The formation of FACTA
While these disputes were going on in the judicial and legislative spheres, the old mother organization of the recovered businesses, the National Movement of Recovered Businesses, was thrown into crisis. Political differences and diverging organizational practices had reached a point of no return that brought on a new division in the MNER. A significant part of the movement opted to create a federation of cooperatives in place of the lax, top-down structure they had used until then. The Argentine Federation of Cooperatives of Self-Managed Workers (FACTA) came to be managed as a federated structure that gathered recovered businesses and other self-managed worker cooperatives, which over time became diversified and ever more distant from the imprint of the original MNER. The BAUEN has always had a central place in the Federation, and Fabio Resino, first, and Federico Tonarelli, since, have occupied leadership roles. Since then, FACTA is inextricably linked to the history of the BAUEN.
The Federation was founded on December 9, 2006. Fabio Resino, in the official presentation of the Federation (which was carried out months later in the hotel), summarized it this way:
FACTA emerges as a necessary tool, for unity, for cooperatives and for recovered businesses. Not only as a tool to struggle, but yes, it is very necessary be united in the struggle for expropriations, for the businesses still to come, for a national expropriation law, for a fiduciary fund, to be able to get credit from banking entities, for all struggles that are legitimate and positive. And also as a tool of unity to be able compete in a capitalist market where, individually, cooperatives are condemned to failure. So if we are setting up production and capitalization networks, we have many more chances to survive in that market, which is so difficult for a worker cooperative that doesn’t have capitalization or State support and of course, everything is much more difficult.1
- http://www.revolutionvideo.org/agoratv/programas/empresas_recuperadas/facta_presentacion.html↩