The Argentine Tragedy
Rosenberg, Bernard
Hunger, illiteracy, unemployment, an exploding population, race conflict, strife between the oppressive oligarchy and the miserable masses, with no middle class to stabilize a backward...
...So is the Argentine personality, an enigma harder to penetrate than most...
...No such freedom is to be envisaged under the coming to talitarianism which will be designed to extinguish every dilemma and squelch all opposition...
...Even under Perlin, a man hostile to the regime could migrate, or stay on, outside government circles, and send his chil dren abroad...
...They help to account for a certain deformation of character, particularly among the young...
...they were ejected wholesale upon his departure in 1955...
...Many of the same people now contend that a democratic polity can exist only after the proper infrastructure of machine production has been brought into being...
...The culture, with its very special flavor, is Italo-Spanish rather than Indo-Spanish...
...So is Mama...
...The polarization of rich and poor is taken for granted in any conventional picture of Latin American society...
...And yet another...
...Swindling the people, he spread enough from a plundered treasury to improve their lot and lift their spirits...
...I found a radio but no electric light in every hut I visited, even one communal, centrally located television set...
...one works incessantly to negate and destroy the other...
...A forced draught, sponsored by Left or more likely, Right totalitarian dictatorship, will work...
...the well-to-do identify with Europe, dreaming of, or actually dividing their time among Rome, London, and Paris...
...Argentina is a big country, the eighth largest on this globe—with a population numbering 20,000,000, of whom more than a fourth live in Greater Buenos Aires...
...We wish them godspeed—and warn them, from bitter experience, that there are no panaceas...
...It is vulgar Liberalism as much as it is vulgar Marxism...
...A civilian gov ernment has set aside forty per cent of its budget for military expendi tures...
...This, on the principle that wherever you need one man there are fifty, and in those rare instances when you need fifty, there is one...
...I dare say the Argentine worker is at least as well, or as badly, informed as his U.S...
...Bosses are generally contemptuous of workers—who in return hate them with a vengeance—but beyond such smoldering antagonism, there is no passionate solidarity within the social classes...
...In the European tradition, they are elite institutions where rich men's sons and daughters soak up an extraordinary amount of knowledge...
...This is a peculiar kind of underdevelopment and we had better not confuse it with other kinds...
...Divided and volatile, reactionary and reformist, Peronista and anti-Peronista, with some kind of hold on the people who, however, rarely attend church services...
...Instead they subscribe almost without exception to the new world religion of economic development...
...Rosario and Cordoba, each with over a million inhabitants, are only the most conspicuous cases...
...These names evoke the strongest possible passions to this day, not only between contending groups but within the individual whose mind is a patchwork of much that they imply...
...He cannot help being aware of the widespread resentment, a symptomatic cry of frustration, heard on every hand...
...Women soak up stories from the cine novelas they buy and the soap operas they hear all day long...
...The mass media have left their mark...
...They are hospitable and aloof, warm and withdrawn...
...A few characteristics are immediately apparent to the outsider...
...More than half are of Italian extraction...
...Youngsters can pummel each other before the unseeing eyes of parents...
...counterpart...
...No one explained how the power was tapped in from a line outside the Isla...
...Their dependency brings indecision, and this in turn promotes impulsive behavior...
...The Argentine people are steadily employed, if poorly remunerated, well-fed and literate in part because they do not feel any great population pressure...
...Stagnation (lid the trick: dynamic stagnation, a process by which this country on par with Australia and Canada until the Second World stood still, and thereby fell hopelessly behind...
...Argentines speak of the First Tyranny (Rosas) and the Second Ty ranny (Perlin) as they await the Third Tyranny...
...the ends are given...
...He will come not on horseback, but in a tank or a jet—in answer to the irresistible invi tation tendered him by a pure, prostrate mass society...
...Imagine the Third Tyrant with hell bombs to loose on his enemies...
...They are the creatures of mass society, fractionated and pulverized...
...But "teacher" is more demonstratively affectionate than her counterpart in the United States...
...Their backwardness fills them with rage...
...Talk to Argentine workers and they will express their preference for living in the United States "where workers are so much better off...
...That it might de-stabilize as much as, or more than, it stabilizes has not yet occurred to them...
...military officers and Castristas may find common cause in condemning those who "sell them out" to foreign investors, and they do...
...guidance in Bariloche where persistent rumors suggest that they are not too far from arranging for their own production of atomic weapons...
...Thus, Mariano Moreno (the liberal principle) and his antithesis, Saavedra in the eighteenth century, or Domingo F. Sarmiento (inspired by Jefferson and Lincoln), a nineteenth century President of the Republic, and his nemesis, the long-time Dictator Rosas...
...They left too many loopholes...
...The national complaint is liver trouble, a disorder that stems from absorbing too much protein, not too much alcohol...
...so is autocracy...
...For each of the services is divided and subdivided into rivalrous actions...
...No doubt everyone suffers from a certain amount of ambivalence...
...Argentines have more than their share...
...It pulls the Argentine one way, meaning as much to him as the Rights of Man meant to his ancestors who modeled their constitution after that of France and the United States...
...Academic councils are composed in equal proportion of faculty, students and alumnae who jointly determine admission standards, curriculum and personnel...
...I know a few Argentine intellectuals similarly afflicted—notably Americo Ghioldhi, isolated leader of the old Socialists...
...The cities get crowded, although they continue to have an amplitude, beauty and spaciousness that can only amaze the North American...
...Why go through the same agony when even we now know better...
...This is the meaning of austerity, as it is the meaning of "sacrifice for socialism," sacrifice today and tomorrow so that your children's grandchildren may prosper...
...Indeed, with pandemonium the rule, nothing can be precluded, anything is pos sible...
...Its citizens are dazed and above all, resentful...
...I am persuaded that the primary schools are intellectually inferior to our own (and I do not have a very high opinion of our own...
...And this is roughly what Argentine intellectuals should be saying to their neighbors...
...Argentine students who do not dare to murmur till they reach the university, sit in judgment of professors, declaring some to be competent and acceptable, others not, usually for extra-academic reasons...
...State Department, foreign investors appeared, the peso hardly fluctuated, confidence could be felt in the air...
...Another split...
...Race" signifies less in Argentina than in any other American republic, North or South...
...This impression is one I could scarcely resist as a parent of two children and a professor teaching university students for over a year—until shortly before the removal of Dr...
...For Argentines are also intensely nationalistic...
...Lincoln Steffens returned from Russia after the revolution and exclaimed, "I have seen the future, and it works...
...Some of them used to say that the only true democracy existed in New England before the Industrial Revolution...
...Frondizi...
...The social schizophrenia of Argentina reaches its apogee in politics...
...This proposition seems to me to be highly problematic, and I am surprised that so many of my friends uncritically accept it...
...The truth is that Dr...
...There is a general expectation that army men will be more barbarous than the others...
...Dominating their unions, he nevertheless strengthened them...
...In underdeveloped areas like Argentina, bureaucracy will continue to flourish as long as it is necessary to reduce discontent among the educated by supplying them with jobs...
...The spectacle of a people for whom one has developed some fondness, bent senselessly on their own destruction can never be very edifying...
...Among the fanatic supporters of Peron it almost suffices that since his time no boss may address a worker—and no senora a maid—by using the personal pronoun, tu, for the law now requires a polite usted...
...The liberal constitution should not be dismissed as a mere scrap of paper any more in Argentina than in her sister republics...
...The privileged, who already have their gadgets, look to Europe for high culture...
...Their wives most often hired out as part-time domestics...
...Argentina has a very substantial middle class...
...their per capita consumption of food is higher than ours...
...To see how heavily, you need only know that in Argentina there are 1,800,000 empleados piiblicos...
...Democracy is meaningful to him...
...Soon it will come to him that this quality is wedded to something as pervasive and classless as resentment, namely, ambivalence...
...For all its uniqueness, Argentina is underdeveloped, or rather, it got to be underdeveloped...
...Most of the men I met were stevedores who earned eighty-five pesos a day (when the dollar was worth 82 pesos), but being subject to the daily shape-up, they did not work regularly...
...They will tell you, with some justification, that Argentine woolens are the best in the world—on their way to purchase shoddy goods imported from the States costing twice as much as their own...
...Specific historical figures symbolize the struggle between polar positions...
...Strophe, antistrophe...
...General Pedro Aramburu rose to power, and restored much of the freedom Peron had wiped out...
...others carried their logic all the way to utopian intentional communities...
...Yet power will be thrust upon him...
...They would rather lose everything than move one inch toward amity...
...Superficial observers exude optimism whenever they note an increase in the middle class anywhere...
...But what of the Church, which surely must be reckoned with in any Catholic country...
...The press carried full accounts of all this, and the President did not dare to discipline his own paramilitary police: he needed them to control street mobs...
...When I left Argentina there were four feeble Socialist parties...
...We have to do in all three cases with cattle-breeding and agricultural economies, large land masses sparsely populated by homogeneous Europeans who have long since subdued the natives...
...Any two or more of them may combine at any time, then dis solve and reunite in a new and yet more bizarre configuration...
...Negros, Mestizos and Indios together compose less than three per cent of the total...
...There are now Radicals of the People and Intransigent Radicals, two bourgeois parties venomously opposed to each other, with no more ideological difference than that between Democrats and Republicans...
...In this most depressed environment, I found men who on an average day bought and read three newspapers, first Democracia, full of union news but popular mainly for its Peronist slant, then most likely, El Mundo, La Nacidn, or La Prensa, all eminently respectable with full, redundant translations from the UPI...
...The national character has puzzled and fascinated a host of scholars and essayists, especially those most given to brilliant introspection in the Great Days—more or less from 1890 to 1930...
...The school teacher will kiss her little charges as they enter the classroom, and then discipline them with the utmost severity...
...This assumption is at least debatable, but we may rest assured that modern technology is the prime precondition for totalitarianism...
...Similarly, Argentine youth cannot easily bring itself to marry, and the interminable noviazgo, the engagement that may last ten years, is common to all classes...
...The armed forces have developed three separate and distinct traditions, based on officers' training at the postgraduate level: the army favored study in Germany, the Navy, England and the Air Force, the United States...
...Frondizi was a prisoner not only of the army, but of the police force...
...Each one is divided and subdivided...
...Only such a man could have welcomed Nazis and used them as thugs, while admitting Jews who were unable to find refuge elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere—to use some of them as advisers...
...Strangely, the gross national product declined and neither the Kaiser plant, paying high wages for the production of an automobile few could afford to buy, nor the new steel factory, a first for Frondizi, balanced the general state of dilapidation...
...An honest observer who hopes he is wrong and who would like to proffer democratic socialism as an alternative (one that beyond peradventure makes perfectly good sense in this situation) can only see a ghastly prospect in store for Argentina...
...Com munists and Catholics may support Perlin at the same time, and for awhile they did...
...When immigrants poured into Argentina and the proportion of foreign-born was higher in Buenos Aires than in New York, as material well-being and cultural ascendancy reached their all-time high, impressive thinkers like Jose Ingenieros and Alejandro Korn sought to understand Argentina...
...Nearly onefifth of the whole population is made up of civil servants...
...The Justicialista movement, Peronismo, is directionless, sundered by the squabbling of wouldbe heir-apparents...
...Political parties, trade unions, social classes, the military, the po lice and the Church: these are all atoms afloat in the Argentine atmos phere...
...The irreconcilable impulses that actually govern Argentines are evident in all their institutions...
...My five-year-old boy was once forbidden to console an age mate of his who sobbed in a corner for one hour after having failed to stand properly at attention in deference to the teacher...
...pensadores do not...
...The Western visitor in an economically underdeveloped area is obliged to say, "I have seen the future, at home, and it doesn't work very well...
...Maybe there are...
...Given enough help from us, there is no telling what a military dictatorship could do...
...The same parents express horror at the intractability of boys and girls from North America...
...Workers who felt defrauded when Peron "ran away like a coward" in 1955 instead of arming them for a military showdown, also revere the man (and more so his wife, for the cult of Evita refuses to die) who gave them dignidad...
...The mystery remains, but its contours may be somewhat clearer...
...The descamisados did benefit from Peron—by whom they were also systematically cheated...
...I find that, like all avoidable tragedy, it sickens me...
...This in a nation whose last war—with Paraguay—was concluded nearly a century ago...
...Businessmen applauded, the International Monetary Fund loosened its purse strings, the regime became a pet of the U.S...
...Differences arise only on the question of means...
...Some momentum seemed to have been regained...
...Our students tend to be passive, seldom venturing to challenge their professors...
...It did not used to be so...
...The economists' favorite yardstick cannot tell us the difference between a low income people in Africa and a low income people, otherwise entirely distinct, in South America...
...Hunger, illiteracy, unemployment, an exploding population, race conflict, strife between the oppressive oligarchy and the miserable masses, with no middle class to stabilize a backward economy: are these the familiar problems of all Latin America...
...Over a sustained period, mingling mainly with academic men, I was unable to locate the famous pensadores, a vanishing breed of literary intellectuals committed to spiritual values which make them antipathetic to Uncle Sam...
...often they inclined toward the Jeffersonian tradition, that is, toward a political preference for the grass-roots agrarian life...
...The Argentine situation should teach us—as if France did not!— that full bellies, universal literacy, racial harmony, urbanization and the existence of a large middle class do not necessarily produce stability, let alone the good life...
...Beware...
...Frondizi made his deal with Peron, only after helping to split the large Radical Party in two...
...The antipathy persists...
...Therefore, chicanery and brutality in the police department of Buenos Aires, run by Admirals, saddens one more than yet another abortive coup hatched by General Toranzo Montero, or his brother...
...Following his flight, a kind of revolutionary exhilaration animated Argentina...
...we have our bureaucracy because of our development and they have theirs because of their underdevelopment...
...Since the university is above all a political arena, something more than formal education is at stake...
...If there is another way, if capital accumu lation is not god, we shall have to find it by turning away from economism, towards some kind of humanism...
...Their growth rate is comparable to our own...
...There is a Northern pocket of hunger among sugar workers around Salta and Tucuman...
...A student who has been ground down, firmly if affectionately, all his life, is unprepared for the exercise of power...
...Taken at their word, these people, if they only could, would all leave their motherland...
...Nowadays it is fashionable to assert that there can be no democracy until a certain, presumably calculable point of economic development has been reached...
...But the secondary schools are intellectually superior to our own...
...Those mobs may be inflamed not only by one branch of the military or another, they may be the victims of a faction within any one of them...
...Then it split, leaving a right wing and a left wing, and the left wing produced a victory for the Socialist patriarch Alfredo Palacios, a Senator in 1961 as he had been in 1909...
...This condition is bad enough but no more typical than the substandard diet of distressed coal miners in West Virginia...
...An abstemious person, the Argentine does not need to quiet his hunger pangs like so many Chileans who buy a quart of cana for less than a quart of milk...
...There one found a large swarm of families recently arrived from the hinterlands, occupying tiny parcels of land illegally but by sufferance of the state, living in huts with dirt floors, little water and no electricity...
...The swollen bureaucracy is typical of Latin America, as it is of India and other emerging nations...
...When Senator Palacios undertook an expose of the police, revealing, for example, continued use of the picana electrica, an instrument of torture and death that antedated and outlasted Peron, a large number of cops, led by their chief who professed not to know about it, shot up the Congress...
...The Castristas who damn such austerity have nothing to offer but more and worse austerity...
...Left, Right and Center are committed to industrialization: it is the only Argentine consensus...
...The Argentine masses had lived fairly well...
...Children went to school, motivated by their parents to master at least the skills of read ing and writing without which they knew there was no decent occupational future...
...But there are other equally potent forces pushing him in the opposite direction...
...Argentines do not suffer from lack of lebensraum...
...If there was a Fascist cast to Peronismo, there was also a tinge of Socialist idealism...
...Pressure groups or veto groups resemble parties and classes...
...the villa miseria is a reality in Buenos Aires, but insignificant by comparison with New York or Caracas, forty per cent slum and spreading fast...
...A temporary fusion of Right and Left is always possible...
...Argentines are perhaps the best-fed people on earth...
...The Socialist Party...
...Only the masses groaned...
...There was still such an entity in Argentina two years after Frondizi's election...
...This is a people of at least two minds about everything...
...One benefits enormously from a close reading of their work—as well as that of a half dozen others, early and recent—and then most cautiously attempts an analysis of his own...
...Argentine ambivalence stems mainly from a conflict between authoritarian and libertarian tendencies...
...Then, a powerful case must be made for Argentine exceptionalism...
...They would and they wouldn't...
...Palacios praised Fidel and cursed the Yanquis, but not vociferously enough to please those "left" of him...
...Having exterminated most of the indigenous peoples long ago, the Argentines are overwhelmingly European...
...A higher standard of living attracts the underprivileged...
...For some time they have been depopulating the countryside, flocking to and creating big cities...
...In his person and in his movement, Juan Peron incarnated the syndrome I have been trying to describe...
...The Argentines do not know which way to turn...
...Tyranny plus technology is the way to spell totalitarianism—and death to the human spirit...
...They absorb large amounts of literary trash from abroad—from Vicki Baum to Herman Wouk, reading any international best seller that deserves oblivion—while ignoring, when they are not exalting, their own much more gifted writers...
...Children may not direct aggression at either authority figure, though both egg them on to fight their peers...
...Frondizi ran on a Left platform: he was after all the author of a book, later withdrawn from circulation, that denounced Yankee oil imperialism...
...The analogy with Australia and Canada is limited but instructive...
...The ex-teachers form a large cluster of disgruntled men who would like to regain their old posts...
...His first major move in office consisted of importing the Yankee oil imperialists in unprecedented numbers...
...If we use white collar work, including entrepreneurs, professionals, functionaries, clerks, military officers and teachers, then by occupation more than fifty per cent of all Argentines are middle class...
...Blight appears...
...When Peron ran the country there were only Peronista teachers...
...They are heavily concentrated in the Federal bureaucracy...
...The family structure is such that children find it exceedingly difficult to cut ties and grow up...
...Frondizi and his Finance Minister, Alvaro Alsogaray (soon tabbed Essogaray) announced and imposed their policy of austerity which, in effect, freed prices and froze wages...
...Do not share the illusions that held us in thrall...
...every system, like every human being, has its share of internal contradictions...
...To be sure, many are perennial students or cronicos who move from one field of study to another without ever feeling any drive for completion...
...If only there were more...
...That he was a thief, a sybarite, and a scoundrel counts for much less than that he did something for them...
...Most of Argentina's physicists are said to be gathered under U.S...
...If there is a Third Tyranny, it will not be like the others...
...They think so well of themselves—even as they disparage all their works—that in Brazil and Chile, in Paraguay and Uruguay, they are viewed as arrogant and overbearing...
...Here income statistics are especially misleading...
...In this "community" there were few illiterates...
...The average Argentine adolescent cannot dream of attending such a place, for he will never get beyond the first few grades of his childhood schooling...
...Avoid our mistakes...
...For the country at large, literacy stands at about 90 per cent...
...Every man who inherits this dual tradition is at war with himself...
...Then came the disastrous election of 1958 which elevated Frondizi to office, made him a captive of the military with a political debt to the Peronistas who had backed him on orders from Peron himself...
...The schools which keep children under a tight rein, release them suddenly into an unwonted climate of freedom...
...No one believes the people are "ready" for liberal democracy: the best of them say they have tried that and it doesn't work...
...No influential writer in Latin America any longer denies that his continent needs rapid technological innovation...
...For who can doubt that the pandemonium will end, that the inchoate atoms will be or ganized, that order will be restored by a Strong Man...
...If college students in the United States are generally powerless, those in Argentina are too powerful...
...Argentina's underdevelopment is all her own...
...The Commonwealth countries are booming, while Argentina cannot seem to budge...
...So few reach the secondary level that, as of last year, there were more university students than high school pupils...
...they were now asked to live much less well—in the interests of a goal so far off that no one could see it...
...Even where the military looms as large as in Argentina, it is impossible to speak of the military...
...Argentina, still short of the "take-off" to industrialism, still dependent upon the export of meat and wheat, ranks very high (not far from Britain) in urbanization...
...It is not out of the question that he will have nuclear weapons at his disposal...
...New parties, licit and illicit, multiply like amoeba...
...To them it represents a relatively new state of affairs...
...This message ought to be conveyed urgently to those peoples who are, hopefully, on their way to the Argentine level...
...I did a little sociological research last year in the Isla Maciel, a wretched slum joined to the capital city...
...Inflation hurt them, no matter how big the profits for business, and inflation which crept at first, began to gallop...
Vol. 9 • September 1962 • No. 4
