The extortive practices of Argentine trade unionism are insinuated here
The unemployed truck drivers demand access to the evidence through which a judge is instructing five local trucking leaders on charges of extortion of the authorities. Spokespersons for the trade unionists asked the prosecutor’s office to present the presumably evidentiary elements of the extortion of US$50,000 contained in the indictment. That is the precondition for continuing to negotiate a lifting of the force measure.
This claim goes far beyond an apparent ignorance of the stages of a judicial process. It is the appearance on the scene of typical practices of Argentine trade unionism in the style of the Moyanos, the Suarez and other referents of organizations that use extortion and blackmail as a dissuasive weapon both against public power and against private sector entrepreneurs.
The truckers’ union, whose maximum patriarch is Hugo Moyano, has a long history of blockades, extortion and threats to businessmen of all levels. Recently in the province of Chaco, a construction materials MSME that had just opened its doors was besieged by Moyano’s truck drivers, preventing it from working. To lift the blockade, they demanded that 10 of their 50 employees join the local truckers’ union. The owner made this complaint in the midst of a nervous breakdown: “They threatened to burn my trucks, burn my business, break me into pineapples and melt down the company. We cannot continue like this, without working. They are suffocating us.”
Stories like these are repeated throughout the Argentine territory and are part of the black history of mafia unionism that today stands as one of the main dissuasive factors for serious foreign investment in Argentina.
It is with this ruling class that Paraguayan truckers have been associated since 2019 trying to copy their rogue, intrusive and criminal methods.
Reflect on the path you have chosen, leaders. Unionism is the exercise of the legitimate defense of interests before employers and the Government. But if defense is deliberately mixed with extortion, blackmail and violence, the protest loses legitimacy and invades the field of illegality prosecuted by justice.
Do not copy, please, the worst of the Argentine mafias. It is, once started, a path of no return.
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The entrance Emerging Moyanism was first published in The Independent.
