Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
royalty, which attempted both to stimulate and tax that growth. The
colonials responded with frontier settlement and additional develop-
ment of internal communications in order to push that growth to new
heights.
The revolution and civil wars certainly disrupted economic exchanges
throughout the former viceroyalty. Nonetheless, landowners, mer-
chants, and peons exploited the new markets in northern Europe in a
common effort to spread the cattle industry across the Pampean hunt-
ing grounds of the native peoples. Eventually, the secondary stimulus
of Atlantic trade reached Santa Fe, Córdoba, and Mendoza, if not into
the old colonial northwest. Toward the end of the 19th century, when
European technology and capital became available, Argentine laborers
and landowners responded yet again to market opportunities. They
imported the necessary gringo ingenuity and enticed foreigners to build
modern railways, port works, and urban infrastructures. Prosperity
soared to new levels.
No matter what their views on populism, few people can ignore the
remarkable success that Argentines garnered in the period of indus-
trialization. The development of manufacturing preceded government
assistance. Then in the 1930s through the 1950s, industrial production
consistently outstripped all other sectors in its growing contributions
to GDP. It is true that the turmoil of de-Peronization and the Dirty War
inhibited even greater achievements, but politicians and the military
share the blame for these failures, for they have consistently shown
themselves incapable of efficiently carrying out either populist poli-
cies or neoliberal ones. Industrialists and workers together (though in
uneasy alliance) built the infrastructure of a modern consumer society
in defiance of politically inspired debts and inflation. Today's farmers
and ranchers again lead the nation in productivity, despite high taxes.
Time and again in the past, ordinary Argentine citizens have worked
their way through national crises brought on by others. They have
responded to every obstacle with humor and renewed energies in order
to take the material welfare of the nation to unexpected levels—all the
while burdened by the social discrimination and political impunity of
a predatory past. How do they do it? Perhaps this is the real Argentine
Riddle.
