The Cost of Life in Argentina
STUART, PETER C.
HIGHEST IN THE HEMISPHERE The Cost of Life in Argentina by Peter C. Stuart BUENOS AIRES The most familiar advertisement here—covering more billboards, walls and construction-site fences than the...
...They and their friends talk of emigrating, either to another part of South America or to North America...
...Twenty Argentine journalists vanished last year...
...For a sizeable segment of the population, overtime and moonlighting have become a means of financial survival...
...That may be an unfortunate mistake...
...There is no discernible "Free Argentina" movement in North America comparable to the plethora of ad hoc groups protesting conditions in Chile...
...Where a person stands on Argentina is hardly a touchstone for American liberals...
...But terrorist incidents have now dwindled...
...The headquarters of the judicial system, an overcrowded old warren known as the Tribunates whose heavy woodwork and frosted windows are reminiscent of an American county courthouse, bustles with lawyers and law clerks...
...Even the United States government decided last year that it could no longer ignore conditions in Argentina...
...After screening several apparently chosen at random, he departs with a curt: "Disculpen la molestia" (Sorry to bother you...
...She and her fiance make up the difference by working overtime nearly every evening and weekend...
...Another armed soldier steps suddenly out of the darkness to challenge a young mother strolling with her daughter and two relatives to one of the popular carrilo restaurants near the Buenos Aires domestic airport...
...The Argentine Army, liberator of Chile and Peru from Spanish colonialism under Jose de San Martin, now busies itself keeping its own countrymen in line as well...
...La Pivnsa, was closed by the first Peronist government and harrassed under the second), the news that had been their staple of late—political violence—Is forbidden except for official reports...
...One economist with a British-owned firm gives even odds on the outcome...
...The number of persons who have mysteriously vanished in the past five years is estimated at anywhere from 5,000-20,000?,500-5,000 of them since the military rulers took charge in 1976...
...Government officials admit to holding 3,472 under a state-of-siege directive allowing persons to be detained indefinitely without being charged or having their families notified...
...Having already eclipsed Chile in inflation leadership (Chile's rate has dropped halted the military aid altogether...
...Sample: a joint communique between President Vide-la and the President of Gabon, with photo...
...HIGHEST IN THE HEMISPHERE The Cost of Life in Argentina by Peter C. Stuart BUENOS AIRES The most familiar advertisement here—covering more billboards, walls and construction-site fences than the omnipresent placards for lurid films and tango festivals—Is a government propaganda poster...
...and the money risked in savings deposits, where it may—or may not—keep pace with inflation and devaluation...
...To Argentines struggling to catch up to the spiraling cost of living with shrinking pesos and fixed wages, these can be cruel statistics...
...The junta itself claims 85 per cent of known subversives have been killed or imprisoned...
...Then the Depression collapsed the world market for its beef and grain, and the mismanagement of President Juan D. Peron from 1946-55 left a legacy the economy is still trying to recover from...
...During the final three months of Pe-ronist rule, political killings by Leftist guerrillas (chiefly the Montoneros) and Rightist commandos (notably the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) occurred at the grisly rate of better than two per day...
...Economic problems are a comparatively new experience for Argentina...
...Argentina's once-admired press is reduced to censoring its news and leading cheers for the junta...
...The front pages of a recent Sunday edition of La Nation, for instance, was dominated (three of the seven articles) by accounts of the activities of various members of the junta...
...Amnesty International, comparing political prisoners as a proportion of population, ranks Argentina (one in 1,200) just below Uruguay (one in 600), and above both Cuba (one in 1,800) and Chile (one in 2,000...
...Nora, a dark-eyed young woman from a rural province who clerks in a Buenos Aires bank, is an example...
...But does it...
...Reaction to this enforced work pace is scarcely in the patriotic spirit of Unamonos sought by the junta...
...The government has just begun printing 1 million-peso notes...
...Other Argentines, tempted by those tantalizing bank interest rates, are giving up the workaday struggle for a game of high-stakes speculation...
...The 1,000-peso banknote, worth $100 as recently as 1975, today is worth barely $2...
...While its commander, General Jorge Rafael Videla, presides over the military government as president, his soldiers are active in the streets...
...But these are, alas, mostly just relics...
...In the less fashionable surroundings of the docks and railroad yards, workmen on their lunch breaks build fires and grill thick steaks, savored with long loaves of French bread and wine...
...Such interest rates betray the inflation rate here, for two consecutive Peter C. Stuart, a new contributor to these pages, is a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor...
...This failure is etched in the working-class areas of the capital, where the airy green plazas of downtown give way to forlorn factory neighborhoods much like the West Side of Detroit or South Side of Chicago...
...It took the largely symbolic step of halving its token amount of military aid, and then (after the junta spurned the remainder) gun discarding the last traces of the "reign of terror"—their bodyguards and high front walls...
...An opportunity to mend the society's division has been lost because of policies calculated to deepen them...
...and the breeding-ground of a distinguished line of reformist presidents whose influence extended continent-wide, among them Bartolome Mitre and Domingo Sarmiento, sometimes called "the Argentine Thomas Jefferson...
...Two years after the March 24 overthrow of the country's second elected Peronist government, however, it seems to be playing well in the United States...
...Even the Pcronists never resorted to such sweeping censorship...
...Most paychecks, though, are growing far more slowly than the rate of either currency devaluation or price rises...
...Let's unite" (Una-monos), the legend reads, "and we will not become a morsel for subversion...
...It has been closed since a month before the military takeover...
...Late last year, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in New York branded Argentina as the worst offender of human rights in the Americas...
...The domed Congreso building is as inspiring an architectural sight as the United States Capitol that it strongly resembles...
...The trappings of these enlightened political beginnings remain...
...Businessmen and wealthy homeowners in Buenos Aires have befrom 340 per cent in 1975 to "only" 65 per cent last year), Argentina is currently surpassing its Andean neighbor as a human-rights violator...
...But whatever the actual figure, it is evident that an enormous number of Argentines—chiefly workers, political activists and their relatives and acquaintances, with a smattering of labor leaders, leftists, intellectuals, and government officials—Are being removed from national life without so much as the minimal procedural courtesies...
...Most Argentines can relate their own personal horror stories of that black time...
...Streets bearing the proud names of Argentina's progressive forefathers are today patrolled by armadas of policemen with steel battle helmets and submachine guns, wedged four together in tiny black Ford Falcons, often clustered in two-car convoys...
...Despite its not attracting much attention, Argentina's human-rights record is vaulting the country into an elite position on this repressive continent...
...years the world's worst...
...In the case of the Congress, literally so...
...After all, Argentina is no Latin American charity case—no Haiti or Paraguay...
...Each must produce identification...
...At least five provincial newspapers have-been temporarily suspended for breaking the rules...
...At lunchtime in downtown Buenos Aires the confiterias, those unique salons specializing in dainty sandwiches and European pastries, are packed with tailored businessmen and elegant career women...
...The military government, too, is gambling—that its harsh policies can restore fiscal order without triggering social disorder...
...A recent State Department report on human-rights practices in 105 countries excludes this one, because it receives no American aid...
...This heavy-handed pressure leaves its mark on what millions of Argentines daily read, and don't read...
...Whether this message from the ruling military junta is winning the hearts and minds of the Argentine populace is anybody's guess...
...Here the government propaganda posters compete for wall space with an old, hauntingly familiar slogan: "Peron Vive—Isabel Vive" (Peron lives—Isabel lives...
...Her fiance's roommate, a white-collar employe of a pharmaceutical company, has held down second jobs as a night-club waiter and travel agent...
...Although all the big national dailies are publishing again (one...
...Other civilian institutions also are taking on the look of facades...
...The philosopher-presidents survive as the names of major Buenos Aires thoroughfares...
...Thus in the nation with the fastest-climbing cost of living, take-home pay is actually 30 per cent lower than it was two years ago...
...The authoritarianism of the Argentine government might be understandable, if not excusable, if terrorism still posed a genuine security challenge...
...Justice, it would appear, grinds on as usual...
...She is seeking a writ of habeas corpus for her parents, who disappeared months ago, presumably for the "crime" of having a son suspected of being a terrorist...
...A visitor notices the cost only gradually...
...As recently as 1930, when the present military rulers were schoolboys, the country ranked among the world's 10 richest nations...
...The court system has survived the darkest days of the guerrilla "reign of terror" during the recent regime of Perdn's widow, Isabel...
...It was the first Latin American country to win freedom from Spain (in 1810...
...It pictures Argentina in the shape of one of its renowned beefsteaks, served up on a plate between a knife and fork...
...Argentina displays to the outside world a glossy veneer of prosperity and, for a country where guerrilla "subversion" until recently rampaged virtually unchecked, relative stability...
...The generals are not bluffing...
...Citing recent wage strikes by railway and subway workers, he detects "unrest beneath the social fabric...
...But this has been imposed at a price, both economic and humanitarian, which may well rank as the highest in the hemisphere...
...Politically, Argentina held great promise as well...
...There is no systematic congressional concern...
...In one of the labyrinthine hallways a girl sobs in fear and frustration...
...A fourth piece of front-page news was illustrated coverage of the observance of "el Dia de la Policia Federal...
...In the middle-class suburb of Martinez, a Saturday night crowd at the small commuter railway station barely stirs as a patrol of carbine-carrying soldiers snakes its way purposefully into the baggage room...
...In the front windows the interest rates are posted on signs whose numbers can be changed daily, and the rates are eye-popping: 144 per cent per year and upward paid on deposits left 30 days...
...Both young men complain bitterly that they cannot afford a car, a meal at a restaurant with their girl friends, or more than a couple of bus trips a year to visit their parents...
...still more for longer-term deposits...
...Her annual salary of $3,500 is $500 less than her apartment rent for a year...
...It is the banks, outwardly projecting the same image of fiscal serenity as banks anywhere, that hint an underlying economic turmoil...
...Her tears are far from the only ones being shed in Argentina for the missing...
...The editor of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald was detained by authorities three days, and several foreign correspondents were held briefly...
...Political detainees have so flooded the nation's prison system that just 16.5 per cent of inmates are estimated to be common criminals...
...In 1977 it reached 170 per cent, yet that figure was positively torpid compared with the previous year, when inflation, spurting 53 per cent in one month alone, hit 347 per cent...
...It was the beef butcher to much of Western Europe and what one of the still-sizeable community of Anglo-Argentines here calls "an unofficial member of the British Empire...
...the first to install a popularly-elected president (Hi-polito Irigoyen in 1916...
...Mitre's descendant and namesake edits the respected newspaper La Nacion...
...A partial list of twice that many names, compiled in the United States, was delivered to Argentine authorities by Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance during his visit last November...
...In short, terrorism by guerrillas has merely been replaced with terrorism by the government...
...Workers are being asked, through austere wage controls, to subsidize greater investment by their employers...
...They halt at gunpoint a bus approaching the capital from the pampas, and send aboard a young enlisted man in khaki fatigues to check the identification documents and travel plans of passengers...
...Everything from family homes to small businesses is said to have been sold...
Vol. 61 • April 1978 • No. 9
