Hi, gang. An article from New York Times, showing my beloved country situation in a very precise way. For all of you asking "what da hell is happening down there? Regards
Albano, el gaucho fotografo Argentina Paying Heavily for Squandering Blessings February 8, 2002 By LARRY ROHTER BUENOS AIRES, Feb. 6 - Everywhere they gather in these days of crisis and collapse, Argentines are asking themselves the same question: how could it have come to this? How has this country, whose name derives from a Latin word meaning money and whose elegant capital faces an estuary called the River of Silver, managed to go bankrupt? "Our case has got to be unique in modern world history," said Daniel Bellini, a high-school chemistry teacher, as he sat with friends at an outdoor cafe on the Avenida Nueve de Julio, a stately boulevard that recalls the country's former glories. "To start off with such abundance and end up this poor, that, my friend, takes a very special talent." Not so long ago Argentina really did seem "doomed to success," to use a favorite rallying cry of Eduardo Duhalde, the country's fifth president since December. Early in the 20th century this was the seventh richest country in the world, with a per capita income ahead of those of Canada, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Japan and Spain and not far behind that of the United States. Today, the average Argentine income is less than a quarter of America's, and 40 percent of the country's 37 million people live below the poverty line. Unemployment is at a record 22 percent, and the situation is getting worse: the government acknowledges the economy will shrink by 5 percent this year, but most independent forecasters talk of a decline of 8 percent or more. How and when Argentina will recover from this economic collapse, which has been accompanied by a loss of confidence in the political and social institutions, is unclear. Mr. Duhalde admits that the local banking system cannot pay depositors and the country has become a pariah on international credit markets since defaulting on $141 billion in public debt in December. Argentina's long slide into insolvency both baffles and enrages its populace because this country is blessed with some of the most fertile soil in the world, under which ample supplies of oil also lie. In the prosperous past - and still today - herds of cattle roamed the endless pastures known as the pampas. Wheat, corn and, more recently, soybeans grew almost effortlessly, leading to a typically cocky saying that "a good harvest can fix everything." In the midst of such plenty, it was easy for Argentines to believe that they were destined for greatness. The attitude that came to predominate, Argentines now acknowledge, was predatory and self-indulgent, based on the certainty that the country's riches were inexhaustible. "Argentines were bitten by the disturbing bug of self-complacency," said Mariano Grondona a columnist for the daily La Nación, who has written of two books about the cultural prerequisites of development. "In love with themselves, they became narcissistic." Over the years, Argentina has veered from a closed state-run economy to a deregulated, free-market model, the only constants being the venality of those in power and their reckless squandering of the nation's wealth. The country's greatest modern writer, Jorge Luis Borges, once said of the Peronists, the dominant political party here for more than 50 years, "They are neither good nor bad, just incorrigible." The pampas influenced the country's development in another way, instilling a sense of isolation and a suspicion of authority perhaps even more extreme than in the American West. The epic work of Argentine literature taught in every school, José Hernández's "Martín Fierro," glorifies those values through its solitary hero, a gaucho cowboy unjustly sent to fight on the Indian frontier. Distrust of the state, however, gradually developed into disrespect for the rule of law, from rampant tax evasion to the military's murder of political opponents. The verdict of G. Bevione, an Italian writer who visited this country in 1910 seems prescient: Argentina is "a country where the judicial branch has no independence and the executive branch knows no restraint." One result can be seen in the current spectacle of a politicized Supreme Court, beholden to a former president and feeling threatened by a new one, trying to torpedo the current administration's economic strategy. On Friday, the justices, ignoring Mr. Duhalde's warning that the banks were without funds, ruled that a two-month-old freeze on withdrawals from accounts was unconstitutional and must be lifted. But instead of bowing to the decision, Mr. Duhalde threw his support behind an effort to impeach all nine members of the court and replace them with justices more to his liking. He also refused to abide by the ruling and decreed that no one might challenge his defiance in the courts, a step that constitutional experts here agree is itself of dubious legality. Even more than the United States, modern Argentina is a nation of immigrants: at the peak of the influx, nearly one-third of the population was foreign-born, more than double the highest rate in the United States. But instead of forging a sense of nationhood that could substitute for the absence of other values, Argentines came to see their country as a "piece of Europe that broke off and landed in South America," in the words of a diplomat here. Rather than integrate with the rest of Latin America, Argentina held itself apart from and above its neighbors, an attitude encouraged by its isolation at the southern end of the continent. Other Latin Americans responded in kind, with sayings like: "An Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish, wishes he were English, acts like he is French and suffers under a German army." But beginning with a military coup in 1930, that self-image failed one test after another. For the next 50 years, the country remained imprisoned in a disastrous cycle in which authoritarian military rule gave way to civilian governments so inept that they provoked new army uprisings, culminating in the brutal dictatorship in which more than 20,000 people disappeared between 1976 and 1983. Though the armed forces remain so discredited that they are no longer seen as a threat, 20 years of democracy have only left Argentines discouraged and humbled. Years of four-digit inflation were followed by a burst of dollar-fueled growth and frenzied consumption, but that quickly evaporated into a four-year recession, one that has yet to hit bottom. Reluctant to accept that reality, "we Argentines continue to be fascinated by the rich country Argentina once was" instead of the poor country it has become, Mr. Grondona said. Though the evidence of ruin is everywhere, "we continue to deny it in the name of a fantasy." Over the last decade, Argentina has opened to its Latin American neighbors and the rest of the world, finally realizing that it could no longer afford standoffishness. But the old problem of a rapacious ruling class has been compounded by the arrival of foreign companies willing, it appears in retrospect, to do anything to get a slice of the pie, including payment of bribes in return for sweetheart contracts. "The looting of the country comes from both within and outside," said Marcos Aguinis, author of "The Intolerable Charm of Being Argentine," a recent best seller. "Foreign investment here didn't take risks either. What came was volatile short- term capital looking for a quick return and an easy exit, content to earn a 20 percent rate of return and send the money home instead of reinvesting." No one can say that Argentines, the most highly literate population in Latin America, are not reflective about themselves or their national malaise. Buenos Aires is said to have the heaviest per capita concentration of psychoanalysts of any city in the world, and even with the country in ruins, fliers continue to be posted on walls here inviting the depressed to group therapy sessions that teach how to "live with joy and little money." Borges was no friend of psychoanalysis, and as he saw it, the typically Argentine bemoaning of "our solitude, our perdition and our primitive character has, like existentialism, the charms of poignancy." But even that emphasis on melancholy self-examination has now come to be seen as a symptom of the country's ills and skewed priorities. "Instead of investing in technology and science, the effort was put into training psychiatrists and lawyers because that was easier and didn't require as much expense." said Mr. Aguinis, a former minister of culture. "We had the same level of human talent as Brazil, if not better. But they were the ones who ended up industrializing, not us, because they were willing to spend money on equipment and laboratories to train engineers and chemists." What the current crisis requires, most Argentines say, is action, and not more "cafe chatter." But the country remains divided and disorderly, perhaps as much so as in 1925, when Argentina was nearing the end of its golden age and Albert Einstein, visiting here and puzzled by what he saw, asked, "How can so disorganized a country progress?" http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/08/international/americas/08ARGE.html?ex=101 4186845&ei=1&en=27b8734af5330dd1 - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
