Workers from social movements and the popular economy held a vigil throughout the early hours of the morning at the doors of the Sheraton Hotel in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Retiro, where the annual meeting of the Argentine Business Association (AEA) is being held this Tuesday, to demand that entrepreneurs to “lower prices”.
The protest is organized by the leaders of the Front of Organizations in Struggle (FOL); a faction of the Darío Santillán Popular Front; the Popular Resistance Movement; the Front of Grassroots Organizations (FOB); the MTR for Direct Democracy and Barrios de Pie-Libres del Sur.
With sleeping bags and blankets, the protesters spent the night in the vicinity of the hotel located in Retiro and will remain throughout the day today until the end of the meeting organized by AEA.
Under the slogan “The private sector is the key factor for development”, the conference “20 years of AEA” will take place, with a recorded message from President Alberto Fernández; while the closure will be in charge of the Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán.
On Monday night, from the FOL they had denounced through social networks a “police deployment” in response to the vigil day at the hotel doors.
“With hundreds of police they surround the workers, cooperative members, the precarious, who survive with poverty wages, while in the luxurious Sheraton will be the businessmen who have criminally increased the price of food and enrich themselves at the expense of our hunger. We, we, demand that prices drop,” Maximiliano Maita, national delegate of the Front of Organizations in Struggle (FOL), said in a statement.
Along the same lines, the national delegate of the FOL, Marianela Navarro, denounced that “while businessmen double their profits, speculatively increasing the price of food, poor families cannot access the basic food basket and workers with formal jobs They have fallen below the poverty line.
“We, precarious workers of the popular economy, survive on starvation wages. We cannot feed our families, while food price makers have increased bread by 6.8% in the last month alone; oils 7, 6%, dairy products 14%.There are 20 companies that own food in Argentina that generate this: ARCOR, Bunge Argentina, Aceitera General Deheza, Molino Cañuelas, Molinos Río de La Plata, La Serenísima, Danone, Ledesma, among others, They act as monopolies and oligopolies to manage the price of food at will,” they said in a statement.
