'Ocupar, resistir y producir' — Gatic lost Adidas after 34 years, then lost everything

When one partner is 70 percent of revenue, the contract is the company. Gatic lost its licence, its plants and its name in that order; the workers who occupied the ruins priced the concentration the board never did.

Eduardo Bakchellian, born in Buenos Aires in 1930, founded Gatic in 1953, aged 23, in an 80-square-metre shed in San Martín with eight employees, copying an Italian rubber-soled shoe. The factory grew exponentially; in 1969 came the prize: Gatic became Adidas's licensee in Argentina, the first in Latin America to take the brand. It dressed Argentina at the 1974 World Cup; Huracán, Bakchellian's own club, first wore the logo in mid-1975. At its height Gatic held nearly every major sports brand and gave work to 8,000 people — a whole town employed by him, as his obituary put it.

The 2001 crisis broke the model. On 9 October 2001 Gatic, still the country's principal maker, filed for concurso with a debt of 340 million dollars; sales forecast at 160 million against 210 million the year before. Three factories closed, 2,900 laid off; imports had tripled since 1991. In December sales fell between 50 and 70 percent. Then, after 34 years, Adidas did not renew: 3,200 suspended without pay across its five Buenos Aires and two La Rioja plants. A cautelar let Gatic produce for a while; in December 2002 a ruling gave Adidas its reason — the licence was 70 percent of revenue.

On 15 September 2004 commercial judge Gutiérrez Cabello decreed the quiebra: the 1953-founded company, 19 plants and some 6,000 workers, owed 177.7 million dollars plus 33 million more; main creditors the AFIP and three public banks; the trigger: 4.5 million owed to the employees. A sale to the consortium Indular died with the ruling. At Pigüé managers abandoned the plant around September 2003; workers entered late that year under Ocupar, resistir y producir. On 12 August 2004 they were evicted by hundreds of police; the cooperative, founded that February, won expropriation in December.

The telling is the cooperative itself. By 2014 it had settled the creditors' debts and expropriated the factory; by 2024 it counted 180 workers, and a second Gatic plant had become Cooperativa Unidos por el Calzado. A 2014 book kept the first ten years of the recovery; on the 22nd anniversary, in 2026, the workers wrote that the ghost of what happened with Gatic revives with macroeconomic policies copied from the 90s — an agony of almost ten years, and the fate of 8,000 workers. Bakchellian died in July 2022, past ninety, having never missed a day at his San Martín factory.

Workers occupied the abandoned plant under 'Ocupar, resistir y producir', expropriated it, and by 2014 settled creditors' debts, keeping production alive.

One licence was the business: 70 percent of revenue came from Adidas, so the 2002 non-renewal was not the loss of a brand but of the company.

The debt outran every rescue: 340 million dollars at the 2001 concurso, 177.7 million plus 33 million at the 2004 quiebra — and the Indular sale died with it.

The workers kept what the owners abandoned: the managers left Pigüé in 2003; the occupied factory outlived the company that owed its own people millions.

A licence can be the whole business. Gatic rode Adidas for 34 years and gave work to 8,000; when the licence left, only the workers who occupied the ruins kept the name producing.