Time To Cry For Argentina?

By Peter Katel With Reporting by Uki Goni/Buenos Aires

After months of a deepening financial crisis, Argentines finally had had enough. Thousands poured out into the streets of every major city in the country last week, looting stores and supermarkets. Angry demonstrators in Buenos Aires surrounded the Presidential Palace and clashed with police in bloody skirmishes. In all, 27 people died. President Fernando de la Rua tried to hang on, but four days after the riots began, he resigned.

Some observers criticized the police response to the riots as sympathetic to the mobs or lax. In a throng surrounding a Carrefour megastore in an upscale neighborhood of Buenos Aires, a woman told TIME that police officers were encouraging people to head for the store. But when demonstrators marched on government buildings and set fires outside the Presidential Palace and on the ground floor of the Economy Ministry building, police fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd.

Scrambling to fill the leadership vacuum, Congress prepared to name provincial governor Adolfo Rodriguez Saa as acting President until an election is held on March 3. But Argentina's collapsing finances demand urgent attention. Default on the country's $132 billion debt seems inevitable--especially since last week's popular rage was fed by the government's preoccupation with servicing debt in the midst of an economic meltdown. Unemployment has skyrocketed to more than 19%. Add to that a split in the opposition Peronist party, and it's clear that an end to Argentina's woes will not come soon or easily.

--By Peter Katel. With reporting by Uki Goni/Buenos Aires