Argentinidad - Issue 11 - n+1

10/14/2017 Argentinidad | Issue 11 | n+1
Essays
BENJAMIN KUNKEL
Argentinidad
Published in: Issue 11: Dual Power
Publication date: Spring 2011
Participants in the parade of Argentine history, which closed the celebration of the
Argentinian bicentennial. Morissey, 2010. Via Flickr.
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-11/essays/argentina/ 1/20
THERE CAN BE NO T URNING 2 0 0 without regrets. Even so, the element of

wistfulness was bound to be especially prominent in the Argentine case. The
surprise for me as a yanqui spectator auto-marooned these past few years in
Buenos Aires, while I wandered up and down the Avenida 9 de Julio, picking my
way through the throngs of Argentines out celebrating the May Revolution of
1810, was that the experience of the bicentennial should at once look so joyous (as
polls of the huge numbers who took part later conrmed) and that the ocial
commemoration of two centuries of Argentine history should at the same time
concentrate on the darkest passages in the countrys history. On the occasion of
the big parade, ghter jets ew overhead and gauchos rode by on horseback, just
as you might expect. But there were also actors depicting militant workers cut
down by paramilitary gangs in the tragic week of 1919; a gigantic installation,
suspended on guy-wires, of the constitution in ames; a oat portraying the
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who campaigned to know their missing childrens
whereabouts during the ruling juntas frenzy of state terrorism in the late 70s;
and another troupe of actors, in business suits, tossing funny money to the
crowd in much the way this was the idea that the Argentina of the 90s had
plunged into a delirium, soon punctured, of ctitious prosperity. Still, it probably
shouldnt have surprised me to see raucousness and grief consorting. To pretend
that the countrys history had been a happier one would no doubt have been to
repress emotion more generally, including joy at being Argentine, whatever such
argentinidad may mean: Argentines seem to nd it signicant about themselves
that they cant say.
Argentina is hardly the saddest country in the world, but it has often been felt to
be the most tragic. The sentiment derives in part from an envious glance at other
large settler colonialist countries the US, Canada, Australia that secured
measures of peace and prosperity unknown here for generations. A vast country,
eighth largest in the world, endowed with a long Atlantic coastline, the endless
fertile plains of the pampas, a deep trove of mineral wealth, and torrents of fresh
if muddy water, its bounty prompted the rather blasphemous n-de-sicle boast
Dios es argentino God is Argentine and for much of its earlier history the
republic struck natives and new arrivals alike as teeming with potential wealth.
That such a country could only prosper in the hands of a relatively small
population of overwhelmingly European extraction appeared a near certainty to
many observers, well into the 20th century. And for a while the gures did look
good. Argentinas economy was by 1910 the ninth largest, with a per capita GDP
superior to Germanys. The French expression riche comme un Argentin dates
from this time. Today it could only sound sarcastic.
Of course the riches of the belle poque were not very evenly distributed. Often
prophesied to one day resemble the US, Argentina at its rst centennial was no
less guilty than the rest of Latin America of the regions original and abiding sin:
the monopolization of the land by an oligarchy. So immigrants who in the
American Midwest might have joined the yeomanry became, in Argentina, peons
and sharecroppers. For the more numerous urban masses, little existed in the
way of an industrial economy to absorb them into decently paid work. Property
qualications meanwhile restricted the vote to those with whom it could be
trusted; and the government of 1910, the better to celebrate Argentinas rst cien
aos de libertad, suspended the constitution, imprisoned thousands of trade
unionists, shuttered the anarchist press, and deported a hundred more
undesirables. These tactics would come to seem both modest and premonitory in
light of subsequent bouts of repression, culminating in 1976 after a sixth
military coup since the Depression in the Proceso de Reorganizatin Nacional.
The dictatorship disappeared, tortured, and killed tens of thousands of citizens
suspected of leftist activity, before expiring ignominiously after defeat in the
Falklands War with Britain (a conict which Borges memorably compared to two
bald men ghting over a comb).
Borges himself nally quit that bad habit, Buenos Aires, in 1986, and went
abroad to die, in Geneva. Belated disgust at the dictatorship, which surrendered
to free elections in 1983 after having run up a foreign debt almost as extravagant
as its body count, seems to have inuenced his choice of an exiles death. Two
decades earlier, he had still been able to imagine, patriotically, an oath sworn by
the countrys founders to be something unknown to them, to be Argentines. No
one is the homeland but we all are, had been the refrain of his ode to
Argentine blankness and potential. By the 80s and after, the ringing emptiness of
the country, of its land and national identity, had come to tell more of
devastation than of promise. Nor did prosperity return with democracy. In the
southern summer of 2001 02, Argentina suered one of the worlds worst
economic collapses since the Depression. In a country that had been a byword
for economic calamity for decades, this tended to suggest, in the way of an
addicts relapse, a hopeless case.
IN HER SPEECHES marking the bicentennial, President Cristina Fernndez de

Kirchner repeatedly contrasted present circumstances to those of 1910. In terms
of voting rights and civil liberties, progress is undeniable, though it has only been
achieved without reversals over the last quarter century. David Rocks excellent
80s-vintage history of Argentina concluded with the ominous suggestion that
liberal democracy still had the air of parenthesis rather than permanence.
Today, amid Argentinas longest sustained period of free elections, its the half
century from 1930 to 1983 that increasingly looks like the parenthesis, if a long
and grisly one. The post-dictatorial consolidation of civil freedom and popular
rule is probably the development that more than any other lies behind the
judgment of most Argentines another nding of post-bicentennial polls
that the country is a better place at 200 than at 100.
The economic record prompts more chagrin. Despite booking what the Buenos
Aires dailies call Chinese rates of growth for the better part of the past eight
years, Argentina today is only something like the fty-seventh wealthiest
country in GDP per capita. The long Argentine swoon hit bottom with the 2001
02 crisis, when the peso lost three quarters of its value, the fraction of the
population below the poverty line rose to one half, and the Parisian boulevards of
the capital lled with angry citizens clamoring with pots and pans for the
wholesale retirement of the political class. Even now the imposing beaux arts
facades of the capital loom over broken sidewalks and streets plied at night by
ragged cartoneros piloting repurposed grocery carts as they scavenge cardboard.
In a country of forty million that produces food enough for seven times that
many, some children, especially in the remote northern provinces, lack adequate
nutrition (or did a point to take up later until just the other day).
Why did so proverbially promising a country fail to pan out? Argentinas

notorious squandering of potential has made it an irresistible object lesson. This
is equally so among professional economists and in the business press (the
opinions of the two groups tend to coincide), and for a local and international left
drawing an opposite conclusion from the Argentine experience. On both sides,
praise of electoral democracy is unanimous and often sincere. The real substance
of the dispute concerns whether Argentina has been too complaisant (according
to the left) or too rebellious (to the right) a subject of foreign capital and a pupil
of economic orthodoxy.
FROM THE ASCENS IO N of legendary populist Juan Pern to the presidency in

1946 through the end of the cold war, Argentina was notorious for its economic
nationalism, bouts of hyperination, and an inecient, highly unionized
industrial sector. But so did the country become the most egalitarian in South
America, with the most substantial middle class, until this development was
aborted by the 1976 coup. The dictators banned the Peronist party, as had
previous de facto regimes, and launched a neoliberal program it took until the
1990s to complete. It was Carlos Menem, a Peronist who had seen the neoliberal
light, who over two presidential terms (1989 99) restored Argentina to the bosom
of orthodox opinion. By privatizing state assets, adopting a hard money currency,
curbing union power, and opening itself to unrestricted foreign investment so
the argument went the Argentina of the 90s had rediscovered the virtuous
economic liberalism of the long 19th century and shaken o the statist legacy of
Pern. For the Economist or the IMF, the country embodied the transformative
wisdom of the Washington Consensus.
In 1998, as the so-called Asian u crisis collapsed the South Korean, Indonesian,
and Thai currencies, the director of the IMF awarded Argentina a certicate of
good health: Argentina has a story to tell the world: a story which is about the
importance of scal discipline, of structural change, and of monetary policy
rigorously maintained. Fiscal discipline meant that the government would not
engage in debt-nanced countercyclical stimulus; structural change alluded to
privatization, nancial deregulation, and union-busting; and rigorous monetary
policy referred to pegging the pesos value to that of the dollar at a rate of one-to-
one (depriving the country of the recourse of responding to changes in the
balance of trade through ination). Encomia to these neoliberalizing
achievements were the stu of virtually all Argentina coverage in the English-
language business press of the 90s.
Yet by 1998 Argentina largely deindustrialized, its privatization mostly

completed, and its crucial agricultural and mining sectors suering from a
worldwide fall in commodity prices had slid into deep recession. At home, the
wage share of GDP, as high as 50 percent on the eve on the 1976 coup, had sunk
toward 20 percent: so much for internal sources of demand. As for external
sources, the articially expensive peso made Argentine exports uncompetitive in
the markets of its major trading partners, Brazil and the EU. Nevertheless, in the
presidential elections of 1999 all major candidates including the victorious De
la Ra of the center-left Radical party and the Peronist who came in second
pledged themselves to the neoliberal program hailed by the IMF. In eect, the
country had abjured all available weapons for combating recession. Thus
Argentina entered the new century in straits similar to those of a disquieting
number of European counties today. With the peso shackled to the dollar, it had
(as Greece, Spain, and the other so-called PIIGS on the periphery of the Eurozone
do today) what appeared to be an irremediably overvalued currency sapping the
competitiveness of its exports, along with mounting diculties servicing its debt
as tax receipts dwindled in the face of recession.
The counsel of the IMF was naturally for austerity. The Argentines should
maintain dollar convertibility that is, a pricey currency and trim public
expenditure in order to cover interest payments. The journalist Paul Blusteins
useful if intellectually conventional chronicle of the Argentine debacle, And the
Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) (2005), quotes a number of consultants to the
IMF claiming to have acknowledged privately that the Argentine economy,
precisely because of the commitment to austerity, was growing too slowly for
Buenos Aires to maintain debt service and avert default. Publicly, everyone kept
up a brave face, and the neoliberal consensus was hardly questioned until the
windows of banks lay smashed in the street.
In December 2001, economics minister Domingo Cavallo, the architect of peso-

dollar convertibility (who had also obliged the last dictatorship as president of
the central bank), froze the savings deposits of ordinary citizens. Looters and riot
police took to the streets, middle class people joined soup-kitchen lines, twenty-
seven demonstrators died, and four presidents were sworn in over two weeks. In
January 2002, only a few weeks after President De la Ra had ed the Casa
Rosada by helicopter, Argentina let the peso oat. Within a few months, it had
shed three quarters of its value. Meanwhile the country suspended payment on
nearly $100 billion in loans, the largest default in history.
Austerity in the face of gigantic indebtedness had, in other words, yielded

precisely the devaluation and default it was supposed to prevent. If the
Argentine experience is truly as exemplary as the IMF once maintained, the story
cant be a heartening one in light of the turn toward austerity today being
undertaken in Europe and threatened in the US.
But there is a sequel, not yet concluded. In the years since the crash, the cheap
peso, in combination with the governments industrial policy, income support to
the poor and elderly, and encouragement of aggressive collective bargaining, has
stimulated consumption of more locally produced goods. Recent years have also
witnessed an export boom, not only of raw materials but also of nished goods
(notably cars to Brazil). The resulting scal surplus has spared the country
another default, and enabled it to sharply reduce its debt to a level
proportionately far below that of the US or UK, not to mention Greece or Spain.
Equally decisive in the reduction of debt to manageable levels was the choice in
2003 of another Peronist Nstor Kirchner, the rst elected president since the
crash and the late husband of the current president to oer foreign creditors
an extremely close haircut in which they would receive twenty-ve cents on the
dollar. Kirchners economics minister later said he had mentioned the gure of
twenty-ve cents only for purposes of illustration; he had never expected
Kirchner to sti bond holders to such a degree.
The punishment for Kirchners heterodox course took an unsurprising form:

Argentina was frozen out of international credit markets, and had to turn to
Chavezs Venezuela for nancing. But the wilderness into which Argentina was
banished was no thorny Patagonian steppe. After expanding at nearly 8 percent
annually since the devaluation, the economy, one of the fastest growing in the
world, is today more than half again as large as in 2002. Even in 2009, virtually
alone among the G-20, Argentina registered a positive rate of growth. It can never
have been any Argentines dream that the country would come to shine, at 200, as
a pis aller, a last resort after disaster. Nevertheless, with the prospect of grinding
debt-deation confronting much of the capitalist core, the Argentine recovery
has provoked the thought, murmured even in the business press, that being
Argentina may not be so bad after all.
The optimistic national mood that seemed to achieve self-consciousness in the

observation of the bicentennial might have been expected to carry Nstor
Kirchner to victory in the presidential elections of this year. The rescuer of his
country, as he appeared to many on the left and among the poor, might have
succeeded his wife as she had succeeded him. This seemed the likeliest outcome
until October 27, 2010, when Kirchner was felled by a massive heart attack a sad
contingency that supplanted the scheduled celebration of the bicentennial as the
decisive event of last year. Whether kirchnerismo can survive Kirchner himself,
in the form of a second mandate for his capable and eloquent widow, is the rst
big question of Argentine politics in the countrys third century.
ARGENTINA TAKES ITS NAME from the Latin for silver, and since the days of
Spanish colonization the bulk of the countrys exports and imports have been
shipped by way of the great estuary, the Rio de la Plata, Spanish for river of silver,
on one bank of which Buenos Aires sprang up as an entrept. The ore alluded to
in these covetous names came not from what is today Argentina but mainly
from Potos in Bolivia, fount of so much of capitalisms primitive accumulation of
silver. Even so, Argentinas name has proved apt, and not only for vaunting riches
that failed to materialize. There is a way in which life and history here seem more
purely about plata, as money is familiarly called, than just about anywhere else.
Class war in Argentina has raged with heightened acrimony in part because of
the countrys unusually homogenous racial composition. In his Judgment of a
Century (1910), perhaps the most authoritative contemporary reections on the
rst centennial, Joaqun Gonzalez, a leading light of the reformist sector of the
oligarchy, recognized that the Argentine working class would have to be awarded
greater rights in the century ahead, but was equivocal about how far these
should extend. That indeed proved the big question. Gonzalez had no doubt,
however, that the program of Argentinas founders had succeeded in the
following respect: Degenerative or inadaptable components of the population
such as the Indian and the Negro have been eliminated.
A slave and, later, servant contingent of African descent ceased to be numerically

signicant in the latter half of the 19th century, due to out-migration,
disproportionate use as cannon-fodder in local wars, and invisible assimilation
into the ood tide of European immigration. And in contrast to the countries on
the western slope of the Andes, whose tricolors were planted on the usurped
territory of the Incas, the indigenous population was sparse even in pre-
Colombian times. The genocidal accomplishment of which Gonzalez boasted had
therefore mostly been the relatively simple work of the Conquest of the Desert,
a blitz of Indian-killing and land robbery roughly parallel to the American eort
against the Plains Indians. (It is a brutal truism of colonial history that native
peoples fare better with mountains and forests to shelter them; the at pampas,
beckoning the Argentines with agricultural promise, also denied protection to
the Indians.)
In most of Latin America, the distribution of wealth has always shown an inverse
correlation, rough but obvious, with that of pigmentation: light-skinned
descendants of Europeans at the top, darker-skinned people of native descent at
the bottom. In a country like Argentina, the rule couldnt hold to the same degree.
Such racial homogeneity (amid a considerable ethnic diversity of Italians,
Spaniards, Poles, Germans, Welsh, Jews, Armenians, Irish, Lebanese, and so on: in
his book on Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin remarks on the pleasures of the names in
the Buenos Aires phone book) may have promised social harmony to the creole
elite, but this was not to be. Elsewhere on the continent, the overlap of racial and
class dierence has a way of naturalizing the latter by coincidence with the
former. Argentina, deprived of this cruel convenience, became the Latin
American country in which class society exhibited itself most nakedly.
Argentinas land-owning ruling class has always bankrolled itself through the
sale of commodities. Already Mariano Moreno, tribune of the 1810 revolution
which deposed the Spanish viceroy in Buenos Aires, and a reader of Adam Smith,
had proposed that the country should specialize in the export of cattle goods and
leave manufacture to its trading partners. Whatever this policys original merits,
by the rst centennial it had yielded a basic dilemma. Even as the country,
lacking the large mestizo or indigenous peasantry of its neighbors, became one of
the most urbanized in the world, with new immigrants swelling the cities, it
relied on the countryside for the bulk of its income.
This proposed a stark choice. Argentina could conne itself to its traditional role
as a supplier of primary commodities of grains, meat, wool, and minerals
and leave the resulting rents for its narrow land-owning class to distribute
parsimoniously among its servants and agricultural hands. But this (neo)liberal
modelo agroexportador would mean industrial underdevelopment and
correspondingly high unemployment and low wages, to the distress of the cities.
On the other hand, developmentalist projects to stoke local manufacture and
domestic demand typically spell reduced export earnings for commodity
exporters, thanks to increased internal consumption and a higher wage bill, and
spur ination. Developmentalist governments from Perns to Cristina Kirchners
have also attempted to siphon o the prots of the great agricultural producers,
incurring the wrath, historically well-armed, of the landed elite.
THE ELECTION of President Hiplito Yrigoyen in 1916 was the countrys rst by
universal male surage, and the next bakers dozen years, a period dominated by
Yrigoyen and his Radical party, saw a rst push to industrialize an
overwhelmingly rural economy, as well as the creation of a state oil rm to
counter the dominion of the American Standard Oil. It looked for a season as if
the republic was on the path to becoming the democratic, industrialized,
economically decolonized country it has never quite succeeded in being. But with
the outbreak of the Depression, prosperity and democracy expired more or less
at once. Yrigoyen, two years into a nonconsecutive second term, fell to a military
coup in the southern winter of 1930.
Through the 30s and into World War II, a series of formally democratic
governments, installed by patriotic fraud at the ballot box, hosted an intramural
debate among the elite over economic liberalism versus nationalism. The
liberals favored a form of free trade that allowed continued British dominance of
banking and ownership of the railroads, and would neither impose import duties
to promote local industry nor seriously tax agricultural exports. The nationalists
including the great developmentalist economist Ral Prebisch argued for
nationalization of the railroads, and pioneered what over the next decades came
to be known throughout Latin America as import substitution, in which locally

made nished goods competed with foreign imports. In 1943, a group of
(economically) nationalist military ocers overthrew an (economically) liberal
president who had secured his position by fraud. Among them was Juan
Domingo Pern, blocky sphinx of Argentine history.
In Two Hundred Years of Peronism, a recent collection by the superbly jaundiced

cartoonist Miguel Rep, one witty frame depicts the explorer Cristobal Pern
discovering the Americas. The opaque gure of Pern refracts all earlier and
subsequent beams of Argentine history. He also oers one of the purest
examples of Latin American populism, with a prominent forerunner in Vargas in
Brazil and a delayed echo in Venezuelas Chavez. Born at the end of the 19th
century to a failed small rancher, he rose through the ranks of the army to
become a colonel. The reformist junta of 1943 installed Pern as minister of labor,
and called elections in 1946. Pern won the presidency in a free and fair contest
and was reelected in 1951, only to be deposed by the army four years later to the
applause of business and the church. (Three years earlier his second wife, Eva
Pern, a former actress and an impassioned champion of the working class, had
succumbed to cancer and been apotheosized as a martyr of the laboring poor.)
Even in exile in Francos Spain after 1955, and with his Peronist Party banned,
Pern dominated Argentine politics. His threatening example supplied the
explicit rationale for military rule by the right, as well as the implicit inspiration
for electoral movements of the center-left. By the time he was restored to
Argentine soil in 1973 and assumed the presidency for a third and nal time, his
name was invoked by an urban guerilla citing him along with Ch and Mao
even as he winked at the activities of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance as
the paramilitary outt dispatched leftists by the score.
Who was Pern? Exiled by the military in the 50s, revered by the left in the 70s,
invoked by neoliberals of the 90s, and acclaimed by the kirchneristas of the last
decade, Pern presents either a riddle or a cipher. He extended the franchise to
women while jailing political opponents and censoring the press. Labors
champion, he vindicated the rights of the so-called shirtless masses from the
balcony of the Casa Rosada and privately explained to American ocials that
minimum wage and compulsory holiday legislation were only so much expedient
anti-Communism. Pern admired Mussolini, but showed none of Mussolinis
interest in foreign conquest or racial laws. The contradictory character of
Peronism has yielded several mystifying historical passages. The countrys

elected developmentalist government of the early 60s was often characterized as
Peronism without Pern his party remained proscribed and no doubt many
of the left Peronists whom Pern, upon his return from Spanish exile, tried to
purge from the movement considered that Pern had been restored without
Peronism.
From election in 1946 to overthrow in 1955, Perns nationalistic economic policy

likewise pursued two dierent and contradictory paths. At rst, he turned his
back on the exporters of meat and cereals by attempting to divert their prots
into a program of industrial production (including of a car named after his
political party) geared to urban, working-class consumption. In the same initial
postwar years, he could boast of paying o the national debt and nationalizing
the railroads. (Its this Pern who stands behind the rhetoric of the Kirchners
contemporary Peronism indeed the pension program and the countrys airline
have been renationalized and the debt stands at less than half its 2002 level.) A
ve-year plan promulgated in 1946 contained this bold declaration: In 1810 we
were liberated politically; today we long for economic independence.
The problem was that an industrializing Argentina needed capital equipment

and raw materials it couldnt furnish for itself. Their purchase required foreign
currency, especially dollars or something convertible into dollars (as the UKs
substantial wartime debt with Argentina, denominated in pounds sterling,
ceased to be in 1948) and these funds could only come from the sale of basic
commodities on the international market and investment from abroad. Thus no
sooner had the road to economic independence been taken than it appeared to
double back through increased dependency on imports of foreign capital and
exports of primary products. Now Pern changed direction and sought to favor
agriculture over industry, to cultivate new foreign markets for farm commodities,
to welcome outside investment in the form of multinationals, and to dampen the
inationary kindling of high wages. (Menems Peronism of the 90s hewed more
closely to this course.)
It might appear obvious that the solution a middle way lay in a

combination of increased agricultural exports with the simultaneous promotion
of a local industry turning out goods for domestic and regional consumption. In
fact this balancing act was just the one Pern meant eventually to bring o, and
what Nstor and Cristina Kirchner have attempted two generations later. But no
such balance could be struck by Pern or any of his fourteen successors some
democratically elected and most not, and one of them, of course, his own
diminished person between 1955 and 1983.
Its often said about Argentina, where rightwing coups enjoyed the enthusiasm
but not the direct sponsorship of Washington, that unlike much of the rest of
Latin America its troubles have been of its own perverse making. The claim
contains a fair amount of truth. No doubt almost any consistent economic policy
and stable form of government would have served Argentina better between
World War II and the Falklands debacle than constant, bloody tergiversation. But
it is not necessary to excuse the countrys periods of either elected confusion or
dictatorial pronunciamento to observe that few if any countries can have
suered more than Argentina from the agricultural protectionism that makes
North Atlantic capitalism such a fundamentally, rather than merely incidentally,
hypocritical phenomenon.
Until the neoliberal 1990s, Argentina was often held to illustrate the folly of
import-substituting developmentalism: high ination, shoddy goods, inecient
services. According to orthodoxy, it should have concentrated instead on its
comparative advantage as a producer of foodstus, never mind that less than 1
percent of the population is employed in agriculture. Granting this premise: to
whom should the Argentines have sold their surplus cereals? The US and the
Commonwealth from the 20s onwards, and the European Economic Community
after the war, were protected markets often extending lavish subsidies to farmers
or agribusiness. Ironically, it took Communist China and the USSR opening up
their markets to Argentine grain in the 60s for the country to make much
consistent use of the comparative advantage that, according to the free-trade
theory that supplies the North Atlantic alibi, should have formed its birthright.
Argentines can be blamed for not making up their minds about whether to favor
free trade or protectionism, but it should be recalled that Argentina, oered this
choice, could never so easily reply Both as Western Europe or North America. In
fact, the North Atlantic preference roughly speaking, for protection of
agriculture and industrial free trade is merely, you might say, an inverted
developmentalism.
THE FLEXIBLE UNCERTAINT Y , the volatilized emptiness of Peronism somewhat

resembles that of the Argentine national character as described by Argentines
themselves, and confusion over the substance of Peronism was never greater
than in the chaotic early 70s, as the prohibition of Peronism was lifted and
Perns return from exile was anticipated with chiliastic fervor by elements of the
left and right alike. As the Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau points out
in On Populist Reason (2005), Perns stature had grown enormously during his
seventeen years of exile: The more repressive [a] new regime became, and the
more its program was seen as a sellout to international nance capital, the more
the gure of Pern became identied with an anti-system popular and national
identity.
But Pern could only function as an empty signier (in Laclaus Lacan-inected
terminology), promising everything to everybody, so long as he remained out of
the country and out of power, communicating to disparate groups of supporters
in private letters. In one of these letters Pern recognized that his infallibility
was precisely based on not saying or doing anything, [the] only way of assuring
such infallibility. Until his return Pern was seen, Laclau writes, depending on
the political orientation of those supporting him, either as the leader of an anti-
imperialist coalition which was going to be the rst step in the advance towards a
socialist Argentina, or as the only guarantee that the popular movement would
be contained within manageable limits. Upon Perns recovery of Argentine soil
in 1973, deadly gun battles between right- and leftwing supporters greeted him at
the airport. A year later, he was dead of heart failure and had been succeeded by
his vice president and third wife Isabelita, a former nightclub singer and skittish
nonentity. Isabelitas security forces paved the way for dictatorship by torturing
and killing hundreds of the armed left, Peronist and otherwise. It remained only
for the military to depose Isabelita herself, whose rule had at least possessed the
merit of constitutionality; to ban Peronism once more; to amplify state terror by
an order of magnitude; and to swap what remained of the developmentalism of
Pern and his democratic successors for a version of the neoliberalism already
imposed by gunpoint next door in Chile.
For Alejandro Horowicz, in his ferocious classic Los Cuatro Peronismos (1985), the
fourth Peronism that of Isabelitas aborted twenty-month reign represents
the liquidation of the earlier Peronisms. The political and economic
enfranchisement once awarded the working class was now decisively withdrawn,
and the reign of foreign capital restored. The juntas Proceso was merely a
programa isabelina multiplied a hundred fold: All dreams . . . of
developmentalism, of negotiation with international nancial capital on a more
or less equal basis, were discarded as useless junk. The dictatorship installed as
its economics minister Jos Martnez de Hoz, scion of one of the countrys great
land-owning families, who embarked on a neoliberal program now familiar the
world over: monopolistic consolidation of media and nance, deindustrialization
and wage repression, the opening of the country to unrestricted short-term
foreign investment, or hot money, and a massive run-up of government debt,
which by the fall of the dictatorship would be more than seven times greater
than in 1975.
Horowicz contends that the restoration of democracy in 1983 did not

fundamentally alter the terms of this fourth, self-canceling Peronism. Elections
would from now on be held only on condition that the industrial working class
accept its subordination to the exporters of raw commodities: This is the
historical tragedy of Argentine society: its extraordinary incapacity to assimilate
any dynamic change that entails the remaking of the ruling class, reforming the
agrarian nature of pampas capitalism.
Neither Carlos Menems self-described Peronist government from 1989 99 nor

its ideologically indistinguishable Radical successor oered much reason to
revise this disheartening evaluation. In his way, Menem cuts as typical a gure of
the 90s as Clinton or Blair, having bent a political party Perns partido
justicialista historically associated with egalitarianism to neoliberal ends. In
recognition of his reforms, the deindustrializing country was swamped with
foreign capital pursuing the exaggerated returns attendant on a bloated currency.
The most prominent results, besides a renewed debt binge, were concentration of
land titles in still fewer hands and the privatization of mineral rights and public
services. Meanwhile the displacement of small concerns by multinationals and
the resulting declines in wages and employment were blows temporarily
cushioned by the illusory strength of the peso. Of course dollar-peso
convertibility ultimately worked best for Argentines wealthy and well-connected
enough to have been alerted, in 2001, to its imminent suspension. Storing dollars
abroad while the peso-denominated bank accounts of their compatriots were
frozen and debased, they became the beneciaries of what the neoliberal von
Mises Institute recognized as a bank robbery by the political elites. Another

dismal aspect of Menems performance was the batch of pardons he granted to
members of the military convicted of the torture and murder of subversives,
many of them, of course, left Peronists.
IN A 2005 AFTERWO RD to Los Cuatro Peronismos, Horowicz held out the

possibility that Nstor Kirchner might represent a fth and better version. This
intuition seems conrmed at the end of a decade dominated by Kirchner from
his implausible election in 2003, through the landslide election of his wife in 2007,
to his untimely death. Even now, the gure of Kirchner looms larger than that of
anyone else. His widow refers to him in her speeches simply as l, as if he were
too awesome and grave a spirit to be named.
In 2003, Kirchner, governor of a remote Patagonian province, was awarded the

presidency with the votes of a mere fth of the electorate, after Menem
withdrew from a runo in which he risked being trounced. Kirchner was little-
known at the time, which probably accounted for much of his appeal after the
2001 crash induced a lingering disgust with professional politicians. Before
acceding to the Casa Rosada, he declared that he wouldnt check his convictions
at the door. But the substance of these convictions remained unknown.
In the early 70s, Nstor and Cristina Kirchner were members of the leftist
Peronist Youth in the university town of La Plata, not far from Buenos Aires. This
milieu put them in touch with developmentalist economic ideas as well as with a
number of future victims of the junta. Three decades later, the Kirchners have
hardly governed as radicals, but the legacy of their militant youth is patent in
what are arguably the two central features of their tenure: the rejection of
neoliberalism and the placement of the last dictatorship at the center of national
memory.
Of these two signals, the commemoration of the junta and its victims was the
one ashing more brightly in the public observance of the bicentennial. On the
Avenida 9 de Julio, amid stalls uncontroversially dedicated to each Argentine
province, were more somber installations, including a sarcastic triumphal arch by
the artist Lon Ferrari likening the junta (and the local Catholic hierarchy who
blessed its crimes) in no uncertain terms to the Nazis. In the same vicinity, a giant
wall magnied and assembled grainy mug shots of the dictatorships mainly
youthful victims. Together these exhibits stood at the symbolic center of the
capital, between the Casa Rosada and the great Italianate congressional palace.
This imagery corresponds to the reopening of prosecutions for violations of

human rights committed under the dictatorship. Pressure from the still restive
armed forces led the Radical government of the 80s to declare an end to further
trials of military ocials, while Menem was later ready with his pardons. It took
Nstor Kirchners appointment of a new Supreme Court in 2003 to revoke the
impunity covering the dictatorship and its more bloodstained executors. You
might call Kirchners court-packing a case of executive interference with the
judiciary, a typical instance of Latin American hyper-presidentialism. You might
also regard it as a decisive step in the causes of legality and national memory.
One revelation yielded by the new legal climate is that the dictatorship included
among its victims not only suspected militants but inconvenient businessmen. In
an episode recently uncovered in a report commissioned by Cristinas
government, the junta robbed the countrys main newsprint concern from its
proprietors, and awarded it to the two principal Buenos Aires dailies in return for
their support. As for Martnez de Hoz, the juntas economics minister, a federal
judge last year sentenced him to a lengthy jail term for his role in the 1976
kidnapping of a businessman and his son. The case of Martnez de Hoz is only
one of dozens to have been opened in recent years, with trials taking place up
and down the country. In December of last year, the chief dictator of the 70s,
Jorge Videla, having suered nothing worse than house arrest over the past two
decades, received, along with several of the more notorious sadists employed by
his regime, a sentence of particular alliterative piquancy: prisn perpetua y crcel
comn life imprisonment in a common jail.
On the eve of his sentencing, Videla denounced the Gramscian Marxists now
ruling the country. This was ignorance as well as hysteria: the Argentine
economy remains dominated by foreign-owned mining and agricultural
concerns, which have polluted the land and in the case of the carcinogenic
pesticides sprayed over transgenic soy crops preyed on peoples health across
the country. Still, the Kirchners neo-developmentalist economic policy (with
apter Germanic precedent in Otto von Bismarck than Karl Marx) appears to have
paid o in terms of manufacturing growth, debt-shedding, and increased
domestic consumption. The English-language business press, as reliably
disdainful of the Kirchners as it was infatuated with Menem, claims that
kirchnerista heterodoxy has scared o vital investment, but the gures say
something else. Between 1993 and 1998 the period of Menems hallucinated
boom total investment as a percentage of GDP was inferior to the prevailing
average from 2003 to 2008. The dierence lies mostly in the national or
international provenance of these capitals. The weak point of the economy
remains high ination, estimated by most private economists, who ignore the
governments massaged gures, at above 20 percent annually: a far cry from prior
bouts of hyperination, and perhaps an enviable condition in the eyes of
countries facing deation, but a serious problem all the same.
CFK, as the papers call la presidenta, has also explicitly sought to recover the
countrys status as the most egalitarian country in Latin America. One basic
device of this project has been the Asignatin Universal por Hijo, a modest
monthly payment, awarded per child, to unemployed or informally employed
parents. According to the UN, the reduction of child poverty has been swift and
signicant, and indigence among children nearly wiped out. Another recent
advance covers the old rather than the young. State pensions now extend, for the
rst time in decades, to nearly all retired people, including those who worked in
the informal sector and never paid the associated taxes. Other redistributive
features of the Kirchners Peronism include a project to impose prot sharing
with workers on large corporations, the addition of full employment to the
mandate of the central bank, and the breakup of the countrys main media
monopoly. (Such trust-busting has been characterized in the English-speaking
media as intimidation of the press.)
At the May 25 bicentenary state dinner, framed photographs of both Juan and
Evita Pern were on display. But these were not the only ghosts summoned. A
photo of Ch Guevara in his beret said by implication: We are a government of the
left. A photo of thick and jaunty Yrigoyen in his top hat said: We have resumed
being a democracy. And images of the revolutionary leaders of other Latin
American countries announced what Argentines of more prosperous and

prejudiced times often wished to deny: We are another Latin American country,
not a stray satellite of Europe.
Now Nstor Kirchners death has added a new face to the political iconography of
Argentina, appearing across the country in posters and stenciled grati. The
mainstream press had turned against the Kirchners after they attacked its
monopoly position, and its chief organs could only betray profound surprise
when, having informed the public of its disillusionment with kirchnerismo, the
same public turned out in droves to view Nstors body as it lay in state. The
mourning appeared most passionate among young people supposedly indierent
to politics, thousands of whom held vigil for days in the Plaza de Mayo, chanting
and singing. A silent gesture of equal force was made by the head of the
Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, when she removed her white shawl
symbol of the movement and tucked it into the breast pocket of Nstors black
suit.
In the days after Kirchners death, I received a number of emails from Argentine
friends and acquaintances. The intelligence and fervor, the ohand eloquence of
these casual communiqus reminded me of my favorite traits among porteos (as
residents of Buenos Aires are known). Florencia, in rejoinder to a more cynical
friend, conceded suspicion of certain aspects of Kirchners leadership, but then
listed o the top of her head a battery of his achievements from the political
sidelining of the armed forces for the rst time in two hundred years, to the
successful promotion, with his wife, of equal marriage for gays and lesbians
and then went on to say:
He restored a belief in politics to the people. He showed many of us, and I

believe that with the passage of time many more will realize, that politics isnt
only this rotten core of national life that you mention with resignation and
disdain, but a TOOL CAPABLE OF OPERATING ON REALITY. These past days in
the Plaza de Mayo Ive felt delight in the promise of thousands of young
people, 20-year-old kids who are far removed from the deep-rooted fear left
behind by the idea-killing dictatorship, and from the disappointment of having
been swindled by politicians not only corrupted but, worse, employed by the
powers that be to whom theyd delivered up the country.
Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner, widow and presumptive presidential candidate,

proposes a suggestive image for a country both in perpetual mourning over its
miscarried potential and enjoying more reason for optimism than in many
decades. At the moment, chances appear good that Cristina will secure a second
term, with a mandate to further the left populist project she and her late
husband outlined.
Long-run economic trends may also favor the rming-up of Argentine

democracy, especially if commodity prices remain as high as is widely anticipated
over the decades to come, and if the tighter regional economic integration that
was among Nstor Kirchners main projects yields more local sources of
consumer demand and nance capital. Nearly self-sucient in petroleum and
brimming with natural gas, Argentina also possesses an enviable abundance of
fresh water and arable land. As disastrous as its last century was, the country has
less to fear than most from the shortages that may characterize the next
hundred years.
Politics plays a fairly small role in my own decision to live in Buenos Aires.
Sentimental and practical considerations have been decisive. And sometimes I do
wonder what I can be doing to have deposited myself in a half-wrecked country
at the bottom of the world, so far from the US and its real if polluted comforts.
Still, something compels me to stay, and the historical position Argentina
occupies just now must form part of that compound motive. I like living in a
country where an ideology still reigning in the US has come to grief; where crisis
has enforced creativity; where the political spectrum is not exhausted by two
colors; and where very little that matters is taken for granted among the people I
know. It has also done me some kind of good to live in a country that, for all its
troubles, appears to be on the mend, rather than, like my own, the spellbound
captive of its decline. At the moment the future looks bright for Argentina. Then
again, it often has. +

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10/14/2017 Argentinidad | Issue 11 | n+1

Publication date: Spring 2011

THERE CAN BE NO T URNING 2 0 0 without regrets. Even so, the element of

IN HER SPEECHES marking the bicentennial, President Cristina Fernndez de

Why did so proverbially promising a country fail to pan out? Argentinas

FROM THE ASCENS IO N of legendary populist Juan Pern to the presidency in

Yet by 1998 Argentina largely deindustrialized, its privatization mostly

In December 2001, economics minister Domingo Cavallo, the architect of peso-

Austerity in the face of gigantic indebtedness had, in other words, yielded

The punishment for Kirchners heterodox course took an unsurprising form:

The optimistic national mood that seemed to achieve self-consciousness in the

A slave and, later, servant contingent of African descent ceased to be numerically

to be known throughout Latin America as import substitution, in which locally

In Two Hundred Years of Peronism, a recent collection by the superbly jaundiced

Peronism has yielded several mystifying historical passages. The countrys

From election in 1946 to overthrow in 1955, Perns nationalistic economic policy

The problem was that an industrializing Argentina needed capital equipment

It might appear obvious that the solution a middle way lay in a

THE FLEXIBLE UNCERTAINT Y , the volatilized emptiness of Peronism somewhat

Horowicz contends that the restoration of democracy in 1983 did not

Neither Carlos Menems self-described Peronist government from 1989 99 nor

Mises Institute recognized as a bank robbery by the political elites. Another

IN A 2005 AFTERWO RD to Los Cuatro Peronismos, Horowicz held out the

In 2003, Kirchner, governor of a remote Patagonian province, was awarded the

This imagery corresponds to the reopening of prosecutions for violations of

American countries announced what Argentines of more prosperous and

He restored a belief in politics to the people. He showed many of us, and I

Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner, widow and presumptive presidential candidate,

Long-run economic trends may also favor the rming-up of Argentine

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