Abstract
On December 19, 2001, the unexpected happened; hundreds of thousands of “ordinary” citizens 1 took to the streets of Argentina’s urban centers, nowhere in greater numbers than in the city of Buenos Aires. This mobilization followed months of coordinated trade union strikes and piquetes, several weeks of Peronist-provoked lootings, escraches and cacerolazos, and also came two weeks after the announcement of the Corralito policy. 2 While not all “ordinary” citizens participated in the variety of protest activities, on December 19 and 20, for a brief moment “ordinary” citizens outnumbered activists, union members, and students. This chapter seeks to identify what finally pushed these “ordinary” Argentines to flood on to the streets and join the protests en masse Was this protest event merely a reaction to the economic turmoil, or something more? In light of the continued and potentially growing presence of “ordinary” citizens’ political participation through protest both in and beyond Argentina’s capital city, social scientists must revisit several questions related to the events of these two days in late 2001.
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© 2014 Cara Levey, Daniel Ozarow, and Christopher Wylde
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Onuch, O. (2014). “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” or Is It? The Role of Political Crisis in Mass Mobilization: The Case of Argentina in 2001. In: Levey, C., Ozarow, D., Wylde, C. (eds) Argentina Since the 2001 Crisis. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434265_5
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