Assembléias de bairro na Argentina: criando espaços de ação política para reconstituir o tecido social
Resumo
Taking into account the current context of social, political and economic crisis
this work consists of a study about the Neighborhood assemblies in Argentina that
followed the panelaços2, which happened in the 19th and 20th of December of 2001. The
main characteristics of the assemblies are that they promote mechanisms of direct
democracy, territorial organization, autonomy in face of political parties and finally for
being composed mainly of people belonging to poorer sectors of society. People that
never had political engagement, people that protested in the Seventies, people that
participate in different political parties, syndicates or social organizations gather weekly
in different neighborhoods to debate and generate actions in order to create alternatives
to face the crisis and also try to develop spaces where new ways of dealing with politics
can take place and thus deepening the process of democratization.
Our study aims to describe the Neighborhood assemblies, its beginning and the
practices performed, using the participants experience as a starting point. In order to
accomplish that the chosen research methodology was Oral History alongside with
Participative Observation of the assemblies and also other activities that resulted from
these methods. With the objective of broadening the collected data spectrum, we have
brought in photographs and a wide range of materials made by the participants as well
as the entries in a filed diary. The data gathering was done between January and
February of 2004 in two assemblies of the city of Buenos Aires, namely: a Asamblea
Popular de San Telmo-Plaza Dorrego e a Asamblea de Palermo Viejo.
The Oral History allowed us to rebuild the participants recent memories, those
of the beginning of the assemblies, of the initial meetings. On the other hand it also
worked as channel for yet another memory that was present inside the participants
accounts to come to surface: that of the military dictatorship. Men and women identify
the destruction of the social tissue as one of the main consequences of the military
dictatorship and the following democratic governs. Beginning with this point of view
they started to develop spaces of political action orientated to the reconstruction of this
tissue.
Hence, we would like to point out some important aspects of the actions of the
assemblies, namely: the work with the memories of the repression years, o development
of deliberation spaces that eventually enriched the political culture, the political action
and solidarity networks with other social movements, the process of (re) signify the
publics spaces and its management, the collective work and the accomplishment of
activities and projects that aimed to create alternatives in a context of generalized crisis.