Argentina

Based on a true story The Clan is about a criminal family in 1980s Argentina, a period when the military dictatorship was coming to an end and democracy was reinstalled. The Clan follows the Puccio family’s antics in kidnapping rich neighbours for a ransom.

It is a politically turbulent period, with their first victim having already been kidnapped before. It is never made explicit, but it is implied that father Arquimedes learned the tactics of extortion through working for the state.

Argentina will hold a general election to elect a new president on 25 October and it is possible that the far left may see noteworthy results. The Trotskyist left got 3.31 percent of the vote in the presidential primaries this August, which elects the parties’ and alliances’ main candidates for the presidency and provincial governors.

This was enough to secure a place for Nicolás del Caño of the Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores (Workers’ Left Front, FIT) in the presidential race.

The similarity of the debt problem, the revolts, social movements, and pending default have all tempted comparisons between Greece today and Argentina’s crisis and popular uprising at the turn of this century. In December 2001 media and activist attention centred on Argentina like it does on Greece today for more or less the same reasons.

On the 30th anniversary of the return of democracy in Argentina, a coalition of Trotskyist parties won over 5 percent of the vote (1.15 million in total) in legislative elections at the end of October last year.

The coalition, Front of the Left and the Workers (FIT according to its Spanish initials), did even better than its overall 5 percent in some key areas.

It would appear that Argentinian president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner will not be invited to one of David Cameron's country suppers - these are reserved only for the great and good such as the rational Jeremy Clarkson and the delightful Rebekah Brooks.

The Argentinian president was not even granted the oily Cameron charm offensive, when she attempted to hand him copies of the UN resolutions calling for a peaceful resolution to the Falklands dispute. Apparently "the prime minister refused to accept the documents, turned his back and walked away without a farewell".

The Law of Hydrocarbon Sovereignty passed through the Argentinian National Congress in May with almost complete support across the political spectrum. It formalised the expropriation of the Spanish multinational Repsol's shares in the oil company YPF. It was met with condemnation and the threat of reprisals from the Spanish government and the European Union.

The economic situation was critical. Our printshop, Chilavert, was bankrupt, with workers owed a huge amount of wages.

The owner tried to sell key printing machines, so we occupied the factory to stop him. Then we began to think about permanently taking over production.

No one likes to be proved wrong. But sometimes it is more painful to be proved right. At the end of January I took part in a debate with Michael Hardt, the co-author of Empire, over 'The working class or the multitude' at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Only a minority of those in the room agreed with what I had to say. Most agreed with contributors from the floor who came in again and again with the same refrain. Argentina, they said, showed how wrong 'Leninists' were to go on about 'vanguard parties' and 'industrial workers'.

The wonderful thing about 15 February was that it felt like an exercise of power. But people's power is about much more than great gatherings in the streets. The demonstrations and meetings are enormously important. But our ambitions as socialists are much bigger than that. We are talking about a world where working people run their own lives directly--shape how wealth is distributed, what priorities govern what society produces, and how to develop new and freer lives.

'It must have been fantastically exciting,' a lot of people said to me on my return from a visit to Argentina last month.