Juan Grabois (Buenos Aires, 40 years old) went in five years from being one of the social leaders who measured the pulse of the streets in Argentina to being one of the most visible faces of Peronism. With the campaign leaning to the right, and the ruling Peronism seeking unity behind the then Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, Grabois summoned the left of the movement and challenged it. He lost (his campaign got some 1.4 million votes, 5.9%), but his leadership among the sectors of popular workers and youth elevates him today as one of the voices that guides the reconstruction of a headless Peronism, which search is being made in the opposition while the far-right Javier Milei goes through his first days in office.
“We have to respect the people who voted for Milei and make ourselves respected,” says Grabois in this conversation with EL PAÍS in his office in the north of Buenos Aires. The former social leader of the Popular Economy Workers Movement, who has gone from the social trenches to politics, knows that the road is uphill, and warns: “Peronism has a caste that I don't know if it really wants to give itself “a bath of humility.”
Ask. On Sunday, while Milei assumed the presidency, you asked for humility and reflection. What is yours?
Answer. We did almost everything wrong as a political coalition. We did a very good thing, which was beating Mauricio Macri in 2019. The Peronist coalition was an electoral success, but a failure in terms of Government. Of course what former President Alberto Fernández says is true. It was a tough time with the pandemic, a very big drought, the war in Ukraine… But a Government that begins its mandate by proposing as a fundamental slogan “start with the last” is faced with a context of growth in activity and employment and is He is with seven points more poverty, he has not fulfilled his electoral contract.
Q. What did the Peronist coalition do wrong?
R. It was bleeding into internal fights; He could not build a synthesis on fundamental issues such as the negotiation with the International Monetary Fund, which directly impacts people's lives because if you pay the Fund you take away from public works, health and education; and it was not able to implement an income policy for the 50% of the workforce that is in the informal sector and that is the one that suffered the most from the deterioration of its purchasing power. The problems of the material life of the people were not resolved.
Q. In the world it was believed that Argentina had a containment dam for the extreme right with Peronism, in its community organization. Did that change with Milei?
R. The essential element is material. Let's see, an ruling party with more than 100% inflation, with 44% poverty and 60% child poverty, which presents the Minister of Economy as a candidate… and, it is difficult. We had a terrible economic performance. Here there is a moral, intellectual and political crisis of the progressive sector, and a reactionary electoral alternative that took on that fantasy of a crusade against “cultural Marxism.” Here comes the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, and says that he wants to hang the Spanish president Pedro Sánchez by his feet, and copying that language begins to produce attacks on leaders and human rights organizations that allows this sector to reaffirm itself as the dominant, masculine class. and hegemonic that questions any otherness. But the cultural or ideological elements, well, go behind the material situation. For me it is clear. Peronism has social justice, political sovereignty and economic independence as its essential flag… and it did not comply.
Q. You went from street militancy to a presidential candidacy that challenged the “unity” that Peronism needed.
R. I have been active all my life in popular organizations, which in this country sustain the community fabric and which have overcome time. Party politics seems to me to be only one of the instruments for transforming reality, not even the most important. My involvement fundamentally had to do with building the coalition to defeat Macri, who brought back the IMF, which for my generation, that of 2001, is a central factor in the crisis that brought hunger to Argentina.
Q. Now, with the main references out of the scene, he has a leading place in Peronism. It is not like this?
R. Not so much in the hierarchy. They don't love me very much. I think that Peronism has a caste that I don't know if it really wants to take a bath in humility.
Q. Who are they?
R. The technocratic structure. I'll give you an example: the other day, a fellow Cartonera member, Natalia Zaracho, assumed her second term as a deputy. A colleague who accompanied her to the Congress sent me a photo of her with a message that said “They are looking at us badly, they must be people from Milei.” But they were all ours! They were sitting on their benches with a smile, as if we had reduced poverty by 10 points and built a million homes. What does that mean? That we have an individual careerism, people who assume a position, stay for 20 years and take the family to celebrate swearing-in day. There is no project there, there is no design of public policies. It is a fight for spaces of power, not for a country project. It is a generalization, there are countless exceptions, but I am very critical of these privileges in a movement whose function is to represent the common people.
Q. Are there no leaders who oppose that?
R. Cristina Kirchner enabled me to go to primary school. His is the ultimate leadership of a mythical nature, even with its defects and virtues. In Argentina, what is coming is more collegial. We are entering a stage where there has to be a more collective process, something that has been difficult to resolve in Latin America and around the world: how is collective leadership resolved when the mental and communication format is ultra-individualistic.
Q. How is it solved?
R. It is very complex. But when there is a project, when there is a meaning, a collective and concrete purpose, it is easier.
Q. Doesn't Peronism have a project?
R. No! And that is the problem. Except for vague slogans or reiteration of old slogans, we have nothing. Why do you get up in the military and work every day? It's hard to find answers.
Q. Who is going to lead Peronism now?
R. The one with the greatest institutional responsibility is Axel [Kicillof, el gobernador de Buenos Aires]. It has the possibility of consolidating that leadership or confirming what we Argentines call the “Baghlini theorem”: the closer you are to power, the more conservative you become, the more you entrench yourself in your comfort zone and prioritize the security of maintaining power. . Well, this shows what political leaders are made of.
Q. We'll see…
R. It remains to be seen in anyone. The same thing could happen to me.
R. What will be your place?
R. I get something new. I was always part, formally or not formally, of the leadership of the social movements and of the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy, the largest mass organization in Argentina. Now I'm no longer a part of it, I handed over the reins to a younger generation. Fighting and negotiation, in that sense, no longer belong to me. Our political platform, called Argentina Humana, has another function, which is to wage the battle of ideas, the electoral fight, the political confrontation within the framework of democracy. That's what I'll do. It is up to us to respect the people who voted for Milei and make ourselves respected.
Q. What will be the place of the guilds?
R. The unions have a single function, which is to negotiate the best possible conditions in the existing context. But my advice is not to let yourselves be used, not to put yourself out there to be cannon fodder for other people's interests. There are people who want things to go badly for Milei quickly and not exactly for the better. Then others come… the vice president belongs to the military party.
Q. Former President Macri, for example, has come to stir up street confrontations between the “young people” who voted for Milei and the “orcs” who oppose his economic plan.
R. I see Milei, out of conviction or convenience, it doesn't matter, discouraging that idea of ”orcs.” That is a revanchist idea from Macri, which was an absolute failure. It has become very fashionable in our times to think that being rich makes you right, makes you intelligent, makes you morally superior. Being rich only makes you rich. Henry Ford, for example, gave his name to an entire era of industrial development, opened the consumer society and established high salaries for workers… but he was the greatest propagandist of anti-Semitism between the wars, and a few years later we learned that hundreds of Millions of combustion vehicles in the world generate a climate catastrophe.
Q. Milei proposes a harsh adjustment, but affirms that he will have an “open wallet” to “help the fallen.” Are you worried about how poverty may escalate these months?
R. There is a paradox that makes me suffer. We are the fucking Red Cross of this country. We are not going to have to hold any demonstration to get food, the Government is going to call us to do it, because there is no other logistical way to get the food to the canteens other than through popular movements. There is a network of 50,000 soup kitchens, a fifth will be from churches and the rest from social movements. We are not going to say “Hey, since I don't like your government, we are going to go on strike”, we are going to continue doing the same thing: hold on, put ourselves in front of the pot. Cooking, collaborating, setting up cooperatives and labor organizations that generate progress. We are here to transform reality, not to contain it. But in a catastrophe situation, who in the Government is going to cook? The representative who wants men to be unaware of paternity?
Q. How do you plan a protest against a Government that says “he who marches in the street does not receive the subsidy”?
R. With the very contradiction of what he proposes: that is illegal. The collection of the complementary social salary is regulated by law. And demonstrating is not grounds for taking away that right. The salary is a property right, and the president cannot take it away from a citizen because he does not like how it manifests itself.
Q. In Argentina that “rebellious” right won. Can progressivism be rebellious again?
R. But of course! We do not propose the socialization of the means of production, the nationalization of banking and the expropriation of the rich. No no. We propose simple things, like that the land be for those who work it. That horticultural producers, some 50,000 families who live in two-hectare farms and produce all the fruits and vegetables that Argentina eats, stop being tenants. They should stop living in shacks and be able to build a house that they don't have today because they maintain lease contracts from the dictatorship. Argentina is the seventh largest country in the world with land everywhere and we have people without land.
Q. It sounds like utopia…
R. It is a possible utopia. We say that a few will have a little less so that many will have a little more. This way, we can all live a little better. Here we talk about “poorism” when we propose that and any alternative proposal to the consumerist model in which we are all supposedly going to be rich is disqualified. I simply believe that this is not going to happen, but if we cannot provide answers to informal workers, thousands of families who do not have their own home, if we cannot explain how we are going to do it and train politicians who carry out these ideas, I don't know how we are going to fall in love with a political project. Look, we ran a campaign with $15,000 and we got one and a half million votes. I think some people listen to us. Maybe in a few years we will do better.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América newsletter and receive all the key information on current events in the region.
#Juan #Grabois #Peronism #longer #project