As time went by, the political spheres and even the Argentinean elites took over the term and their methodology of popular protest, in most cases to end up distorting it.

For this reason, the documentary “Piqueteras”, by Malena Bystrowicz and Veronica Mastrosimone from Argentina acquires a special value: it reconstructs the period from 1996-1999 in which the movement emerged, in a 42 minute video.

And this is done from a gender perspective, because, according to Bystrowicz “when we started to research, and there were many months of research- we realized that women made up more than 80 per cent of the movement. From cooking meals to being in charge of security, despite the media attention fell in men”. “Although the men were losing their jobs, they left to look for a new job in another town or got depressed and drank…they couldn´t find a way out. But women had the need to give food to their children every day and so they decided to block routes”. And this is how it started.

The documentary was screened in the framework of the Globale MVD festival, which was previously carried out in Berlin, Germany and this year was held in Montevideo.

The festival was organized by an independent group which adopted the European festival to Uruguay, and was carried out from May 21st to 27th. The group tried to “bring the audience closer to documentaries” as a mechanism of “denunciation and awareness raising, showing aspects of reality which are mainly neglected or distorted by the big media corporations”.