Argentina since 2001: From Spontaneous Uprising to “Transition,” or a Crisis Intermezzo?

Abstract

The energy unleashed by the 2001 uprising in Argentina and the social movements that both generated it and were simultaneously its product, became a powerful device for a political reorganization initiated "from below." The protagonists comprised large sectors of diverse social strata, which three decades of free-market policies had until then successfully managed to politically disengage and disorganize. At the time of my fieldwork in Argentina between 2003 and 2005, these protagonists recognized their own weaknesses regarding their ability to replace the existing economic and political establishment with their own alternative. Thus they set about negotiating the terms and conditions of the incoming government. Notions of a period of "transition" began to circulate after the 2001 uprising among the emerging social movements and in particular guided the politically moderate mobilized strata in their relationship to both the first presidential elections in April 2003 and the new government. This chapter takes issue with "transition" as a concept to describe this period, and assesses how it informed political interpretations and actions that shaped subsequent political processes.