Cristina and Nestor Kirchner, Argentina’s current president and former president respectively, show little sign of backing down from their tax hike on agricultural exports which has provoked a national crisis in the South American country. Farm leaders called a nation-wide strike and road blockage after Mrs. Kirchner changed the export tax on soybeans, Argentina’s leading export, from a fixed 35% to a fluctuating tax that has now reached 49% and which The Economist predicts could soon reach a marginal rate of 95%.

The country has been hit by gas and food shortages since the main roadways are blocked by protesting farmers, who produce two-thirds of Argentina’s exports. As the third biggest exporter of soybeans, Argentina’s losses due to the crisis are already estimated to be in the billions of U.S. dollars, and only worsened the increasing worldwide shortage of food.

But the blockages have affected the movement of food and goods throughout the country. “Most butcher shops haven’t received any meat for over a week,” Alberto Williams, the vice president of the Buenos Aires Butcher Shop Owners Association, told the press.

Spontaneous protests erupted in the capital, Buenos Aires, as well as the regional centers of Rosario, Mar del Plata, and elsewhere in response to the unwillingness of the presidential couple, known for their heavy-handed governing style, to reconsider the high rate of tax. In response, the Kirchners have used their allies in the main labour union to pay people to attend a pro-Kirchner counter-rally in the Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires.

“To get workers to the rally on time,” Dow Jones reported, “banks closed at noon, while flights out of Argentina’s international airport were to be canceled between noon and 7 p.m. The airline pilots’ union leader, Pablo Biro, told news television channel Todo Noticias that the seven-hour stopage would affect the nation’s main air carriers, including Aerolineas Argentinas and LAN Airlines.”

Mrs. Kirchner was elected to the presidency of the Argentine Republic last year in succession to her husband, who has become leader of the official Peronist party. She failed to obtain a majority in the first round, but the fractious nature of the opposition — divided between the moderate leftist Elisa Carrio, the former president Roberto Lavagna, and the anti-Kirchner Peronist Alberto Rodriguez Saa — meant that she had a large enough margin to avoid a run-off election.

Though Argentina is the only official military ally of the United States in South America, Mr. Kirchner was closer to the continent’s ne’er-do-well duo of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez (believed to have helped fund Mrs. Kirchner’s campaign) and Bolivian president Evo Morales. Though for most of their married life, Mrs. Kirchner was the more prominent, media speculators believe that Mr. Kirchner still holds the reins of power and merely allowed his wife to become president to avoid the electorate suffering from “Nestor fatigue”, allowing him to run again after her term expires. He has chiefly spent his time out of office advising his wife and purging the Peronist party — a very broad alliance of trade unionists, centrists, conservatives, and socialists — of the large anti-Kirchner faction the couple’s reign at the top has fomented.