Buenos Aires is divided into 15 ‘comunas’.

The Buenos Aires city Appeals Court overturned yesterday a decree signed by mayor Mauricio Macri in 2011 which established the Units of Citizen Attention (UACs) to the detriment of the city’s comunas.

The ruling came after a group of neighbours and legislators filed an injunction against the creation of the UACs, 17 decentralised administratives bodies directly controlled by the city government, which, they argued, encroached on the scope of the recently created comunas and impeded citizen’s participation in the matters pertaining to their respective neighbourhoods. According to the injunction, “The Constitution of the City of Buenos Aires establishes participative democracy (…) by regulating the comunas. The aim of the comunas is to decentralise the functions of the city government (…) and the creation of the UACs alters this process.”

The first instance judge, Gabriela Seijas, had ruled against the injunction. However, the Appeals Court overturned the initial ruling and declared the UACs “illegitimate”.

“Decree 376/11 [which creates the UACs] keeps within the structure of the central government responsibilities that by legislative decision belong to the communal authorities and, therefore, can only be declared illegitimate”, the ruling states, suspending the application of the decree and transferring the responsibilities assigned to the UACs to the Community Boards (the comunas’ executive body), at least until a final judgement is delivered.

Proyecto Sur legislator Rafael Gentilli, who was part of the group that filed the injunction, said that “now Macri doesn’t have any more arguments to keep the neighbours from fully participating in their neighbourhoods,” and explained that thanks to the ruling “the Community Boards will now get back the duties of: dealing with the public, neighbourhoods’ public works (streets and avenues), decisions on green spaces, trees and pruning, communal control over public spaces, and emergency public works (such as fixing potholes and sidewalks).”

Buenos Aires is divided into 15 'comunas'.

On 10th July 2011, after 15 long years of legislative indecision, the city of Buenos Aires finally held its first elections for the representatives of the juntas comunales (community boards). Each of the city’s 15 comunas, approved definitively in 2005 by the Organic Law of Municipalities (ley de comunas), elected seven representatives to their new local governing units.

In the weeks leading up to the elections, which also reaffirmed incumbent Mayor Mauricio Macri for a second term, the city government polled a selection of 1050 residents of Buenos Aires. When asked about their awareness and knowledge of the comunas, a staggering 82% responded that they had no idea what they were.

Finally active after years of political struggle, the basic purpose of the comunas is to address the needs of their neighbourhoods and involve greater citizen participation in the life and governance of local affairs.

“The comunas are completely open to their communities,” says Juan Carlos Quiroga of Movimiento Comunero, an NGO dedicated to forming a non-traditional political movement based on participation and power for the common citizen. “We invite people to get involved in their communities, to freely debate the problems and solutions, and to modify the reality of their neighbourhoods,”

Faced with the reality of their low public visibility, the comuneros’ principal challenge now is to inform the public not only of the promise, but the direct advantages of bringing new voices into the mix of democracy in Buenos Aires. To this end, the history of the comuneros’ struggle can bring to light the factors that have led and shaped their current predicament, as well as their priorities moving forward.

Decentralisation in the City Constitution 

“As in fairy tales,” says a 2009 report from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLASCO), “the decentralisation of the municipalities of Buenos Aires is a never-ending story: one is always near the end, but it never arrives.”

Consistent with the six-year gap between the passage of the ley de comunas and last year’s elections, a chronic history of delay may be the best general explanation for the lack of public knowledge regarding the function and active status of the comunas.

The plan to create local administrative units in Buenos Aires originated in the ratification of the autonomous City Constitution of 1996. Providing five years for the city to adapt to its decentralised role, the Constitution obligated the municipal legislature to create and define the function of the comunas no later than October 2001.

More significant at the time, however, was the newly elective nature of the mayoral office in Buenos Aires, previously a role appointed by the federal government. The overall move toward decentralisation and the city’s autonomous status now signified a novel political space.

Introduced as part of the same constitutional process, the call for comunas and the adapted role of the mayor in the city initiated spheres of decentralised power, often antagonistic, that have since shared important links in defining themselves and the new political space.

Crisis and Opportunity

As the end of 2001 approached, Argentina was spiralling into an economic, political, and social crisis of historic proportion. The emergence of extreme opinions and public confrontation polarised attitudes toward radical positions.

'Que se vayan todos' (Photo: Nicolas Liuzzi)

Characterised by the cry, “Que se vayan todos!” (“They all must go!”), the agitated stance of the public, reacting to administrative dysfunction, served simultaneously to support differing ideas of reform.

Citizen activists, driven by the extensive loss and distrust sweeping society, could genuinely claim an urgent need for participative democracy to reform the broken politics of Argentina. The city government, meanwhile, vulnerable and in crisis mode, could effectively dismiss the comuna question as a step into further chaos or systemic collapse.

“In the 90s and during the economic crisis, the city experienced tremendous social fragmentation,” Quiroga explains. “The instability in this context, intensified by unemployment and hardship in many sectors of the population, created a scenario for participative democracy to offer hope, opportunity, and better health for the people of our neighbourhoods.”

Since the City Constitution already provided the legal grounds to establish the comunas of Buenos Aires, private citizens and neighbourhood organisations embarked on their long fight to make the constitutional mandate a reality.

‘The juntas comunales were envisioned in the Constitution as the governing power, delegated by the neighbours, to their 7 elected officials, as in traditional representative form,” says Ismael Reaño, a retired agronomist and comunero in comuna 14 (Palermo). “The other governing bodies, consejos consultivos, were to provide the new participative space led freely and voluntarily by residents of the comuna to inform the actions of the juntas comunales.”

Confronted with mounting public pressure, the city legislature returned to the problem of drafting the ley de comunas after the worst of the crisis had passed. While independent neighbourhood networks coordinated to raise motions in the courts, the city government favoured its own transitional centres of citizen participation, the Centros de Gestión y Participación (CGPs), which had served since 1998 as forums for testing administrative models of decentralisation.

With the issue indefinitely relegated to a question mark, the fervour for democratic participation during the critical years of the crisis succumbed to inertia in the eyes of the wider public. Compared to an improving status quo, the comunas lacked the kind of meaningful progress and institutional support on which city residents could base practical expectations.

Not surprisingly, as the traditional party organisations positioned themselves for control of the evolving mayoral office, little was done officially to discourage empty forecasts for the comunas and citizen-led democracy.

The Long Road to Elections

Far from producing definitive answers, the eventual ley de comunas of 2005 exposed fault lines between the city government and neighbourhood organisations fighting to launch the comunas. Gradually, the neighbours’ struggle intensified around securing elections and limiting the degree of executive power the mayor could exert over the comunas’ implementation.

Elections in Buenos Aires (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

While the ley de comunas called for fulfilment by the end of May 2007, the government at the time did not call for elections. Aware by 2008 that Macri’s position was to thwart or fatally amend the comunas altogether, the neighbours’ groups proactively re-engaged the courts. Finally, in 2009, at the order of a judicial decision, the legislature set an election date for June, 2011. The mayor, however, moved the date of the elections to 10th July, making it coincide with citywide elections, and placed the candidates for the juntas comunales on the full city ballot.

“This is a very important factor to consider in our first elections,” says Alberto Silber, coordinator for Movimiento Comunero in comuna 7 (Flores and Parque Chacabuco). “Article 20 of the ley de comunas clearly states that if the elections coincide with other city elections, there must be a measure for separate ballots or commissions.”

The mayor, executing his interpretation of the law, timed the first public action to establish the comunas in the shadow of mayoral and legislative elections.

For the 18% polled who were knowledgeable about the comunas beforehand, the outcome was nevertheless a victory that displayed clearly the government’s complicity in the perception that nobody cares about the comunas.

Local Authority: Limits of Macrismo

As of last December, the 15 comunas operate freely with legal status and territorial jurisdiction. Their limited scope, as per the ley de comunas, defines only green spaces and secondary roads as exclusive competencies. Other powers the comunas share concurrently with the central government to meet local needs and demands, include the execution of plans for public works, projects, and services.

What remains uncertain, in both the long and short terms, is the comunas’ destiny in the realm of city politics.

Guido Palazzo of Eudemocracia plans steps on the white board (Photo courtesy of Eudemocracia)

Looking at the big picture, the elaboration of future goals depends necessarily on the citizens, NGOs, and other social organisations that participate to create an impactful role for the comunas in Buenos Aires. Right now, however, with the consejos consultivos formally opening only last month, the focus is on asserting the comunas’ immediate practical authority against Macri’s rival policies of local administration.

“The situation between the Macri government and the comunas is full of tension,” says Pablo Nanini, a comunero and activist with the Asociación Civil Eudemocracia, which advocates incorporating technology into the exercise of direct democratic decision-making. “There is a void of distribution, a budget held to the minimum, and efforts at co-optation.”

With respect to the last point, Nanini was referring to the mayor’s creation of Units of Citizen Attention (UACs after their name in Spanish) to overtake the previous CGPs. The UACs, enacted by decree of the mayor, consist of 17 units staffed directly by the mayor and charged with duties that interfere with the transfer of local functions to the comunas, diverting their resources and cutting back their already minimal budget.

Prohibited from imposing taxes on residents in their respective territories, the comunas are dependent on allocations from the city budget. For the first two years of operation, this amount is not to exceed 5% of the total city budget, divided as chosen among the 15 comunas. However, in the 2012 budget the comunas were given a scant 0.002%, or $71.8 million, for their first year of operation.

“If we don’t have money, we don’t have real autonomy. We can’t serve the people in our comunas,” says Ernesto Altamiranda of comuna 14. “This is why we are so focused on preparing our budget for 2013.”

Local Participation: The Future of the Comunas

It could be argued that the city government’s basic attitude toward the comunas all along—that they first need to prove their worth among the citizenry—was not so wrong in light of the poll numbers published prior to the elections.

The NGO Movimiento Comunero holds a community meeting in 2010 (photo courtesy of Movimiento Comunero)

Active members of the comunero movement are well aware of the need to reach a wider demographic; and in essence, given the city government’s feeble attempts at promoting the new system, this is the comunas’ de facto bottom line for survival.

“Salud. Siempre, salud…por el 5%,” Altamiranda jokes over a round of beers following much discussion of what is wrong instead of right—corruption, waste, the corporate nature of traditional politics.

Many of the men and women long involved in the creation of the comunas understand that what they have fought for will be for the benefit of future generations.

“For these guys,” says Pablo Nanini, indicating his elder peers, “the struggle came from the generation of the dictatorship, to first rebuild democracy. For my generation, it’s about carrying that idea through and bringing direct participation to the people.”

Alarmingly, however, per the government’s poll, the demographic least informed about the comunas fell between the ages of 18 and 29.

“I think this is one of our most important tasks,” Nanini reflects. “We need the participation of young people, and we are working online, with the technology we have, to bring the comunas to the to the attention and interest of all to participate.”

To see what porteños think about the decentralisation process in Buenos Aires, click here.

Buenos Aires’ communes or comunas, represent the 15 separate districts that were outlined after the city’s reassignment to autonomous status. Despite being designated in 1996, the city’s comunas are just now beginning to wield power.

They held their first elections in 2011, and are mainly responsible for secondary roads, public parks, sidewalks and local maintenance issues. The decentralisation of power is meant to democratise the city’s funds, and allow neighbours, social organisations and NGOs to weigh in and propose community and cultural projects.

What do the locals think of the redistribution of power? Do they think that the city’s barrios should have more access to funds? Also, what does this say about the nature of participative democracy in Argentina? Will it work?

The Indy’s reporters set out to see how the people feel about handing power over to the people.

Photos by Allison Kate Cherkis

Dora Tamara, Accountant, Palermo

I think the neighbourhoods should have more power over the funds.  For example I just got a 200% raise on my taxes. They (the government) always take your money to fix other things. It turns out that here in Palermo, it’s more advanced than the neighbourhoods in the southern area. But there are things here that also need to be fixed and maintained. So why would I have to pay for people from other neighbourhoods and even from the province? I’m not lacking money, but I also don’t have money to spare.

Unfortunately, my generation could not participate as much [in politics] because of all of the military governments. There was a short lapse of democratic government. When democracy came back in 1983, I was just over 30, and wanted to participate. But, of course, they gave more room to older people, those who had experience, and those who had been in jail during the Peronist years. I’m talking about the socialist party. Now they prefer to have young people that they can manipulate over older people with more political activism. So they don’t give room for “cult” older people to participate.

I never found room to participate in the party. They have younger people who are not even from the neighbourhood.

Julieta Ginter, 25, Student, Palermo

I think that each neighbourhood should have at least a small budget, because there are some neighbourhoods that are very abandoned and left behind. The [centralised budget] may only fix a park but that’s it. But yes, each neighbourhood should manage at least a small budget.

I think participative democracy will work in this case, for the same reason that the budget will work. This neighbourhood (Palermo) is pretty well looked after because it’s more touristy, and the mayor pays a lot more attention to touristy neighbourhoods, and not so much to the other ones.

Brenda Asuscfli, 25, Student, Palermo

I think that the neighbourhoods should have a base budget that they can count on, to develop different touristy parks, and other places. So that people can also make the most [of the city] not only in the more centrally located and touristy places, and also so that everyone can look after [public places].

Participation of the people will be good. People will learn to look after things, to have a budget, and develop activities with that budget.

Ariel Zichichi, 37, Clerk, Caballito

[Having a budget in the neighbourhood] will be more equitative and will give people the opportunity to participate. People could have more participation, and have their opinions heard more by the government. It will be good if there is a representative for each neighbourhood, who will know the specific problems of their neighbourhood. Whereas, government doesn’t know the specific problem of each neighbourhood. I think that in the future, this could work.

Flavia Galdo, 38, Lawyer, Caballito

I don’t know whether the funds should be centralised, or whether more access to the funds will help. I’m not sure about the funding, because that’s a more delicate economic issue. I don’t really have a clear opinion on whether it will be better for the budget to be decentralised, or centralised and managed by the government. But I do believe in more participation for the people.

We are still very far away from a participative democracy. I think there is a tendency towards decentralisation, but we’re still far away from that in Argentina. There’s a lot of talking about it, but we can’t actually see it in action.