The work stoppage has been lifted and dialogue with the government will begin...
The four farm groups/entities that controlled this stoppage have decided to stop the protest, reports La Voz del Interior, Córdoba's newspaper. Good.
It's been really interesting and strange to be a foreigner in Argentina while this is going on...because at first it didn't seem so bad. Sure, my bus was stalled for a while while we drove back from Puerto Iguazú. But then so was everyone else's bus. (I had friends that it took one full day to get back from a usually-ten-hour-trip from Buenos Aires.) And then there was a sudden meat shortage and a bunch of protests. So then I was like, oh, is this a big deal? My friend Abby lives with an Argentine woman while she's studying here, and Abby said she was glued to the news for the past week and was extremely nervous. So it's hard to gauge the nation's psyche if you aren't from here. Are people over-reacting? A lot of sources in newspapers were claiming all the hubub and protests were over-the-top...but of course everyone says that about resistance to all governments. And Argentina has certainly had a rocky political past. So it's been quite a lot to take in and not a lot of certainty about what exactly the outcome will be. So I'll keep you all posted! But it seems like everything is beginning to smooth out...
I definitely didn't mean to worry anybody. I feel completely safe here...there wasn't a thought in my mind that anything could happen to me. Other than not be able to order meat in my empanadas...:)
The president of la UCC just issued a statement to the students that I found really interesting. It's in Spanish and it's long and of course I don't fully grasp 100% of it, but he talks about the division that's arisen throughout this conflict, poor vs. rich, rural vs. urban and he rejects all the nationa's divisive language: "The wounds that are being inflicted on our social fabric will take a long time to heal," he says. "Argentines versus Argentines...we've already seen this movie, and it ends bad and extremely sad. When will we learn?"
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