BAUEN posts

Nor do they seem to know that was the reform of the bankruptcy law in 2011 that benefits business recovery by the workers. With all its deficiencies (among them, that it leaves a lot of discretion to judges to decide whether to use the mechanism or not, and that it extends the time long beyond… Read…

The indignation of La Nación against “illegal occupations” has a direct target: the workers of the BAUEN cooperative. They present the deceased owner Marcelo Iurcovich and his son Hugo, without naming them, as poor victims of the new barbarians, the workers that occupy businesses (they prefer to call them employees, to highlight their subordination an… Read…

La Nación gets upset by the lack of respect for private property that “illegal occupations” represent, when private property is violated to defend other constitutional rights, like the right to work, housing, education, and a dignified life. They never get upset, in contrast, when public property is attacked. They are not indignant about the growth… Read…

A provisional epilogue And in case it was not entirely clear who is who in this story, La Nación put it in black and white. Judge Hualde sent another eviction notice in March, with a deadline of April 14. Since that was Good Friday, which everyone had off, she later sent a correction, and the… Read…

In the rest of the article, what has been expropriated is ceded in the form of a loan to the cooperative Buenos Aires Una Empresa Nacional “for the achievement of its social objective, with the condition of continuing the cultural, educational, and social activities that it carries out.” The cooperative must also “destine and create… Read…

The text The unified bill incorporated elements of the prior versions, combining them into a single text. Outside the rigorous formalities, the substantive points of the bill which, the following year, the Senate would turn into Law 27344 and which president Macri would veto shortly thereafter, are the following: Art. 1) The properties and all… Read…

The text The unified bill incorporated elements of the prior versions, combining them into a single text. Outside the rigorous formalities, the substantive points of the bill which, the following year, the Senate would turn into Law 27344 and which president Macri would veto shortly thereafter, are the following: Art. 1) The properties and all… Read…

Of course, Clarín did not deny itself a new attack on the workers. “Bill advances to expropriate the BAUEN, despite claims,” read the headline November 26th, 2015,1 the day the session was held. For La Nación, it was a “scandalous” session, in which a wide-ranging bundle of laws was voted on. Of all those laws,… Read…

Expropriation against the clock It is an enduring paradox that a project driven by, worked on, and wished for by the workers for almost ten years would be approved in a race against time. The result the Presidential elections in 2015 was the starting gun for this last opportunity to try to approve expropriation before… Read…

In spite of being a bill that distanced itself from the self-management that characterized the recovery of the BAUEN from the beginning, the cooperative did not have many other choices and decided to accept the idea. It remained to be seen what would become of the role of the cooperative organization, which workers were not… Read…

A State-run Bauen? In November of 2014, it came to light that Deputy Andrés Larroque, of the Front for Victory, had presented or was about to present a new expropriation bill that was explicitly supported, for the first time, by the Executive Power. The BAUEN workers, after the latest adverse judgment by the Supreme Court… Read…

Clarín did not stop paying attention to the BAUEN. In fact, other than Página/12 from the opposite perspective, it is probably the newspaper that has paid the most attention to the recovered hotel. Most of the other almost 400 recovered businesses, not so much. As the situation was not being resolved, the Iurcoviches, supported more… Read…

Demonstrations of support for the cooperative also continued to grow at the local level. Personalities like Osvaldo Bayer and Quino spoke out, together with hundreds of political leaders and intellectuals. The 15th and 16th of April, the Social and Political Book Fair was held in the BAUEN, where stands of independent and self-managed publishers were… Read…

Chapter 12 The long road to expropriation March 21, 2014, marked the eleventh anniversary of the occupation of the hotel by its workers. Like every year, the cooperative organized an event and invited numerous guests from different political, labor and cooperative sectors to show their support for self-management of the BAUEN. There was even a… Read…

“No businessperson comes through these courts the way we do” Speech by Omar Villablanca, representative of FASINPAT and of the Union of Ceramistas of Neuquén, at the doors of Court n.° 9, April 19, 2012 We prefer to call ourselves Zanon, because we’ve exproporiated everything from the boss, even his name. We continue to be… Read…

The BAUEN workers pay homage to the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo Speech by Federico Tonarelli, April 18, 2012 We simply think that it was the best opportunity to remind all of you, and the grandmothers, obviously, of the story of this place. It is a place that is intimately linked to the story… Read…

As the representatives of the cooperative, its lawyers, and various legislators and social and political leaders that accompanied them went into the hearing, the protesters listened to a series of speakers. One of them was Omar Villablanca, leader of FASINPAT, Factory Without Bosses, the former Zanon Ceramics, another great example of the recovered businesses in… Read…

Of course, it did not stop building its collective management every day. Nor did it stop building support and social strength for its demands, even as it pushed for new expropriation bills in Congress. One significant milestone in that search was the event in which it honored the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo by… Read…

Resistance and solidarity continue Throughout the following years, the legal case in which the original judge ruled that the cooperative had to leave the hotel, continued to advance through different levels of the judiciary, always with unfavorable result for workers. The appeal by the cooperative’s lawyers was granted by the judge and then rejected in… Read…

As the years went by, FACTA became consolidated as an organization with a national reach, with affiliated cooperatives in different regions, like the provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Cordoba, Mendoza, San Juan, La Rioja, Catamarca, La Pampa, Formosa, Chaco, and Buenos Aires and the City of Buenos Aires, growing to include some… Read…

But in contrast to MNER, which was made up exclusively of recovered businesses, the Federation intended from its beginning to expand the connection with other collectives of self-managed workers. Resino continues: We are worker cooperatives that are self-managed businesses, because some are recovered businesses and others are cooperatives, which, while they are not recovered businesses… Read…

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… Read…

Chapter 11 Resistance and self-management The eviction ordered by judge Paula Hualde unleashed a wave of solidarity with the BAUEN workers that grew endlessly from then on. If there is one thing the recovery of the downtown hotel had, it was solidarity. It received all kinds of groups of popular struggle in its rooms and… Read…

The judge, in this part of the judgment, made two different interpretations. She accepted as valid and satisfactory the “offer” of the “Morando Law” that proposed that Mercoteles employ the cooperative workers, among other theoretical concessions (like the recognition of the costs of repairs made to the building by the cooperative up to an obviously… Read…

Next, she quickly concluded that there was no option but to “return” the building at Callao 360 to the registered owner, which is to say, Mercoteles, but that, as a judge, she considered it prudent to contemplate the “negative consequences” of this restitution, which she sagely deduced would be the loss of the cooperators’ jobs.… Read…

After reviewing some facts relative to the history of the hotel as of the bankruptcy (without even mentioning the prior circumstances) and grounding herself in the passage of Law 1914 (the “Morando Law”), Hualde went on to explain that in her “visual inspection” of May 17, 2006, she could see that: (…) the poor state… Read…

A new actor comes onto the scene: Judge Hualde The workers had little time to celebrate the triumph in this trial, because very shortly after, May 16, 2006, the bankruptcy judge of the Bauen, Paula Hualde, showed up at the hotel to do a “visual inpection.” She had replaced Favier Dubois. According to the workers,… Read…

Diego Carbone, the lawyer that began to represent the cooperative in place of Florencia Kravetz, declared: “The testimony of Samuel Kaliman, was presented as General Director of Mercoteles, was shameful. He said that he did not know the address of the legal headquarters of the company, the stockholder composition, or when the directors met. Why… Read…

Do you know what a front man is? Also, among the considerations in the national bill is the relationship between the Iurcoviches and Mercoteles, which had been made obvious in an unusual trial concerning a complaint by Mercoteles for the violation of closure signs in Contravention Court n.° 3. The prosecutor himself, Adrián Martín, declared… Read…

The first bill was presented July 20, 2006, to the Congress of the Nation by a group of legislators led by Francisco “The Beard” Gutiérrez, the historical leader of the Metalworkers’ Union in Quilmes, the first union to promote factory recovery, at the end of the 80s.1 Gutiérrez was accompanied by a group mostly made… Read…

Chapter 10 Eviction order The “Morando Law” was unable to impose its conditions, and the commission that was expected to meet was never assembled. The cooperative asked the Head of Government at the time, Jorge Telerman, to veto the regulation, but the functionary limited himself to not enforcing it and presenting a bill that modified… Read…

Sidebar: Cromañón, or the complicity of the state and business owners ON December 31, 2004, a fire at a place known as the Republic of Cromagnon (managed by Omar Emir Chabán, a well-established business owner on the Argentine rock scene) claimed the lives of 194 people, the large majority of them young people. The survivors… Read…

In this assembly (which is recorded, once more, in Pierucci’s documentary), there was a rather intense debate between the workers, the leaders of the MNER (including Murúa and Resino), and Diego Kravetz. Kravetz tried to argue that the bill of temporary occupancy was going to lose, and that Morando’s bill was going to win the… Read…

Agitated session in the Legislature The climate became more and more confrontational until, on December 6th, 2005, the bills came up for a vote on the floor. Kravetz’s bill did not get enough votes to be approved, and above all, to defeat Morando’s bill. This bill was presented to counter the one that sought to… Read…

The fight was not limited to Parliament or the judiciary. In contrast to other former owners of recovered businesses, the Iurcoviches, now characterized as Mercoteles, had an active communication policy. Internet portals and some important media outlets produced articles every so often that were no more than veiled propaganda in favor of the return of… Read…

But the BAUEN was not among the thirteen, nor those added later. Federico Tonarelli, explains that, “like the expropriation bills that were approved for Chilavert, Grissinópoli, Ghelco, or the Patricio Print Shop, the BAUEN’s, presented by Diego Kravetz, was also for temporary occupancy of two years.” The bill, number 1505, was presented June 16th, 2005,… Read…

The struggle moves to the legislature The expropriation bill that Marcelo Ruarte mentioned was presented to the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires by Diego Kravetz, a legislator and also the cooperative’s lawyer, although due to his position in the Parliament of Buenos Aires, the representation of the cooperative was being covered by his… Read…

Ruarte summed up the situation in these terms in those days: We what we have through the judge in the bankruptcy case is custody of the property. Later, we’re in contact with the Government of the City, we’re advancing on expropriation, working on an enormous tax debt this gentleman who calls himself the owner has.… Read…

Chapter 9 Macrismo takes the stage: the “Morando Law” While the judicial minuet was going on behind the scenes, the BAUEN workers were confronted with a more concrete threat. After the Cromagnon massacre (see sidebar, below), the product of systematic and long-standing corruption between the business community and the government of the City of Buenos… Read…

And, what’s more, why did judge Hualde herself, having noted the mismatch of the dates of the transactions, decide to ignore it, ruling that the cooperative had to be evicted from the hotel and crediting ownership to Mercoteles? Of course, none of this was a surprise to the workers. Marcelo Iurcovich never stopped presenting himself… Read…

The reader will be able to discern a wide incongruity in the dates. Not only the last, in which Mercoteles (which is to say, the front men of the Iurcoviches) appears before the court, which “understands” the bankruptcy of Solari SA three and a half years after having acquired ownership. There’s something much more serious,… Read…

Chronicle of a sale foretold On July 25th, 2001 (or June 25th, according to Berasategui and Gallardo), arguing that the sale to Solari was void because he had not finished paying (leaving aside the issue of the hotel itself, with the debt to BANADE), Marcelo Iurcovich sold the BAUEN to Mercoteles, an enterprise that had… Read…

The issue of when and how this sale took place is key, because it is what protects the pretensions of the Iurcoviches and allows them to appear over and over, demanding the eviction of the BAUEN. The deed to the building at Callao 360 appeared in their hands, almost by magic. Recall that when the… Read…

The chicken or the egg The Iurcovich group was now under the control of Hugo, the son of the founder, Marcelo, but it still had the same old tricks. For them, the hotel had always been their property. In that sense, they had the advantage of really knowing what arguments they had to demand its… Read…

So, where did the capital come from to set up and equip the rooms, to outfit the bar and the rooms and the rest of the arrangements discussed above? The answer is clear: from labor. From the work of the cooperative members, from the solidarity of workers at other recovered businesses, and from the community.… Read…

Chapter 8 The return of the ones who never left: the Iurcoviches reappear By the middle of 2005, as we’ve seen, the workers in the BAUEN cooperative had managed—with enormous effort—to put this large hotel back on its feet after it had been abandoned by the employers. What had been a boarded-up, empty building a… Read…

Of course, the ends pursued by the new administration and the modes of organization and decision-making were far removed from those of the previous employers. This was not lost on the media, which systematically opined and wrote against the hotel workers (and against the working class in general): Through contacts with the delegate on line… Read…

Although it initially seemed “crazy” to Juan Carlos to install their little print shop in an occupied hotel, after several months, he was convinced. The fact that the copy center started working, almost exclusively for the cooperative, was an example of the things that began to function, and better all the time, relieving the fears… Read…

A hotel underway At the beginning of 2006, a little more than a year after the visit of the Venezuelan orchestra, the BAUEN hotel was fully functioning. As an article in Lavaca documents, it had grown “from 35 to 140 members, who keep the hotel operating 24 hours a day: the auditorium, the coffeeshop, the… Read…

María Eva remembers that moment: When the Venezuelans were looking for housing to bring a group, they spoke with us, but the hotel was still very ugly. The boards that had been up before had been taken down, but the rooms were not ready. We told them the story of the hotel, that we were… Read…

The Great Homeland The dividing line between the prolonged period of “holding on” — the first activities — and the launch of the reactivated hotel could be drawn by the solidarity of the Bolivarian government of Venezuela. At this moment, at the beginning of 2004, the hotel had not managed to re-establish the ability to… Read…

Soon, other projects were also located in the BAUEN. On the Callao side, with the door to the new bar, a bookstore was installed, which was there for several years. During one semester, classes were given by the Language Laboratory of the School of Philosophy and Letters of the UBA. Training courses for workers and… Read…

The mere existence of an occupied hotel in the very center of the city of Buenos Aires quickly turned the BAUEN into a center of political and union activities. The MNER itself started to use the rooms for meetings and assemblies. October 11, 2003, for example, a debate was held about legislation for recovered businesses,… Read…

Chapter 7 The recovered hotel While Rosalía Peñarrieta’s birthday was the key to rehabilitating the event rooms, the key to the guest rooms, which is to say, the hotel itself, was still missing. In spite of the efforts of the cooperative workers, a year after the occupation, they were still not in conditions to accommodate… Read…

The party was held at the beginning of October of 2003, and marked the return of food and hospitality activities to the building at Callao 360—this time, without the boss. As Plácido says: The bitterness of not being able to sufficiently satisfy the needs of my family for a year was mixed with the sweetness… Read…

Two plans were combined: on the one hand, Plácido wanted to organize his daughter’s birthday party, though he didn’t have the resources, and was trying get them through the solidarity of various sectors; and on the other hand, the workers at the BAUEN cooperative no longer only wanted to help out a compañero who had… Read…

“I felt like I had a large debt to my family all the need they had experienced, and for all the times I wasn’t able be with them,” continues Plácido, who remembers: When my daughter was fourteen years old, I promised myself that I was going to throw her a fifteenth birthday party. But another… Read…

The first event: recovered business to recovered business “Meanwhile, we put the rooms in a condition to be able to work. This took us about a year, before we had our first client, the quinceañera [fifteenth birthday party] of compañero Plácido’s daughter (Plácido belongs to the Chilavert cooperative). That was when we started holding events… Read…

From there, with the disputes overcome, the “holding on” was organized better, with tasks distributed according to people’s capacities and availability of time. The first thing that occurred to them was that all the available unused and wasted material could get a little money. They contacted a depository of recyclable materials to see what could… Read…

Chapter 6 Holding on Taking over the hotel was simple compared with the long period of resistance immediately afterwards, which the workers usually call el aguante, “the holding on.” They found themselves inside an immense building, in a state of total abandonment, in no condition to work. The door on Callao Avenue was boarded up,… Read…

One of issues with the trustee was the inventory of goods, because if it was done at the end of the occupation, they could be accused of having taken anything that was missing. Finally, an inventory was done of everything in the hotel at the time of the occupation, and the bankruptcy judge ended up… Read…

In María Eva’s story, we also hear the emotion of that entry, something that hadn’t even been a dream months before. But we also hear the concern for the state the facilities were in. There was electricity, but the neglect was significant. “The only thing that made us happy was that we had lights. Otherwise,… Read…

The takeover The former Bauen employees met on the morning of March 21st at the corner of the hotel. They were not alone. About a hundred people accompanied them, convened by the National Movement of Recovered Businesses. There, they were advised that the purpose of the call was not to be paid money by the… Read…

So, Chilavert was an ideal place for the former Bauen workers to begin to join together with a view to an eventual recovery. This seemed absolutely unreal, initially. Arminda says that, “one day, my compañeros called me and told me that they were going to hold some assemblies to take over the hotel, because they… Read…

The former employees of the Bauen connect with the MNER While close to a hundred factories and establishments of all kinds were working or in a struggle for recovery by different methods, the Bauen hotel remained closed and boarded up with a fence covering the whole front on Callao avenue. Most of its furniture and… Read…

Chapter 5 The takeover The Bauen began its history as a recovered business March 21, 2003, a year and almost three months after its closure. Its workers had been left on the street in the middle of Argentina’s biggest economic crisis in decades, a crisis that was also social and political, and the end did… Read…

Iurchovich’s companies According to an investigation by journalist Guillermo Berasategui, the Iurcovich group is composed of almost 30 firms, several of which are simply name changes (changes to legal names) of existing firms, to facilitate certain evasive or fraudulent maneuvers. The flagship company is the Bauen hotel. Original group businesses: – Polytechnics (hospitality supplies)– Industrial… Read…

Solari Félix Santiago Solari Morello doesn’t have anything to do with the Solari family (except perhaps his anti-communism and his sympathy for the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet),1 prominent members of the bourgeoisie of Chile. Together with the Cúneo and Del Río families.2 they control the ownership of the chain of Falabella businesses, which arrived in… Read…

In spite of all the indications of the general state of the country and of the accelerated decline of the business, the workers were left in a state of profound helplessness and a certain bewilderment by the loss of their jobs. “They were taking out comforters, curtains, beds, etc., lots of things, and we were… Read…

Rodríguez Saá (the Peronista governor of the province of San Luis, who also learned how to weave alliances in the BAUEN around the year 2000), momentarily in charge of the presidency, declared that the country had entered into default with international credit organizations the 23rd of December. A short time later, he, in turn, left… Read…

The decline of the Bauen paralleled the decline of the country. The year 2001 was full of disastrous measures, starting with the ruinous business of the “Megaswap” of external debt, negotiated by (among others) Federico Sturzenegger, president of the Central Bank fifteen years later with Mauricio Macri. There was also the brutal attempt at adjustment… Read…

The Bauen closes its doors The Bauen managed by Solari reached a crisis, and Iurcovich himself forced him to present a call of creditors (the first step in the mechanism in the Bankruptcy Law to resolve business insolvencies). A lien was placed by judge Rodolfo Herrera of the National Court on Civil and Commercial Affairs,… Read…

For workers, the change in boss was a wake-up call that marked the beginning of the end. In María Eva’s words: In ‘97, it was reported to us that this part was going to be sold, that the Bauen Tower was going to be divided from the Bauen Suite.1 They offered us severance money that… Read…

The sale to Solari Frequent changes to the registered name were a lead-up to the sale of the hotel to a Chilean businessman named Solari. It was the end of an ever-more obvious decline, and coincided with the collapse of Buenos Aires as hotel showcase, as another product of the economic policy that was sinking… Read…

At the beginning of the ‘90s, the hotel started to see changes: the business “outfitted the fourth floor of the hotel with offices for rent, to attract Chilean executives coming to do business. And the auditoriums of the hotel were transformed into the site of political meetings of every stripe.”1 The Iurcoviches’ Bauen was, according… Read…

Chapter 4 The closure “We were very happy about the World Cup, without knowing what was happening around us. We only saw the personalities who paraded by the hotel, while outside, people were being killed,” remembers Arminda Palacios, one of the members of the cooperative who worked at the hotel since its founding, or more… Read…

What really had happened was very different: Bauen SACIC had accepted a plan in fifteen payments, of which it only made the first. That is, Giordano was making his demand on the basis of an arrangement that had expired for lack of payment, and on top of then, tried to make the State pay the… Read…

The debts to the Government of the City of Buenos Aires Between 1991 and 1993, when its registered name was still Bauen SACIC, the business fell into debt to the City of Buenos Aires for non-payment of taxes on gross income (II.BB.) and for fees for streetlights, street sweeping, and maintenance (ABL) for the sum… Read…

The attempts to collect the remainder through the Banco Nación, the entity that managed the residual portfolio of the BANADE, included an agreement in 1994 with Bauen SACIC for six million dollars. At that time, parity of 1 peso = 1 dollar (Convertibility Law of 1991) was in effect, which established a more than favorable… Read…

The contract signed with Bauen SACIC stipulated a series of disbursements that the BANADE would make in return for the firm presenting certificates that gave an account of the progress of the work. Shortly after beginning, Iurcovich’s business introduced a series of modifications to the original plans approved by the bank, consisting of increased parking,… Read…

These are the social reasons of the businesses that asked BANADE for loans they never finished paying, if they even started, or ever intended to. The liquidation of the National Bank of Development during the government of Carlos Menem facilitated things things for them. Gaglianone Establecimiento Gráfico SACI is currently the recovered business Chilavert Graphic… Read…

The maneuvers of chaining firms that are bought and sold as a way to hide the true owners and the source of their capital, getting loans from public banks and never paying them, using debt waivers or transfers to the State, and filing lawsuits against the State to obstruct investigations (something like a thief shouting… Read…

Chapter 3 How to scam the State The complex business framework we have described provides the starting point for the asset-stripping and bankruptcy of the Bauen hotel, which was a scam on the treasury right from the beginning. The plot of this operation is widely detailed in a work by Federico Tonarelli (former president of… Read…

Here is where Marcelo Iurcovich appears: according to an article published by journalist Santiago O’Donnell in the newspaper Página/12,1 his excellent relationships with the military government, especially with Brigadier General Osvaldo Cacciattore, by then the de facto mayor of the City of Buenos Aires, and with ship captain (later rear admiral) Carlos Alberto Lacoste, who… Read…