrators attending the marches was the profusion of homemade signs. In previous marches there were a few. But yesterday was loaded with small signs with slogans invented by their bearers, written with markers of different colors on leaves, cardboard or anything they could find. A note from Página/12, gives an account of this phenomenon. It is not necessary to think too much: If hundreds or thousands of teachers get together, they prepare the march as if it were a class, with their didactic or funny posters for their students. It is hard to imagine a march of railroad workers, for example, with handwritten signs in different colored markers.
How little do these guys who govern know the real country. Those placards are a class in public school. No one forces them to wear a placard. It is what teachers do in their “free” time, because it is what is in their blood to be a teacher. “Education makes us free” says one that vindicates true freedom and not the one that these phonies claim. And there is another one that is food for thought: “I fight for an education that teaches us to think and not for an education that teaches us to obey”.