Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The British companies, after all, were businesses that served world
markets. International prices determined their own profits and what
they could afford to pay to the Argentine oligarchs. Any downturn
in international demand, as in 1885, 1892, 1902, 1908, and 1914,
undermined the capacity of British meatpackers to pay top prices for
beef steers.
Estancieros
blamed the foreigners for monopolistic pricing
and for remitting “excessive” profits abroad. They demanded govern-
ment action. The Radical government responded in the 1920s with
police confiscations of company account books and with congres-
sional investigations of British meatpacking operations. When some
British interests sold out to such American meatpackers as Swift and
Armour, Radical politicians doubled their oversight. Many Argentines
believed they could deal with the British firms. But the Americans had
the reputation of being especially aggressive and monopolistic in their
operations. “[W]hen North American capital arrives,” the conservative
newspaper
LaPrensa
editorialized in 1928, “it is said . . . that the coun-
try is being invaded” (Wright 1974, 132).
There was a limit to elite pressure on the foreign companies, how-
ever, for the latter remained indispensable links to foreign markets for
Argentine exports. As a spokesman for the Rural Society said, “We are
not even thinking of the possibility that the State, by construction,
purchase, or nationalization of freezing establishments should become
directly involved in the economic management of the firms, convinced
[as we are] of the superiority of individual initiative which, in the case,
has shown itself in the admirable development of the meatpacking
industry in this country. It could well be . . . that the destruction of
wealth brought by official management would exceed the harm which
the monopolistic combinations could cause to us rural producers”
(Smith 1969; 123). But not all modern production was exported. This is
the reason that the nationalists in the liberal age had made more prog-
ress in regulating and owning the Argentine petroleum industry.
Petroleum Nationalism
Argentina was the first country of Latin America to establish a state oil
company to compete against foreign capital. It represented the initial
phase of the nation's many subsequent forays into state-run enterprise.
Argentina's extraordinary economic growth had made it the lead-
ing consumer of petroleum fuels, all of them imported. The British-
Dutch Shell company and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey
(later renamed Exxon) established offices in Buenos Aires to import
