Reflections on Contemporary Argentine Culture

...Thus, despite the fact that they receive widespread coverage and generate outrage among the national citizen-audience, they have no significant political impact...

...The regime's social project fractured a rich and long-standing political culture, inflicting deep wounds that will likely never heal completely...

...As was the case in other countries in the Southern Cone, the military conditioned its retreat on maintaining its role as the nation's institutional "protector...

...The immigration policies inspired by these ideas, however, soon created problems for the very elites who had implemented them...

...His most recent work is La marca de la bestia: Privacidad, vigilancia e infoentretenimiento (forthcoming...

...Elections have also been influenced by the other face of the appliance vote-the inflation syndrome-the fear on the part of economic elites that the fixed exchange rate could unravel, and with it, the entire credit system...

...For those sectors that have always dreamt of Argentina's full inclusion in the geopolitical world order, Menemismo has been a godsend...

...At the turn of the century, there was already a large literate public which made the development of a national culture industry viable...

...was played by industrial unions...

...Its grand celebration-"pizza with champagne"-expresses the triumph of that strategic subalternity which figures that the closer one gets to the centers of geopolitical power, the easier it is to access their privileges...

...The porary political culture in Argentina, which is the fact teachers' union, for example, has organized a series of that the orderly and disciplinary authoritarianism actions to protest cuts in the government's education implanted by the dictatorship is a key component of budget...

...Numerous political projects have attempted to envision a nation without cultural prejudices against either mestizos or foreign immigrants, including the anti-oligarchic radicalism of Hip6lito Yrigoyen and the populism of the Peronist movement...

...These migrants, who would become Per6n's key constituency, were vilified by Per6n's enemies as "the little black heads" and the "zoological avalanche...

...Under certain aspects of the dictatorship's Below: Carlos Menem during a visit to Menem, the project begun by the provinces in his 1989 presidential social project were inevitable, irre- campaign...

...At the turn of the century, there were more foreign-born people living Buenos Aires than native-born Argentines...

...Globalization has also affected local patterns of consumption...

...The coup n increasingly that ousted Yrigoyen in 1930the first of the numerous armynensions, as led coups of the twentieth century-brought together an )f migrants ultranationalist Catholic military enos Aires in leadership and a conservative elite that favored the liberal ecolustrial jobs...

...This attempt at "reconciliation" eventually led to Menem's infamous pardon of the juntas, through which he inaugurated a regime of institutionalized impunity where corruption reigns and civil society is weak and defensive...

...It is no surprise that the country's first labor union, the Typographers' Union of Buenos Aires, formed in 1869, was related to the print media...

...This unholy alliance would reemerge again in the military coups led by Gen...

...Meanwhile, the deregulation and flexibilization of labor continue to exacerbate individualism and the fear of unionization or association...

...In effect, the theory of the two demons expressed the final triumph of Argentina's political and social establishment, for it completely denied all social legitimacy to the progressive movements that were exterminated by the military regime...

...By 1930, 60% of all the newsprint used in Latin America was consumed in Argentina...

...Criminology has deeply marked Argentine history, from the turn-of-the-century projects for social hygiene to the massacres during the dictatorship of Gen...

...An entertainment industry, including film, radio and music, flourished during this period...

...Despite the military debacle in the Malvinas, which prompted the generals to relinquish power and hold democratic elections, efforts to consolidate a transition that was less controlled by the military and more closely linked to the proposals of the Multipartidaria of 1982-a coalition made up of the country's major political parties-were unsuccessful...

...While the members of the military juntas that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983 were brought to trial by the Alfonsin government, the impact of these judicial proceedings was undermined by the Final Stop and Due Obedience Laws...

...The racist disdain interior took o for the people and cultures of the interior provinces has been a con- political dirr stant tension in the country's cultural history since the time of thousands Domingo Sarmiento, a prolific arrived in Bu author and prominent statesman of nineteenth century Argentina...

...during the Videla regime...

...The immigration policies which stimulated this wave of European emigration to Argentina were implemented by an agroexport oligarchy as part of In the a social darwinist project to the racism of improve what they perceived as the "degenerative" mestizo stock against peol of the nation...

...The permanent threat of another coup assured that impunity would become official state policy...

...As Menem shed his populist-nationalist discourse in favor policies-which have ices that were so crucial ctory in 1989-he also cial hairstyle and unruly cess of Menemismo is y the defeat of inflation, it has failed to deliver se of a "productive revothe alleged benefits of its the United States have been less than forthcoming...

...What is problematic here is that the kind of media coverage received by the Cabezas case and others like it forecloses the possibility of more profound discussions because stories are framed as one-dimensional news events without any structural implications...

...He is author of Salir a bailar: Discriminaci6n y racismo en la noche urbana (University of Buenos Aires, 1997...

...Jorge Elbaum is a researcher at Gino Germani Institute and teaches sociology at the University of Buenos Aires...

...Out of this emerged one of the most strategic forms of disciplinary knowledge of the modem state-criminology-which targeted not only criminals but social agitators as well...

...Yet beneath the optimism of Menemismo, there are other realities lurking...

...Argentina embarked on the project of modernity early on...

...He also teaches communications at the University of Buenos Aires...

...These practices were complemented by widespread censorship, black lists and other measures designed to ensure the regime's tight control over memory and the production of national historical narratives...

...Through a brutal repertoire of disappearances tor ture, intimidation and exile, the military dictatorship which ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 attempted to transform the mentalities and identities of its citizens...

...Global communication technologies, moreover, have also wrought important changes in Argentine culture...

...At the same time that a majority of Argentines have been economically impoverished, Argentina has become one of the countries with the highest percentage of cable-TV subscribers...

...The shroud of forgetting cast over the atrocities of state terrorism was favored not only by the military, but also by the business elites who had supported the dictatorship and who were the main beneficiaries of the economic liberalization that the regime had implemented-an NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 36REPORT ON ARGENTINA unholy alliance indeed...

...At the same time, corruption is growing like an oil spill--each day implicating more and more people tied to the business sector and to the state...

...The predictable clash between material poverty and symbolic "wealth" reveals the current hypersaturation of imported mass culture as well as the neglect of local cultural production...

...This point is crucial social contract-and its promise of social mobility-is to understanding the transition...

...It is also what best most evident in the crisis of the school system and in the explains the fundamental contradiction within contem- recurrent protests against cuts in public education...

...Like Per6n, Carlos Menem, who is from La Rioja, one of Argentina's poorest provinces, came to power in 1989 with the support of urban and rural workers, crafting a look for himself reminiscent of Facundo Quiroga, the caudillo from the provinces vilified in the writings of Sarmiento...

...The Menem government, however, had no trouble shedding its nationalistic rhetoric when it was required to comply with the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and become an unconditional ally of the United States...

...Translated from the Spanish by NACLA...

...Through a horrific dirty war, Videla set out to consolidate the hegemony of this military-economic alliance once and for all...

...The cultural dislocation and embittered resignation that plagues much of Argentine society is the result of the dismantling of the social contract and the absence of real political debates...

...They also had to reconstitute Anibal Ford is a writer and researcher at the Gino Germani Institute...

...37 VOL XXXI, NO 6 MAY/JUNE 1998REPORT ON ARGENTINA Menem's frivolous mass-media strategies, moreover, have trivialized political culture by transforming politics into a televisual spectacle...

...The stabilization of the economy opened the way for a credit-driven consumer frenzy underwritten by the logic of comfortable monthly installments...

...In this context, both the official story and the discourses of the Alfonsin governM enemismo emerged using populist and nation- alist rhetoric that had a strong messianic undercurrent...

...This case generated a feeling of widespread public insecurity and at least momentarily revealed the corruption within the state apparatus...

...The link between state-sponsored education and the rise of the mass media was crucial in the development of Argentine modernity...

...For the rest of the country, it has foregrounded the urgent need to elaborate possible futures in which new projects for social justice may be born...

...VoL XXXI, No 6MAY/JUNE 1998 35 VOL XXXI, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1998 35REPORT ON ARGENTINA During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Argentina was transformed by a massive influx of European immigrants...

...Juan Carlos Onganfa in 1966 and Videla in 1976...

...Reckless privatizations, the flexibilization of labor markets, growing unemployment, the exclusionary modernization of various sectors of the economy, the systematic destruction of the public university and the reckless condemnation of the entire national education system, are the structural pillars of a social project that was first ment, wmicn claimed Above: A sketch of Juan "Facundo" set m moon i y Jose to be acting within the "limits of the Quiroga, a prominent nineteenth cen- Martinez de Hoz, Finance Minister possible," implicitly accepted that tury caudillo from the interior...

...In the nineteenth century, the state implemented one of the first literacy laws in the world, guaranteeing free and compulsory education for all residents of the country regardless of their citizenship status...

...their shattered political culture, recuperate their history prior to 1976, and reconfigure their relationship to a world that had undergone deep transformations during the years of the military regime...

...When the generals stepped down in 1983, Argentines had to come to terms with the legacies of the dictatorship and the Malvinas War debacle...

...The racism of ruling elites against people from the interior intensified and took on increasingly political dimensions, as hundreds of thousands of migrants arrived in the capital in search of industrial jobs beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the period of classic Peronism (1946-1955...

...The assassination of photographer Jos6 Luis Cabezas, who was investigating government corruption, illustrates the way in which the media transforms events into important but depoliticized public issues...

...nomic policies of Britain and the United States...

...Martinez de Hoz has been fully conversible, and thus somehow linked to solidated...

...These political projects, and their 1930s, underlying visions of the nation, ruling elites were systematically attacked by ultranationalist elites and the )le from the land-owning oligarchy...

...The dismantling of the an evolutionary notion of progress...

...Between 1870 and 1930, over six million Europeans entered the country, dramatically transforming the capital city of Buenos Aires as well as Argentina's national identity...

...Disillusionment and skepticism, or simply an embittered resignation, populate the minds of Argentines, as accusations against public officials are diluted in an inefficient and corrupt judicial system...

...The list of suspects in Cabezas' murder range from Buenos Aires police officers to businessmen and politicians with close ties to Menem...

...The docui Lost Republic is one expressions of this his tive, presenting both ments for social chang nized state terroris products of institutions tence and political i The historical dichoto barbarism and civilization reappeared, now refracted through the distortions of the transition...

...The rapid growth of the labor movement, spurred by recently arrived immigrants with strong anarcho-syndicalist influences, led to an average of over 100 strikes per year by the turn of the century...

...Public outrage over corruption is also defused through everyday humor and satire and popular TV talk shows, whose growing success feeds off the vacuum produced by the absence of real political debates...

...The political implications of this have been noted in the public references to the importance of the "appliance vote" in the successive electoral victories of Menemismo...

...It is difficult to describe contemporary Argentine culture without mentioning at least some of the central elements of the country's cultural history...

...search of ind Sarmiento perceived the Argentine national project as a struggle between civilization and barbarism, making Buenos Aires the symbolic embodiment of a modern civilized nation on the frontier...

...This process mirrored the emergence of the global "info-tainment" industry, the logical result of the concentration of the mass media in the hands of a few powerful conglomerates...

...Ruling elites responded to this social unrest with violent repression and restrictive legislation...

...Jorge Videla (1976-1980), who perceived social unrest as the work of people who were "genetically predisposed" to subversion and thus a threat to national security...

...While hundreds of bodies were being exhumed from the clandestine graves of the dictatorship, President Ratil Alfonsin promoted a conciliatory discourse based on the "theory of the two demons," which explained Argentina's recent past as the result the conflict between two camps of warring state on one side and' on the other...

...Teachers have also taken part in demonstrations Menemismo's globalized and "efficiency-oriented" cul- around other issues, playing a role that in earlier times tural project...