2 Killed in Argentina in Protests Demanding Back Pay for State Workers

Two men were shot and killed in clashes Friday between paramilitary police and public servants demanding overdue pay in the northern province of Corrientes, plunging Argentina’s new government into its first crisis.

The country’s second-largest union called a 24-hour strike for Monday in protest of the deaths.

But Interior Minister Frederico Storani accused extremist groups of infiltrating the protest in Corrientes and firing at the paramilitary police, or gendarmes. Storani said the police were armed only with rubber bullets and tear gas as they tried to expel protesters from a bridge.

“The most violent elements on the bridge were supported by snipers firing from nearby buildings,” Storani told reporters.

He said there will be an investigation into the killings but stressed that the gendarmes were not armed with live rounds.

The two men, ages 18 and 26, both died after being shot in the chest, Julio Fidel, director of the San Martin Hospital of the province’s capital, also called Corrientes, said.

The week-old Alliance government of President Fernando de la Rua took direct control of Corrientes this week. The provincial authority is nearly bankrupt and public servants--including teachers and provincial police--are on strike, while doctors are working without pay.

Gendarmes, who report to the federal government, have been sent in to keep the peace in the absence of civilian police.

Storani said that he understood the protesters’ grievances and blamed years of corrupt provincial government for forcing the national government to intervene.

About 600 miles from Buenos Aires, the province of 854,000 people has not paid state employees since April as it struggles under a mountain of debt.

The provincial government is in disarray, with two men claiming to be the legitimate governor.

Gendarmes wearing gas masks and carrying shields fired tear gas at protesters on the city’s outskirts. Youths, their faces covered with bandannas, aimed slingshots and stones at the gendarmes, and firefighters extinguished a burning vehicle.

Reporters said some protesters had guns. Protesters said gendarmes fired live rounds at their legs.

The provincial undersecretary for health initially said a pregnant woman died after exposure to tear gas, but hospitals in the area, which would have received the woman’s body, discounted the report.

One of Corrientes’ would-be governors, Hugo Perie, ordered civilian police officers carrying white flags to put themselves between protesters and gendarmes to prevent further violence.

The Confederation of Argentine Workers, which groups most of Argentina’s state sector workers, said it was calling a 24-hour general strike Monday to demand that gendarmes be pulled out of the troubled province.

Furious protesters screamed insults at De la Rua, accusing him of being responsible for excesses by the gendarmes.

“De la Rua sent them to repress us. They are a bunch of cowards,” said a man brandishing a spent tear gas canister to television cameras, his face hidden by a handkerchief.

Economy Minister Jose Luis Machinea on Friday promised $30 million of urgent aid for Corrientes but insisted that it must put its books in order. Public servants are 80% of the work force in the province, which has debt of $1.4 billion.

The federal government is also struggling to cut spending to meet fiscal targets agreed with the International Monetary Fund, and has frozen federal transfers to the provinces.