Buenos Aires: The Palermo Viejo Assembly

The Palermo Viejo Assembly (APV) is one of many neighborhood organizations that were formed after the cacerolazos(protests where demonstrators bang on pots and pans) of December 2001, when Argentina experienced the worst economic crisis in its history. At the same time, it was when, for a relatively extended period, it was possible to conceive and put into practice large-scale, direct democratic processes, i.e., to coordinate an albeit tentative, precarious multiplicity of groups, movements, and collectives that were taking action all across the country.

The work of popular assemblies consisted of exercises in direct democracy, experiments in social organization transcending state and neoliberal market regulations. In Argentina, there were once over one hundred of these groups, and today there are fewer than forty.

The Palermo Viejo Assembly was created on January 17, 2002, in a middle-class neighborhood known for its restaurants, clothing, and furniture stores geared toward a well-to-do clientele. In 2003, APV members pressured the local government into allowing them to take over a section of the municipal-market building located in the heart of the neighborhood. This is where they continue to organize their activities.

The APV was born, evolved, and continues to exist without a predetermined power structure or rules, though it has always followed certain basic principles: horizontality, collective thinking and action, socialized work, and coordinated activities with other grassroots collectives. From the time it was founded to mid-2003, the APV has gone through high-spirited times of mass action and participation. It has organized numerous public demonstrations, hosted very well-attended political and cultural colloquia, cooperated with unemployed workers’ movements as well as with cartoneros (people making a precarious living by picking and recycling garbage), and workers who had taken over the factories where they had been employed. It has also launched public health campaigns and neighborhood cooperation programs.

Today, the APV stands on uncertain ground. It attempts to survive with questions of its own amid a process of mass demobilization following the institutional reorganization accomplished by Nestor Kirchner’s government. The greatest challenge the assembly faces is to rethink the way it works in this new context, to develop new capacities and movements of its own, and, finally, to formulate cooperative actions in conjunction with other social groups.

-Santiago García Navarro