The Christmas season has just ended and it will be almost a year before we once again hear children singing to the rat-a-tat-tat of a snare drum:
Come they told me,
Pa rum pum pum pum …
Me and my drum
It’s cute and sweet with a few kids and a drum. But imagine an entire city drumming, furiously and angrily, a million people or more. That’s the powerful sound of protest, the sound of people joined together in impassioned resistance to an unpopular or illegitimate government or regime.
That’s a cacerolazo.
And it’s a tool and tactic that we in the United States should learn about. Our South American cousins have been putting it to good use for decades, sending unmistakable messages to their leaders.
What is a cacerolazo?
Cacerolazos arose in Chile during the 1970s as a form of popular protest. Someone surely came up with the idea but that person’s identity is now lost to history. It’s brilliantly simple: grab a pot or pan and a spoon or lid, go outside, and bang the two together to make some noise (cacerola is the Spanish word for a cooking pot).
One person doing that would merely be annoying his or her neighbors. But when five or ten or twenty neighbors join in and then people in the next block join in as well … and the next block …. and the next block … until the entire city is making a racket — well, at that point it’s a mass protest that can’t be dismissed.
Cacerolazos are generally fairly short-lived, usually less than an hour and often as little as 10 or 20 minutes. The message gets across pretty quickly so there’s no need to keep at it all night.
If you participate in one, it’s good to organize your neighbors a bit. Encourage everyone to take a break occasionally because that way they can hear that many, many people in nearby areas are participating as well — knowing that others are joining with you promotes determination and solidarity.
For those unfamiliar with Spanish, the word is pronounced “kah-say-ro-LAH-so.”
The powerful advantages of cacerolazos
A fawning or suppressed media can refuse to cover organized demonstrations or treat them as less participatory and significant than they are. That doesn’t matter with a cacerolazo because everyone can hear for themselves that it’s happening everywhere around. If the news media bury it, they just look foolish and lacking in credibility.
Government leaders can disregard even a large assembled protest as representing but a small fraction of the actual population. The sound of a cacerolazo disabuses them of that notion: they can’t help but hear for themselves that vast numbers of the populace — all around them — are angry and demanding changes. They realize that a cacerolazo today is a warning message of a potential matching demonstration of people-power tomorrow, but with far more dangerous implements than pots and pans.
A cacerolazo isn’t the single tool we should keep in our resistance toolbelt but it has so many advantages over traditional demonstrations that we should consider using it well and wisely.
|
Traditional demonstration |
Cacerolazo |
Ease of organizing |
Requires advance work for permits, scouting location, arranging portable toilets, water, first aid stations, etc. |
Requires no planning, permits, or facilities because people are protesting right outside their own homes |
Reaction time |
Slow, unless it is an illegal assembly, with all of the risks that entails |
Immediate. It can even be spontaneous, started in a single neighborhood and spreading out as others hear and respond |
Participation |
Limited to those who have transportation and time to travel to the staging area, often enough in another city or state |
Everyone can join in — who doesn’t have a pot or pan in the house? You don’t even have to leave home — just lean out a window or sit on the balcony and bang your pot |
Empowering |
Inspiring for participants and media coverage can inform non-participants that many others feel as they do |
Seeing your friends and neighbors outside, joined in protest with you, affirms that you are not alone in your anger or distress. Hearing the response across your city or seeing people participating elsewhere on the news solidifies the feeling that you are right to be upset and that changes need to be made |
safety |
Susceptible to troublemakers seeking to incite violence; also susceptible to participants getting carried away with their own emotions and turning violent. Participants can be harassed. arrested, or assaulted by police |
Dispersed all over the city or country, participants should be safe right outside their own homes. There are simply not enough police to force everyone to stay inside. Troublemakers are not going to succeed in inciting people to commit vandalism or arson against their own homes or those of their neighbors |
Effectiveness |
Limited. Leaders can dismiss an event as a “one-off” that is more symbolic than anything. With spontaneous or planned violent counter-protests, the message can be lost entirely and the protesters cast as villains |
Extreme. Mass participation is a warning of deep dissatisfaction among the entire populace, with an implication of potential civil unrest if the cause is not soon relieved. The message that “we are millions, you are few” is pretty frightening to leaders and those who enforce their edicts |
When to have a cacerolazo
Here in Argentina, cacerolazos are used sparingly. Making them common occurrences would eventually cause them to lose significance. So rather than having a cacerolazo to protest the local library raising its overdue book fee by a nickel, they’re reserved for true crises or outrages.
For example, during the 2001-2002 financial crisis in Argentina — when more than half the population was living in poverty, unemployment was more than 40%, and people were literally starving — cacerolazos broke out spontaneously as the people demanded that the government solve the crisis and restore stability.
The government got the message, apparently, if you assume that going through five presidents in less than two weeks is a sign that leaders understood the public’s anger and frustration. When Buenos Aires’ 14 million people erupted in noisy demonstrations, night after night, one can imagine that the assorted presidents — and their potential replacements — pretty much thought “Hell no, I’m not going to be the fall guy for this debacle.”
So, we too, in the US, should use cacerolazos sparingly — for situations that truly jeopardize the overall existence or well-being of our republic. As awful as the migrant “baby jails” along the border are or Trump’s rollback of national parks and monuments, they don’t rise to the level of real and dire threats to democracy itself.
If and when Robert Mueller is fired or his report suppressed, or if Trump declares martial law, or defies the Congress and the courts, that’s when we should strike a blow for democracy and the nation by striking spoon to pot, again and again.
We are legion and the spoon is mightier than the sword.