Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
rural productivity. Meatpacking continued to expand in the 1920s with
a new influx of investment from the United States. The arrival of the
automobile industry added to the vigor of Argentina's light industries,
as evidenced by the growth of the shoe and textile Alpargatas plant
of the Fraser family, a third-generation Scots-Argentine clan, and the
expansion of the S.I.A.M. company owned by Torcuato Di Tella, an
immigrant from Italy.
By 1930, Argentina had made progress toward alleviating its depen-
dency on foreign sources of energy. The creation of the state-owned
oil enterprise Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (Federal Petroleum
Deposits), or YPF, helped the country cut its per capita use of for-
eign coal by supplying more than half of its petroleum requirement.
Argentina's economic growth in the 1920s even outstripped that of
many “industrial nations”: Its annual growth rate for gross domestic
product was 6.7 percent. At the end of the 1920s, Argentines compared
themselves favorably to France in terms of material progress.
Economic nationalism meant exercising the political will to absorb
and internalize the benefits of economic growth by restricting the influ-
ence of foreign interests. In Argentina, it specifically referred to the
state's steady accretion of power to regulate foreign-owned economic
assets such as railways, meatpacking plants, and petroleum companies.
All of the foreign enterprises gaining entrée to Argentina would eventu-
ally suffer state interference. Economic nationalism also served as the
foundation for the state-run industries for which Juan Perón's presi-
dency became known in the 1940s. In Argentina, economic nationalism
originated among the landed oligarchy; the Generation of Eighty that
had given foreign investors great liberties, after World War I, began to
restrict their activities.
The railways serve as a good example. Back in the 1880s and 1890s
the landed oligarchy had wanted to build railways to increase the value of
their rural properties. This same oligarchy had even supported subsidiz-
ing British railroad companies through government borrowing. As soon
as the companies were established, however,
estancieros
began to resent
paying high freight rates and pressured their friends in government to
prevent the British managers from raising prices. Lower railway profits
inhibited the companies from investing in sufficient capacity. During har-
vest time, when the
estancieros
needed to deliver their perishable crops to
the port, the railways never had enough rail cars. Bags of wheat would be
stacked up along the rail lines, slowly rotting in the sun.
To make matters worse, in the eyes of the landowners, the foreign
companies never were able to control their workers. Laborers in the
