One Sure Thing: Death to Taxes.(World Affairs)

Byline: Mac Margolis; With Brian Byrnes in Buenos Aires

Latin Americans watch their taxes grow but get little in return. Now they're finally fighting back.

In Argentina, pots and pans have many uses. Brandished over the hearth, they can conjure some of the world's finest cuisine. Deployed in the streets, they can bring down governments. So in late March, when thousands of protesters took to the pavement in Buenos Aires, clanging their kitchenware in anger over scorching new taxes on farm goods that had sent growers on strike and emptied supermarket shelves across the country, many Argentines held their breath.

It's one thing when provincials are grousing, and quite another when well-dressed citizens in tony Buenos Aires make a clatter. After all, just six years ago, with the economy floundering, deafening cacerolazos helped topple the hapless regime of President Fernando de la Roa after two stormy years in office. Is the same fate in store for Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who succeeded her husband as Argentina's president in December? Not for now. After three weeks of stinging rhetoric from both sides, the farmers ended their strike on April 2, on promises of renewed dialogue and a sprinkling of concessions, such as farm credit and transport subsidies. But the farming feud may be a sign of the times. The bloom is off the Kirchners' rose, and the days of Latin America's famous tolerance for governments' helping themselves to the national larder may finally be fading. Taxpayer unrest is spreading, and if the row in the Pampas is any indication, governments will have to contain their appetites for taxing and spending, or face a whirlwind of turbulence.

Grousing about taxes is as old as Latin America itself. Resentment over the Portuguese crown's levy of 20 percent of the bounty from colonial gold mines--"the fifth from hell," the settlers called it--fed a rebellion that led to Brazil's independence in 1822. Gaucho hero Martin Guemes is venerated for his fight to free Argentina from Spain, as well as his battle to keep Buenos Aires's hands out of provincial affairs and pockets. Two centuries later, little seems to have changed. While governments in places like Brazil and Honduras have paid down their debts and deficits, they have often relied on tax hikes to do so rather than cutting spending. A thorough fiscal reform would help but with rare exceptions (Uruguay, Colombia), attempts to repair onerous tax systems have stalled in national legislatures, perhaps because so many of today's lawmakers hope to be tomorrow's big-spending mayors, governors and presidents.

So now ordinary citizens and business leaders are striking back. In Brazil, a movement by middle-class taxpayers pushed Congress to strike down a $22 billion-a-year levy on banking transactions last December. The Brazilian rebels are now pressing to require vendors to reveal each of the cascade of levies that inflate the final price of goods and services. Much of Bolivia's recent political upheaval centers on La Paz's attempt to stop wealthy provinces in the fertile, gas-and-oil rich lowlands from declaring tax autonomy, and to tighten the central government's reins on local revenues. And while Argentina's farmers backed down this time, the cacerolazos made a din heard from La Rioja to La Recoleta.

Each of these conflicts has its own politics and peculiarities, but they all reflect the fatigue of ...