Students of the Mariano Acosta public school hang protest posters on September 28. ENRIQUE GARCIA MEDINA
"We demand that they listen to us," reads a banner hanging outside the Mariano Acosta school in Buenos Aires.
This secondary school, located in the Once neighborhood, was the first to be occupied by its students last Monday.
Since then, about twenty have joined the fight against the local government headed by Horacio Rodríguez Larreta.
Students lock themselves up day and night in schools and thus force classes to be suspended.
They demand a "decent" diet, infrastructure improvements and the elimination of unpaid labor practices in companies.
Rodríguez Larreta has responded with complaints to the parents and has warned that the days of class that are lost will have to be recovered.
The students of the occupied schools want the opposition project that seeks to transform the school feeding system to be approved.
In his opinion, school menus are insufficient in quantity and quality and some students have suffered poisoning due to the poor condition of the food they receive.
"Every day they only bring a shoulder and cheese sandwich, which usually arrives frozen, and fruit, which is almost always in poor condition," Federico Lavagnino, president of the student center at the Juan Pedro Esnaola school, described to the media.
From the Ministry of Education of Buenos Aires they remind that public secondary schools have a simple day and what scholarship students receive is not lunch but "a snack" designed to eat mid-morning or mid-afternoon.
This is one sandwich and one fruit or one cereal bar per day.
The students are also opposed to unpaid work practices in companies and organizations that the Buenos Aires government launched last year in the midst of strong controversy.
In addition, they ask for improvements in the buildings in which they study and that they stop "politically persecuting student centers."
no dialogue
The Government of Buenos Aires has been intransigent in the face of the method of protest.
It demands that the occupation of educational institutions cease and that the regular development of classes —now interrupted— be allowed as requirements to open a negotiation.
“Taking over a school is nullifying dialogue.
As long as they don't lift the shots, we will continue to be inflexible because actions have consequences and a minority can never impose itself on the rest," Rodríguez Larreta warned at a press conference this Friday.
Hours before, the mayor of Buenos Aires has accused the parents of the students of being responsible and has anticipated that "they will have to take responsibility for the damage that their children cause."
THERE IS A COUNTRY MODEL THAT IS ENDING pic.twitter.com/yELOKxzrAN
– Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (@horaciorlarreta) September 29, 2022
Nearly 170 parents have been denounced for "entering or remaining against the will of the holder of the right of admission" in public places or places of public or private access.
This violation contemplates sanctions of between one and five days of public utility work or a fine of up to one thousand pesos (6.5 dollars).
Of the twenty schools that have participated in the occupations throughout this week, a dozen maintain them and eight have lifted them in the last few hours.
"The good news is that there are fewer and fewer, a better Argentina is coming," Rodríguez Larreta celebrated this morning in an electoral campaign tone.
The Buenos Aires mayor, from the Together for Change coalition, aspires to compete for the presidency in the 2023 elections.
From the opposition, the most critical has been the Peronist legislator Ofelia Fernández, who made the leap to politics from the Carlos Pellegrini student center, one of the most emblematic public schools in Buenos Aires.
"Complaints against parents, ignoring students, police squeezing, but 0 answers to the problems they pose: neither to junk food, nor to falling ceilings, nor anything," Fernández has pointed out through the networks social.
The first shot of a school in Argentina was made by Dorrego, Las Heras and Rivadavia.
May 28, 1796. One of the main slogans: adequate food in schools.
The brutes are those of the ministry of education, go to study and work pathological commentators
– Ofelia Fernández (@OfeFernandez_) September 28, 2022
The occupation of schools is a common form of protest in Argentina.
In 2017, students from almost thirty schools in Buenos Aires locked themselves in and paralyzed classes in protest of the educational reform launched by the Buenos Aires government.
At that time, the city's educational authorities warned that they would transfer the responsibility of the students to the parents in an attempt to curb this type of conflict.
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