Argentina: Hotel Bauen eviction called off at last minute

Hotel_Bauen_Argentina_Famed worker-occupied building Hotel Bauen got a stay of execution last night after the National Chamber of Appeals in Buenos Aires allowed an injunction against its eviction, just hours before the site was due to be forced out.

In its comments the court overturned an order by María Paula Hualde that Bauen’s 140 workers had no right to appeal their eviction. It said she had “erred” in rushing through the order. Hualde’s overenthusiastic ruling followed President Mauricio Macri’s decision to veto a Senate agreement last year to give the building over to the workers.

Over the last month staff at the Bauen have been building solidarity and organising support events to raise awareness about the threat to the hotel, which has been under occupation for 14 years and is a mainstay of left-wing organising in the city. City bosses have been reluctant to take on the hotel, which is a national symbol for the co-operative movement and has a long history of successfully seeing off eviction attempts. [Read More]

Argentina: Worker-occupied Hotel Bauen gets ready to resist April 19th eviction

Hotel_Bauen_ArgentinaToday marks 14 days to save Argentina’s famed worker-occupied building, after 14 years of continuous working for the community and providing jobs for 140 people.

The building was taken over by its staff as part of the fábricas recuperadas movement during Argentina’s early 2000s financial crisis, as the original owners had dealt with their financial troubles by abandoning it. Currently hotel chain Mercoteles is claiming ownership of the site, which has become a major hub for left-wing organising in Buenos Aires. In a video, Bauen workers explained:

The group that bought the Bauen was built with the help of the dictatorship and they abandoned it without paying a million-dollar debt and leaving 70 families in the street.

Hotel Bauen co-op members are currently fighting a legal battle against a judge’s ruling last month to evict them on April 19th, based solely on the veto of right-wing President Mauricio Macri. They had previously been confident that they would beat the case overall, as they had won Senate support to expropriate the building to their care before Macri intervened in December last year. Team member Ataliva Dinani explained:

The legal route is not a utopian dream on our part, there is a mechanism in Section 83 of the Constitution which would allow deputies and senators to ratify the ruling to expropriate the Bauen, despite the veto by Macri. [Read More]