Thursday, February 27, 2014

POL/GralInt-Cry for Me, Argentina

The following information is used for educational purposes only.



The Opinion Pages| Op-Ed Columnist

Cry for Me, Argentina



FEB. 27, 2014


Roger Cohen



USHUAIA, Argentina — A bon mot doing the rounds in post-commodities-boom South America is that Brazil is in the process of becoming Argentina, and Argentina is in the process of becoming Venezuela, and Venezuela is in the process of becoming Zimbabwe. That is a little harsh on Brazil and Venezuela.

Argentina, however, is a perverse case of its own. It is a nation still drugged by that quixotic political concoction called Peronism; engaged in all-out war on reliable economic data; tinkering with its multilevel exchange rate; shut out from global capital markets; trampling on property rights when it wishes; obsessed with a lost little war in the Falklands (Malvinas) more than three decades ago; and persuaded that the cause of all this failure lies with speculative powers seeking to force a proud nation — in the words of its leader — “to eat soup again, but this time with a fork.”

A century ago, Argentina was richer than Sweden, France, Austria and Italy. It was far richer than Japan. It held poor Brazil in contempt. Vast and empty, with the world’s richest top soil in the Pampas, it seemed to the European immigrants who flooded here to have all the potential of the United States (per capita income is now a third or less of the United States level). They did not know that a colonel called Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Eva (“Evita”) would shape an ethos of singular delusional power.

“Argentina is a unique case of a country that has completed the transition to underdevelopment,” said Javier Corrales, a political scientist at Amherst College.

In psychological terms — and Buenos Aires is packed with folks on couches pouring out their anguish to psychotherapists — Argentina is the child among nations that never grew up. Responsibility was not its thing. Why should it be? There was so much to be plundered, such riches in grain and livestock, that solid institutions and the rule of law — let alone a functioning tax system — seemed a waste of time.

Immigrants camped here with foreign passports rather than go through the nation-forming absorption that characterize Brazil or the United States. Argentina was far away at the bottom of the world, a beckoning fertile land mass distant enough from power centers to live its own peripheral fantasies or drown its sorrow in what is probably the world’s saddest (and most haunting) dance. Then, to give expression to its uniqueness, Argentina invented its own political philosophy: a strange mishmash of nationalism, romanticism, fascism, socialism, backwardness, progressiveness, militarism, eroticism, fantasy, musical, mournfulness, irresponsibility and repression. The name it gave all this was Peronism. It has proved impossible to shake.

Perón, who discovered the political uplift a military officer could derive from forging links with the have-nots of Latin America and distributing cash (a lesson absorbed by Hugo Chávez), was deposed in the first of four postwar coups. The Argentina I covered in the 1980s was just emerging from the trauma of military rule. If I have a single emblematic image of the continent then it is of the uncontrollable sobbing of Argentine women clutching the photographs of beloved children who had been taken from them for “brief questioning” only to vanish. The region’s military juntas turned “disappear” into a transitive verb. It is what they did to deemed enemies — 30,000 of them in Argentina.


Since 1983, Argentina has ceased its military-civilian whiplash, tried some of the perpetrators of human rights crimes and been governed democratically. But for most of that time it has been run by Peronists, most recently Néstor Kirchner and his widow, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (shades of Perón’s widow Isabel), who have rediscovered redistribution after a Peronist flurry in the 1990s with neoliberalism. Economic whiplash is alive and well. So are reckless spending in good times and lawless measures in bad. So, too, are mawkish evocations of Perón and Evita and Isabel: On earth as it is in the heavens.

Cry for me, my name is Argentina and I am too rich for my own good.

Twenty-five years ago I left a country of hyperinflation (5,000 percent in 1989), capital flight, currency instability, heavy-handed state interventionism, dwindling reserves, uncompetitive industry, heavy reliance on commodity exports, reawakening Peronist fantasies and bottom-of-the-world complexes. Today inflation is high rather than hyper. Otherwise, not a whole lot has changed.

Coming ashore at Ushuaia on Argentina’s southern tip, the first thing I saw was a sign saying that the “Malvinas” islands were under illegal occupation by the United Kingdom since 1833. The second was a signpost saying Ireland was 13,199 kilometers away (no mention of Britain). The third was a packet of cookies “made in Ushuaia, the end of the world.” The fourth was a pocket calculator used by a shopkeeper to figure out dollar-peso rates.

Hope is hard to banish from the human heart, but it has to be said that Argentina does its best to do so.



Source: www.nytimes.com








Durísima nota sobre la Argentina y el peronismo en The New York Times



Titulada "Llora por mí, Argentina", el artículo de opinión repasa cómo nuestro país pasó de ser más próspero que Suecia y Francia, hace un siglo, al contexto de hoy; "Está camino a convertirse en Venezuela"

Una nota de opinión del veterano periodista Roger Cohen publicada hoy en el diario estadounidense The New York Times repasa cómo la Argentina pasó de ser un país más próspero que Suecia y Francia, hace un siglo, al contexto de hoy. El artículo carga contra el peronismo y augura que el país "en proceso de convertirse" en Venezuela.

"Brasil está en proceso de ser la Argentina, la Argentina está en proceso de transformarse en Venezuela y Venezuela, en Zimbawe. Es duro para Brasil y Venezuela, pero la Argentina, en cambio, es un caso perverso en sí mismo", arranca el texto, titulado "Llora por mí, Argentina".

Cohen relata la "guerra sin cuartel" con las estadísticas, el "toqueteo" del tipo de cambio, la nula participación en los mercados de capitales del mundo, la "obsesión" por una "pequeña guerra perdida" en Malvinas hace tres décadas y el convencimiento de que la causa de todos los fracasos es "el poder especulativo".

La nota da cuenta de cómo la Argentina era -hace un siglo- más rica que Suecia, Francia, Austria, Italia, Japón. "Vasta y vacía, con las tierras más fértiles del mundo en la pampa, los inmigrantes europeos creían que el país tenía la potencia de Estados Unidos. (Hoy, el ingreso per capita es un tercio o menos que en Estados Unidos). No sabían que un coronel llamado Juan Domingo Perón y su mujer Eva ("Evita") darían forma a un ethos de poder singular".

Cohen cita a un politólogo del Amhert Collegue, Javier Corrales, quien explica que la Argentina "es un caso único de un país que completó la transición al subsedesarrollo".

El periodista, quien escribió la nota desde Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, plantea que -en términos psicológicos- la Argentina es "el niño entre las naciones que nunca crecieron".

"La responsabilidad no fue lo suyo. ¿Por qué habría de serlo? Había tanto para saquear, tanta riqueza en granos y ganado, que instituciones sólidas y leyes -sin mencionar un sistema de impuestos que funcione- parecían una pérdida de tiempo", escribe.

Cohen repasa también el surgimiento del peronismo, una "filosofía política propia, mezcla extraña de nacionalismo, romanticismo, fascismo, socialismo, pasado, futuro, militarismo, erotismo, fantasía, lloriqueo, irresponsabilidad y represión".

La nota menciona a Perón, los desaparecidos, los 80, el neoliberalismo de los 90. Compara la situación de de 1989 con la situación actual. Menciona la inestabilidad cambiaria, el intervencionismo del Estado, las reservas en picada, la industria no competitiva y la dependencia de las commodities. "La inflación, hoy, es alta pero no hiper. Salvo eso, lo demás prácticamente no ha cambiado", lanza.



Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar




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