Farmers Declare Truce in Tax-Based Strike

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times
Thursday, April 3, 2008 6:56 PM CDT

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - Argentine farmers Wednesday suspended a three-week-old strike that has led to food shortages and sparked the first political crisis for President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

The four principal rural groups declared a 30-day “truce” in the strike, although representatives stressed than “a state of alert and mobilization” would remain.

“We are going to continue pressing for the solutions that we want,” a farm leader, Mario Llambias, told supporters in the northern city of Gualeguaychu, a strike nerve center.

Media reports here indicated that hundreds of farmer-organized roadblocks on major rural routes were being lifted and produce once again was flowing to the capital and other cities. Farm leaders expressed concern that serious food shortages probably would sour public opinion against them and trigger stronger police action to open the roads.

“We’re going to allow the cities to be supplied because we’re not insensitive,” Juan Echeverria, a strike leader, told the daily Clarin. But, he added, “The battle continues.”

Producers voiced hope that negotiations could prompt what they characterized as a more flexible response from Fernandez, who has refused to roll back expanded export levies unveiled in March. The new taxes increase to as much as 45 percent the duties paid on soybeans, Argentina’s principal export crop, from a current high of about 35 percent.

Taxing commodity exports has been a hallmark revenue-raising tactic of Fernandez and her husband, Nestor Kirchner, who served as president before stepping aside last year to let his wife seek office. The center-left Kirchners have had a tumultuous relationship with farmers and other business interests, but the pair has overseen five years of steady growth in Argentina, a major exporter of beef, soybeans and other grains.

Fernandez has signaled her unwillingness to budge on the export levy issue and has labeled the strikers “protesters of abundance.”

The president likened the current rural unrest to a 1976 farm strike that preceded Argentina’s last military coup, which ousted Argentine’s first female president, Isabel Peron, and ushered in seven years of brutal military rule. Raising the specter of the 1976 coup was widely seen as a warning that the government was losing its patience.

Still, farm leaders warned, in the words of Llambias, “We will not remain silent.” Growers “are going to return to the roads,” he added, if the government does not compromise.

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