By Bridget Johnson, your guide to Journalism

Argentina is no stranger to financial crisis: Seven years ago, a crumbling economy brought the government to its knees. But now, just a few months after succeeding her husband, Nestor Kirchner, as president, Cristina Fernandez-Kirchner seems to be at a loss in the third week of a farmers’ strike that has emptied grocery shelves. The farmers are protesting a dramatic increase on export taxes for soya beans — a leading crop — and other levies imposed by a presidential decree. The government calls it a plan to control inflation and redistribute wealth.

So on Tuesday, tens of thousands of the president’s supporters were bused into Buenos Aires to cheer her on as she begged for an end to the blockades:

“‘I would like to thank the presence of the people who have not come to support any political persuasion or party. They have come to defend the country,’ she said. ‘Free the roads so that Argentinians can get access to food, companies to their merchandise and factories to their supplies.’


…Matters got worse for Ms Fernández last Tuesday, when she gave a speech at the Casa Rosada — the famous pink presidential office in the heart of Buenos Aires — in which she accused the farmers of forming a ‘picket of abundance’ and holding the country to ransom.


The speech was regarded by many Argentinians as divisive and unleashed the worst social turmoil for seven years. In scenes reminiscent of 2001, when Fernando de la Rúa, then the President, was ousted, the middle classes immediately took to the streets of Buenos Aires and other cities in a show of support for the farmers.


Violence broke out in the centre of the capital as the farmers and their supporters clashed with pickets and trade unions allied with Ms Fernández. ‘This is the worst ideological confrontation between social classes, ranging from rural producers to the picketeers, since the Seventies,’ Professor Marcelo Leiras, a politics expert at San Andrés University in Buenos Aires, said. ‘The strikes are taking place because the design of the new tax was poor and the way it was presented was ever poorer.’”

The Times of London reports that one government strategy to end the strike is trying to split the farmers — offering some subsidies to cushion the tax blow, but not others.