Marcelo Colussi*, Prensa Latina employee
Although I usually write some things there, I almost never write about Argentina; I do not make any political, social, cultural or other analysis of the place where I was born and raised and spent the first decades of my life. I don’t feel able to do that because it can be very presumptuous to talk from a distance about something that you don’t know in everyday life, that you don’t experience every day. And certainly: wrong. I observe and know something about everything that happens there, but not in the smallest detail; In any case, that is enough to decide today to express something in relation to what was my home (I say “whatever was” because the years of distance no longer allow me to feel it as my own ).
I grew up in an Argentina of relative abundance. Although I never lived in luxury, as a humble member of the urban middle class, I was always well fed, I lived in a decent house with all basic services, I had the opportunity to receive an education that was not particularly bad ( (if my education is deficient, this can only be attributed to my laziness), I was able to travel abroad, I suffered none of the humiliations that I later saw as commonplace in many countries, given my pilgrimage there. I enjoyed the country in my childhood and youth , always dependent and without achieving the development of the powers of the North – although a large part of the native peculiarities wanted to feel like a parable with them, in a Europeanizing Latin American version – a certain economic splendor, that is, both scientific-technical and cultural .Many Argentinean populations boasted of producing twice as much as their nearest “competitor”: Brazil. Today, the neighboring country’s economy outperforms Argentina’s by three to one, if not more.
All this serves as an introduction to understanding what the Russian-American economist Simon Kuznets, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1971, once said with acerbic humor when he noted that there are four categories of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan and Argentina. Why these last two? The fall of the Asian country, because it represents a true “miracle”: after being virtually destroyed in the Second World War – with two atomic bombs on its civilian population – it reappeared monumentally within a few years and transformed into a couple of decades one of the most important economies in the world. In contrast, the case of Argentina is also worth examining (one might call it the Argentine “paradox”): how was it possible for a prosperous society with high rates of what we would today call “human development,” with abundant Fertile land areas, numerous water resources, oil, a huge Atlantic coast and a sizeable industrial park, which in the first half of the 20th century had a greater strength than Canada, Australia or Spain, could decline so much in a few years, killing one in three of its inhabitants become poor? How was that possible? How can you arrive at this pathetic reality where a large section of your youth thinks the only way out for the country is Ezeiza? (the international airport).
Once, to demonstrate to the Latin American citizens who were listening to me this fall, when I told about the looting of zoos that was taking place so that hungry Argentines could eat red meat, I was called a liar. Unfortunately, the reality was not a joke or a fictional story. It wasn’t a lie: it happened in what was called – in a different time, of course – “cow country.”
Why did all this happen? This painful letter is not at all the right place to develop explanations for such complex phenomena. Yes, one can say – I think without fear of being wrong – that none of this is a product of “bad governments”. This is a false statement that I would rather describe as an attack on the intelligentsia, rather than a mockery so that the ever-manipulated masses find a scapegoat. The problem is structural. I don’t want to go into this in detail, nor do I feel able to do so properly, but it should be said that the neoliberal plans put in place by the dominant capitals in the 70s/80s of the last century (essentially the United States), supported by its underage partners in Western Europe, reduced the regional power that went to Argentina to a country that was nothing more than an impoverished, beleaguered agricultural exporter.
I remember once attending a meeting of an organization with the fallacy of “international cooperation,” at which a Washington official said without the slightest shame: “Argentina is consuming too much oil, so they had to stop.” “We prefer Brazil as the industrial park of South America because there is not so much middle class there that consumes.” It is clear that the presidents in power, whoever they are – including Peronism – only manage the economy, always in favor of capital . The more or less great corruption that can exist is marginal, almost anecdotal data. This is not the cause of our troubles, neither in Argentina nor in any other country in the world.
There is no doubt that Argentina has found itself in a situation that seems insurmountable at the moment. Now it has the profile of any Latin American country that much of the Europeanized middle class of old once viewed almost with contempt. Hungry children, people begging for handouts and rampant crime are the result of the global reorder brought about by neoliberalism, whose politics are fixated on Wall Street or the White House. It is not the “political caste” that caused this disaster. Career politicians – starving middle-class people with a careerist spirit – are the same everywhere: liars by trade who run the affairs of the big people and sometimes give crumbs to the poor.
The country is experiencing a catastrophe. A major catastrophe from which there appears to be no return (which is why Kuznets’ words quoted above are relevant). Despair is a bad advisor. “The dream of reason produces monsters,” Goya illustrated. He wasn’t wrong. Today the Argentine population is desperate, which is why they can look for miraculous solutions that make us think of the overwhelmed German population who sought refuge in the speech of a mad messiah in the 1930s. If an unbalanced person who shamelessly insults his opponents in public can serve as a reference for the presidency, is loved and idolized, it shows that he has gone backwards. From the trial of the military juntas to the apology of the clownish far right.
Every injustice hurts me and I try to confront it to the best of my mediocre abilities. But Argentina hurts me more. The place where we buried our navel is heavy. Argentina weighs on me. I see that the dreams of a revolutionary transformation with socialist ideals must continue to wait for the moment, because it does not seem very near. The pain of seeing the demise of something of your own is very bitter, much worse than that of mate. Hopes are not lost, but…
rmh/mc
*Political scientist, university professor and Argentine social researcher, resident in Guatemala (from Select Signatures)