— BUENOS AIRESBy mid-afternoon on Saturday the Avenida de Mayo had become a slow-moving river of red, white and blue, the colors of the Argentine flag carried by tens of thousands of marchers who had walked from the city's outer barrios to the gates of the Casa Rosada to protest a year of unrelenting austerity.
The demonstration, organized by the country's two largest labor confederations and joined by an unusually broad coalition of student unions, retirees and small-business federations, was the most significant show of street-level opposition to the government's emergency economic package since it took effect eight months ago.
"Bread is a luxury now," said Eva Domínguez, 64, a retired schoolteacher who had traveled by bus from the suburb of Lanús. She held a hand-lettered sign that read, simply: "Mi pensión ya no alcanza" — my pension no longer reaches. "They told us this would hurt for a season. It has been a year."
The package, championed by the country's libertarian president, slashed energy subsidies, devalued the peso, and froze public-sector hiring in an effort to tame inflation that had touched triple digits before he took office. By some measures, the program is working: monthly inflation has fallen sharply, the central bank has rebuilt reserves, and the bond market — long a graveyard for Argentine credibility — has tentatively warmed.
But the human cost is visible from any window of a downtown bus. Soup kitchens in the working-class neighborhoods of the south report queues that stretch for blocks. Public hospitals say they are turning away non-emergency patients. University rectors warn that a freeze on operating budgets will force the postponement of the academic calendar.
Government officials, who watched the march from the windows of the presidential palace, struck a defiant tone. "Adjustment is never popular," the economy minister told a wire service in a brief statement. "Decline, however, is fatal. We choose the former."
Saturday's protest passed without significant incident, though clashes broke out briefly between a small group of demonstrators and riot police near the Congress building. By dusk the crowd had largely dispersed, though organizers vowed a national strike before the end of the month.
