My new year's vacation in the stunningly beautiful mountains of northern Argentina, near the borders with Chile and Bolivia, was forcibly derailed by this country's most visible political activists: the piqueteros, or protesters who block roads to draw public attention to their demands.

We were on a desert road heading toward Humahuaca, an indigenous town of 6,000 people more than 1,000 miles north of Buenos Aires, when our tour guide alerted us that there was trouble ahead on the road.

He pointed to a long line of cars and tourist buses that were standing still under the desert sun ahead of us.

When we got to the end of the line and asked what was going on, we learned the road had been blocked by piqueteros.

A dozen were protesting that they hadn't been given drinking water facilities for all homes on a piece of land they had been recently given by the government.

At the roadblock, an informal committee of Argentine, Italian and German tourists was trying to persuade the piqueteros to let all of us pass.

At one point, an Argentine tourist behind them got out of her car and started shouting at the protesters: "Get out!" Another Argentine tourist shouted back: "We must understand them. They are right."

The first one responded angrily: "Why do they take it out on us tourists? It's not our fault!" The second woman answered, "Yes, but both sides are right."

There were no police to be seen anywhere, and I was quickly informed that there wouldn't be.

In this country of wild political swings, the political etiquette of the day is to reject anything smacking of the human-rights excesses of the dictatorships of the 1970s.

Piqueteros often shut down entire sections of downtown Buenos Aires without being evicted by police.

After waiting under the sun for nearly an hour, we decided to head back. Maybe I'll get to know Humahuaca some other time.

What's so special about this story? you may be asking by now. Doesn't that happen throughout Latin America?

What's different is that in Argentina, the government often finances the piqueteros, either as an attempt to co-opt them or to use them against its political or business enemies.

And that is encouraging more and more people to become piqueteros.

"Argentina is the only country that I know that finances social protests," says Rosendo Fraga, a political analyst with the New Majority Studies Center.

"That doesn't happen with the Zapatistas in Mexico, nor with the Sin Tierra (landless ones) in Brazil."

Indeed, after the collapse of Argentina's economy in 2001, former President Eduardo Duhalde launched a program to subsidize nearly 2 million unemployed heads of household with $50 a month, as a supposedly temporary plan to fight hunger and calm down the piqueteros.

The practice has been continued — and critics say expanded through other welfare plans — by left-of-center President Nestor Kirchner.

According to Fraga's estimates, 90 percent of the subsidies are now given out by the government and the ruling party to win "captive votes," and the remaining 10 percent is given to piquetero leaders to be disbursed among their followers, in hopes of keeping them quiet.

Despite Argentina's strong economic rebound in the past three years, and government promises to reduce its welfare plans, not much has changed.

Kirchner supporters say cutting the subsidies abruptly would increase poverty, and clamping down violently on the piqueteros would only help escalate social violence.

The bottom line is that the piqueteros are the kings of the road in Argentina, and the culture of welfare is thriving. A restaurant owner in the northern town of Pumamarca told me he finds it hard to find workers:

"A lot of people can get two or three government subsidies per household, or become piqueteros, and they prefer that to having a real job," he said.

My conclusion: Argentina needed emergency subsidies for the poor after its 2001 crisis, but today they have become a dangerous recipe for political control and economic stagnation.

And I'm not too hopeful that Kirchner will do away with them: If he didn't do it in 2005, when the economy was at its peak, it will be more difficult to do it in 2006, when the economy is projected to start slowing down.