How is it possible that a teacher’s union salary increase conflict in the far-off southern part of the country where President Nestor Kircher used to govern is becoming a regional political crisis that threatens to transform into a national crisis throughout all of Argentina? At first glance it seems to be an absurdity. The Kircher government holds a solid 60% approval rating among the general public and until now, his popularity was even greater in his own provice of Santa Cruz.

Surely, the government of the province made a series of mistakes; the most serious of which was the extreme repression that ended up costing teacher Carlos Fuentealba his life. Even so, the fact that this distant and barely significant provincial crisis has spread throughout the rest of the country seems almost unbelieveable.

Luis Bicego, the preist in the Santa Cruz town of Las Heras, affirmed what seems to be the population’s reigning feeling: “This way of governing is so authoritarian, so blind and so deaf.” Immediately afterwards, he accused President Kirchner of “making himself into the victim.”

Argentina is living through a pre-electoral period in which any tiny conflict threatens to overflow nationally, like as was the case this week in the Buenos Aires Constitution Station where yet another malfunction left travelers stranded. From a conspiracy theory angle, many in the government think the opposition is orchestrating it all. There’s something, however, that happens in a country to make a people’s patience run out so quickly. From this side of the river and from a nationalistic perspective that simplifies our entire world view, one starts to think that Argentines must have some almost pathological propensity for protest, some kind genetic defect marking their identity.

Even though there are several angles from which to understand the current situation, sociolgist Maristella Svampa’s analysis expressed in an interview with the Río Negro newspaper seems offer some clues on what’s happening.

Despite “the masification of hand-out policies, co-optation, and the disciplining and the demonization of the displaced workers movements…the blocking of streets and of transport routes today appears to be a strategy of mass struggle,” because “direct action has become one of the few effective tools for those who don’t hold power.”

The rest, has to do with people’s reactions in the face of death, because strong repression “brings to life the ghost, the trauma, that society still shoulders from the periods of the military dictatorship.” This sharp anti-repressive and anti-dictatorial conscienceness put limits on and weakens even the President with the highest approval rating since the electoral system was restored 24 years ago.