Week 7 - Argentina

Week 7 - Argentina
PART 1. Economic Crisis, Clientelism, and the Legacies of Juan and Eva Perón; Tango
Associated Readings

1. Peter Winn, “Perón! Perón!” pp. 133-160 (2006)
2. Eduardo Archetti, “Masculinity, Primitivism, and Power: Gaucho, Tango, and the Shaping of Argentine National Identity" from Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence, pp. 200-216 (2007)

Associated Handout

1. Handout 7 - Argentina and Perón

Associated Films

1. “Memoria del Saqueo” (2004, 113 minutes; Source: YouTube, see below) 

I. Introducing Argentina (Draws from World Scholar/Latin America & the Caribbean, 2011)
Argentina, the second-largest country in South America, shares borders with Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Chile. Have a look at the map below to appreciate Argentina's hugeness:

Predominantly temperate in climate, the country varies in terrain from highlands in the north, to the tropical forest in the northeast, fertile pampas or plains throughout the central portion, the isolated Patagonia region to the south, and the Andes Mountains to the west.
Argentina's capital is Buenos Aires.  With a population of around 13 million, Buenos Aires is South America's third largest city (after Brazil's São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro).  It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent. Strongly influenced by European culture, Buenos Aires is sometimes referred to as the "Paris of South America."  Architecturally, it is an extraordinary place, with a dizzying array of styles and traditions.  Here are a handful of photos I took a couple years back:

Buenos Aires' expansive Avenida 9 de julio crossing the Washington Monument-like Obelisk

Apartment Buildings

 

The city's Department of Water and Power (Not bad, right?)

Buenos Aires is the site of the Teatro Colón, an internationally rated opera house, and several symphony orchestras. The city has numerous museums related to history, fine arts, modern arts, decorative arts, popular arts, sacred art, arts and crafts, theatre and popular music. The city is home to hundreds of bookstores, public libraries and cultural associations (it is sometimes called "the city of books"), as well as the largest concentration of active theaters in Latin America.  Truly, there are bookstores, some tiny and some large like the photos below, everywhere.

It has a world-famous zoo and Botanical Garden, a large number of landscaped parks and squares, as well as churches and places of worship of many denominations.  Buenos Aires is also known for its European-style cafes, long and narrow and serving up some of the best café and sweets imaginable:

A random factoid:  Buenos Aires has more practicing psychoanalysts than any other country in Latin America.  Appropriately enough, most of them work in a neighborhood called "Villa Freud."

Buenos Aires is also, as you might know, internationally known for its vibrant tango scene.  We'll learn a lot about tango -- its history, its significance for national identity, and the forms of masculinity and femininity it reflects -- in this week's reading by Eduardo Archetti.  Here's a short clip of a tango band playing on the streets of one of B.A.'s oldest colonial neighborhoods, San Telmo:

Spanish settlement of Argentina began in the 1530s, and colonizing projects continued despite sharp Indian resistance. The region supplied agricultural products and livestock to silver mining communities in Bolivia. Beginning in the 1750s, Buenos Aires became a major port and the home of an elite class of merchants. In 1810, a junta claimed control of Buenos Aires, and in 1816 the independence of Argentina proper was achieved, ending Spanish control over the area.

In the late nineteenth century (1800s), thriving agriculture, foreign investment, and continued European immigration helped make Argentina an economic powerhouse. However, economic problems and political struggles followed in the twentieth century, with military regimes alternating with democratically elected civilian governments through the 1980s.  In 1982, Argentina suffered a humiliating military defeat by Great Britain in the Falkland Islands War.

Since the colonial period, Argentina's political leaders have often been what are referred to as caudillos, that is, charismatic, populist leaders of authoritarian regimes.  Make a mental note of this term, as we will revisit it when we arrive to Juan Perón.

From 1976 to 1983, Argentina was controlled by a brutal military junta.  Known as the "Dirty War," this time period is remembered by today's Argentines with horror for state-sponsored violence and the "disappearing" of more than 9,000 citizens.  Please now watch the following half-hour-long BBC documentary about the Dirty War.


Democratic civilian rule returned to Argentina in 1983, but its economic woes continued. 

II. Juan and Eva Perón

The following section closely follows Handout 7 ("Argentina and Perón," available on Bb; please review this handout as you move through the corresponding blog sections)
 
In this week's reading by Peter Winn, you will learn about the most important last name in 20th-century Argentinian history:  Perón (pronounced like "pear-own").  Juan Domingo Perón, elected to the presidency three times, first came to power in the mid-1940s.  A military man by training (he had been a colonel in the army), Perón was a populist who rejected identifying as liberal or conservative.


"Ni izquierda ni derecha" ("neither left nor right"), he famous declared in his '46 campaign, and indeed his brand of politics drew was inspired by both capitalist conservatism and pro-communist, worker-oriented communism.  Before his bid to the presidency, Perón had been head of the federal Department of Labor, where he had successfully defended the rights of workers.  This priority carried into his presidency, as he created strong unions, increased the minimum wage, and instituted an eight-hour workday as well as paid vacation time.  He became, in short, a hero and champion of the working class (colloquially referred to as "los descamisados," that is, "the shirtless").  He also had a deeply troubling fascination with Nazism and fascism, but this is a story for another occasion.

Matching and perhaps even eclipsing the massive popular appeal of Juan Perón was the love and devotion Argentina developed for Perón's wife, Maria Eva Duarte -- known more commonly in the affectionate diminuitive as "Evita", and immortalized in the Broadway musical of the same name, as well as the 1996 film with Madonna.   Indeed, Eva was crucial to her husband's popularity among workers and, for her successful fight for female suffrage, among women as well.  If you have some extra time and like musicals, consider watching the feature-length Madonna film - Hollywood trappings aside, it gives a good account of Eva's rise from a poor girl in the countryside to the influential woman in her country's history.  Please, in any case, watch the following 10-minute documentary:


Also have a look at this short clip I shot of Evita's tomb in Buenos Aires:



III. Peronism and Clientelism
Among Perón’s major legacies have been the party he created, the Partido Justicialista (Justice Party) and the political movement he founded, commonly known as Peronism, and of which he remains the central symbol to this day.  Since its creation in 1945, Peronist candidates have won eight out of ten presidential elections, and Perón himself remains the only Argentine to be elected president three times.  Argentina’s current president, Cristina Kirchner, is a Peronist to the core.  As a political ideology, Peronism is defined as an “authoritarian populism” rooted in the masses, emphasizing a strong centralized government and autonomy from foreign influences.

Here I'd like to introduce a new term -- "clientelism" -- used by political scientists to describe a particular kind of relationship between politicians and ordinary citizens (known as "patrons" and "clients," respectively).  Simply put, clientelism refers to an exchange between politicians and voters of material private goods for votes.

Some important characteristics of clientelism:

1. It is based in personal relationships that link patrons and clients together in a system in which jobs, favors, and protection are exchanged for labor, support, and loyalty.
2. It concentrates power in the hands of the individual politician, who decides personally how to distribute resources according to personal preferences.
3. Its relationships (between patron and client) are personalized, ongoing and reciprocal. 

One of Peronism's major legacies is that it relies heavily on clientelism at the grassroots.  That means that in cities like Buenos Aires, grassroots community leaders often spend a lot of their time distributing goods that their "patron" has provided them with and in exchange for which they must guarantee a strong vote the next time elections come around.  In Javier Auyero's reading about the 2001 riots in Buenos Aires, we'll see what this looks like on the ground.

Typically in political science, clientelism is presented in negative terms.  (No one says, "I'm a clientelist and proud of it!")  The primary critiques of clientelism are:

1. It is not (genuinely) democratic.
   It often involves the exploitation of the poor.
   It discourages unbiased provision of public goods.
2. It is often associated with political monopolies.
3. It stifles efficiency of the market.

One problem with much of the scholarship on clientelism in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America is that it typically treats this form of political practice as a "traditional" form of corruption--a vestige from the pre-democratic past when Latin Americans hadn't yet learned how to organize society in a "modern" democratic manner.  So, what's wrong with this understanding of clientelism?  As you read Javier Auyero's texts on the 2001 riots in Buenos Aires, think carefully about the following he makes:

Clientelism is not just the persistence of traditional hierarchical structures, but also a response to their breakdown.

PART 2. Collective Violence
Associated Readings

1. Peter Calvert, “Argentina: Decline and revival,” from Latin America, Its Problems and Its Promise, pp. 524-537 (2011)
2. Javier Auyero, Introduction, Chapter 1, and Conclusions from Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina: The Gray Zone of State Power, pp. 1-54 and 151-158

I. Argentina Economic Crisis of 2001 (selections drawn from http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/sap/Argentina_crisis.php)
In order to fully understand the events described in this week's ethnographic case study by sociologist Javier Auyero, you must first grasp the backdrop for Argentina's 2001 economic crisis.  During the 1990's Argentina was heralded as a successful developing its economy:  Foreign investors poured billions of dollars into the country, inflation rates were lower than those in the U.S. at the same time, and the economy was one of fastest-growing economies in Latin America.  Argentina was the darling of international financial lending, strictly adhering to the IMF advice.

But in 2001 the Argentine economy reached its breaking point. The government announced that its foreign debt could not be paid back and billions of dollars in government spending would be cut. This translated to government employees receiving a salary reduction of 13% (Pastor and Wise 2001).  While at the same time unemployment skyrocketed to nearly 20% (Stiglitz 2002).  In one year Buenos Aires fell from being the most expensive city in Latin America to the cheapest city (Latin Trade 2003).
 
How did an A-plus student fail?
The exact cause of Argentina' economic melt down is contested.  Some argue that it was due to the poor policy advice from the IMF (Stiglitz 2002) and others, the IMF among them, blame the irresponsibility and corruption of the Argentine government (Krueger 2002).  Central to all the arguments, however, is the failure Argentina's fixed exchange rate policy.
 
During the 1980s and early 1990's, on the advice from the IMF, the government opted to fix the Argentine peso's exchange rate to the U.S. dollar (1 dollar = 1 peso). The fixed exchange rate was intended to be a stabilizing force for the economy after a period of hyperinflation (up to 200%).  This policy essentially made the peso and dollar interchangeable.  Both currencies circulated through the economy, ATMs dispensed dollars and pesos and bank loans could be made in either currency.
 
The problem with Argentine fixed exchange rate was it caused the peso to increase in value at the same rate as the dollar during the economic boom of the 1990's.  A rising currency value caused Argentina's exports to become more expensive relative to the country's imports.  Since Argentina's largest trading partners are Brazil and the European Union, whose currencies were valued much lower than the peso, the Argentine export market was stalled limiting the growth of the economy.

Who was affected?
Argentina's economic crisis affected every level of Argentine society and created an air of uncertainty for the future of Argentina.  To quell the crisis the IMF recommended that the government dramatically cut spending.  These cuts led to reduced public-sector wages and pensions and a delay in pension benefits for over 1.4 million retirees and their families (Lewis 2002).  In addition, as the unemployment rate grew, more people sought unemployment insurance and other social services, the very services being cut.  Many people were forced to find jobs in the informal sector that paid very little and offered almost no security for the future (see Jeter 2003).

Argentine workers began to withdraw their savings in pesos from banks in exchange for U.S. dollars for fear that rising prices would leave their savings worthless.  To curb this cash flight the Argentine government limited cash withdraws to $250 per month and freezing bank assets all together for short periods (Krauss 2001).  Additionally, for those who took out loans in dollars were faced with repayments that nearly doubled due to the rising interest rates (Lewis 2002).  This left people squeezed between rising prices, job uncertainty and limited access to money.
 
Stunned by their nation's economic unraveling Argentines took to the streets in Buenos Aires in a protest that turned violent.  The protest was described as a spontaneous demonstration of citizens outraged by the lack of leadership their government exhibited (Evans 2003).  The magnitude of the protests and the level of public dissatisfaction with the government's handling of the economy lead to the resignation of the President of Argentina, Fernando de la Rua and the nation's Economic Minister, Domingo Cavallo.  It was these protests and riots that form the focus of Javier Auyero's study on the "gray zone of politics."

If you haven't yet viewed the film, "Memoria del Saqueo" (which tells the story of the 2001 crisis), please view it now.

Finally, to get an inspiring update on how porteños (residents of Buenos Aires) have been fairing in the aftermath of the economic crisis, watch at least the first 10-15 minutes of "Argentina: Turning Around" ("videos" tab on Bb or http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/media_that_matters_8_argentina_turning_around/).