Resources for Reform

Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina

Elana Shever

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804783200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

While most people live far from the sites of oil production, oil politics involves us all. Resources for Reform explores how people's lives intersect with the increasingly globalized and concentrated oil industry through a close look at Argentina's experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform.

Examining Argentina's conversion from a state-controlled to a private oil market, Elana Shever reveals interconnections between large-scale transformations in society and small-scale shifts in everyday practice, intimate relationships, and identity. This engaging ethnography offers a window into the experiences of middle-class oil workers and their families, impoverished residents of shanty settlements bordering refineries, and affluent employees of transnational corporations as they struggle with rapid changes in the global economy, their country, and their lives. It reverberates far beyond the Argentine oil fields and offers a fresh approach to the critical study of neoliberalism, kinship, citizenship, and corporations.

I

Neoliberal Kinship

1

Affective Reform

DIEGO PARMADO WAS DEVASTATED.¹ He had been born and raised in a Patagonian oil town and followed his father and uncles into YPF Estatal at the age of fourteen, expecting to retire from the company as they had. He had worked in the Neuquén oilfields for almost thirty years when he was dismissed during the privatization of YPF Estatal. He was thus younger than fifty years old at the time he left the company and, like most state oil workers, was too young to receive a retirement pension but too old to be hired by another oil company or to retrain for another career. He was overwhelmed because leaving YPF represented more than the loss of a job. In the early 1990s when the company was being restructured, Diego was one of fifty-one thousand workers who called themselves YPFianos after the state entity for which they labored. This self-designation begins to illustrate how attached the workers were to the state oil company. Not only Diego’s work life, but also his sense of himself and his family life revolved around YPF.

As the state oil company was converted into a privately owned corporation, Diego and the workers in his division were dismissed from their jobs. They were not, however, entirely pushed out of the oil industry. They were told to re-form their production units into worker-owned microenterprises that would offer subcontracting services to the newly formed private company, YPF SA. The YPFianos’ change from public servants to independent business owners occurred so rapidly, Diego explained, that “you went to sleep at night with a baby bottle and the next day you got up with a tie and briefcase.” With his Kafkaesque vision of metamorphosis, Diego captured an understanding, shared by his fellow YPFianos, that the formal conversion of state workers into small businessmen happened overnight. However, he later told me how their substantive transformation was a far more arduous and extended process. Bodies toughened by years of labor in the harsh Patagonian oilfields did not easily fit into business suits meant for deskwork, yet Diego learned to wear a businessman’s clothing with poise.

The vast majority of state oil workers across Argentina lost their jobs during the privatization process, and many of these men, and a few women, became worker–owners in subcontracting microenterprises like Diego did. These subcontracting companies were known as emprendimientos, a word that could be rendered in English as “startups” if their owners were much younger, wealthier, and more formally educated.² The YPF emprendimientos were special oil service microenterprises collectively owned, managed, and staffed by former state workers. While many YPFianos joined these emprendimientos in the early 1990s, only a small percentage of them remained employed in the oil industry a decade later. The second half of this chapter examines how the remarkable ones who managed to stay in the industry were able to remake themselves into business owners and maintain their microenterprises for a dozen or more years against seemingly impossible odds. I was surprised to find that kinship was the key to comprehending their metamorphosis.

The conversion of YPF Estatal into a privately owned transnational oil corporation, first called YPF SA and later restructured as YPF-Repsol, was one of the most prominent pieces of the sweeping state and economic restructuring carried out by the Menem administration in the decade between 1989 and 1999.³ YPF’s privatization thus belongs to the ideas and actions that became “married” to form the global neoliberal “family” discussed in the Introduction. The midwives of this process stressed that the privatization of state enterprises and services was the panacea for multiple ills, including state debt, bureaucratic corruption, market inefficiency, and the failures of state development and welfare. President Menem in particular promised that privatizing state companies and services would allow Argentines to finally “join the First World,” as they had been striving to do since the early twentieth century.⁴

The architects of Argentina’s privatizations assumed that the legal and administrative changes that were reorganizing the state and the national economy would inevitably lead to modifications in people’s dispositions and relationships. In particular, the privatization of state companies such as YPF was supposed to remake public servants into “entrepreneurs,” the quintessential neoliberal actors.⁵ That is, privatization was supposed to turn people who work for others into people who work for themselves, people who take orders into people who take risks, people who depend on the state into people who depend on themselves. This represents a significant change from the seventy years during which oil workers were supposed to be quintessential national actors, and thus public servants rather than entrepreneurs. The microenterprises were intended as a short-term tool to ease this transformation for the YPFianos, but there was no long-term plan for them. They were expected to become entrepreneurs on their own or to quietly disappear as they were replaced by young people with college degrees, computer skills, and an intuition for business. But the YPFianos did not quietly disappear.

Argentina’s privatization process would not only alter how commodities and services are produced, distributed, and consumed, but would also transform the people who produce, distribute, and consume these products. However, it is wrong to assume that state projects or their representatives could determine these changes in subjectivity. This chapter elaborates my assertion that neoliberalismo is not a set of principles, a series of policies, or an ideology that is producing a new type of person: the autonomous, competitive, and calculative entrepreneur. Instead, neoliberalismo is a family of both novel and existing concepts, techniques, and discourses that is shaping personhood in unexpected ways. One of the unanticipated ways that the privatization of the Argentine oil industry has reshaped the YPFianos is by strengthening their longstanding kin relationships rather than replacing them with the short-term contractual agreements that neoliberal policies mandate.

The relationship between changes in state and economic institutions, on the one hand, and the transformation of social life and personhood, on the other hand, is never straightforward. There is no direct or predictable effect of the former upon the latter because, among other reasons, these processes cannot be untangled. As legal anthropologists have long pointed out, the law does not stand above society but is itself a social institution tightly imbricated with other aspects of social life. Chapter 2 examines how the legal and administrative aspects of the privatization of the Argentine oil industry intertwined with other processes of social transformation. This chapter focuses first on the development of a particular kind of person, family, and company that the national oil industry embodied and then on the intertwined reconfiguration of personhood, kinship, and labor that the privatization process entailed. What were the subjectivities, kinship formations, and social relationships that the privatization was intended to dismantle? How was the process of privatizing YPF and remaking YPFianos enacted on the ground? Why did it fail to generate the economic successes and autonomous individuals that it promised? What changes in personhood and social relations did the process of privatizing YPF produce? Conversely, what aspects of personhood and social life did not change despite the dramatic restructuring of the state and the oil industry?

Analyzing the interwoven lines of continuity and change between the state-led and privatized oil industry requires delving into the social history of petroleum production in Argentina. In the first part of this chapter, I chart the emergence of notions of YPF kinship including filial discourse and attendant practices of familial care in the oil towns in order to show, in the second part of the chapter, how YPFianos redeployed them during the privatization. Before I begin to tell the story of the YPFianos, however, I situate my analysis of it within scholarly debates about kinship and capitalism.

The Productive Power of Kinship Sentiments

Anthropologists long have criticized the assumption that kinship is a natural formation determined by seed, sperm, blood, or genes and have illustrated the varied grounds for generating kinship, from foods (Carsten 1997) to photographs (Bouquet 2001). This line of scholarship raises the possibility that kin relationships can be created through a substance as seemingly disconnected from biological reproduction, or the human body at all, as petroleum. This chapter joins contemporary kinship studies not only in demonstrating that countless materials are used to form kin relations, but also in showing that these relationships are based on intergenerational hierarchy and gendered discipline as much as on parental affection and sibling solidarity. Kinship sentiments and relationships are not a refuge from the world outside the home but are thoroughly part of it.⁶ With the reinvigoration of the anthropological tradition of kinship studies, a burgeoning scholarship now focuses specifically on how science, technology, and capitalism have been deployed to reconfigure kin relations, familial reproduction, and the very concept of kinship itself. Anthropological studies of biomedical technology point to a collapse in the distinction between production and reproduction in the contemporary moment.⁷ Furthermore, kinship sentiments now are recognized as both “resources that are used in production” and “cultural forces that incite, enable, constrain, and shape production” (Yanagisako 2002: 11). My examination of the formation and development of YPF, oil towns, and oil worker subjectivity builds on Sylvia Yanagisako’s argument that kinship sentiments shape business enterprises as much as household dynamics. Affect, more generally, is not a force of reproduction trapped in the domestic domain, but a force of production that has important effects on the industrial and commercial processes of capitalism.

The rise and fall of YPF in Northwest Patagonia illustrates how company towns and their residents blur the assumed divides between kinship, labor, industry, and state. The history of the YPF town Plaza Huincul and neighboring Cutral Có shows how a particular kinship formed and attendant sentiments emerged in conjunction with the national oil industry and state rule over Patagonia. The intertwined paternalism of state and company has been central to this project. Paternalism undergirded the development of the oil industry but then came under attack during the neoliberal restructuring. Yet it hardly disappeared. Relationships among workers and between them and the state have continued to be understood and organized in terms of kinship, sometimes as brotherly dedication and intergenerational care and other times as filial constraint and paternal discipline. Yanagisako’s analysis (2002) of struggles over inheritance and succession in Italian family firms shows how men’s desires for filial continuity shape business strategy and the relationship between labor and capital. My analysis of YPF illustrates a similar dynamic, yet it also demonstrates that we cannot fully understand the productive power of kinship sentiments without paying attention to state institutions, their agents, and the national discourses they deploy. Kinship and nationalism come together to constitute a particularly powerful but unrecognized force in fueling oil production in Argentina and molding the people who have done the labor of producing petroleum, first for the state-owned company and then for the privately owned ones that succeeded them.

Paying attention to kinship sentiments is crucial not only for understanding the history of the national oil industry, but also for a robust analysis of its privatization as part of the larger project of neoliberalismo. The introduction identified several shortcomings in the bourgeoning literature on neoliberalism and suggested that attention to affect provides a fruitful path for addressing them and gaining a fuller understanding of neoliberal processes. There, I depicted neoliberalism as a family of discourses, techniques, and practices that resemble each other as kin do because of their shared genealogy, not because of a natural essence. Here, I highlight the crucial aspects of the Argentine branch of this family that would be overlooked without close attention to familial sentiments and kinship practices. These include both the lines of continuity between neoliberal and previous governing methods and the strategies used by those excluded from the privatized industry to regain a place within it. I demonstrate that, in short, YPF’s privatization worked economically because it worked affectively.

Before elaborating the importance of kinship sentiments to the privatization of YPF, I turn to the history of the state oil company and the oil towns of Northwest Patagonia to explore the historical basis for the familial idiom and kinship practices that the YPFianos deployed in creating their emprendimientos. The history of Plaza Huincul and Cutral Có shows how YPF kinship emerged within the context of the extension of state governing, the development of oil extraction, and the advent of paternalism on the high desert plateau of Northwest Patagonia.

Fires in the Desert

The petroleum industry was established in Argentina within the context of the annihilation of native peoples, the encouragement of European immigration, and the incorporation of the southern territories into the nation and state. By the time of Argentina’s independence from Spain in the first decade of the nineteenth century, missionaries had been working for almost two centuries to “civilize” the indigenous groups of the south, particularly to end their nomaticism, polygamy, and idolatry. While most native inhabitants did not take to sedentarism, they did to capitalism. They bought and sold livestock and frequently were accused of stealing them from the settlers who moved into the land that indigenous people had inhabited for centuries. Nearly all of the heterogeneous indigenous groups in Patagonia became incorporated into the Mapuche nation, whose caciques (chiefs) managed dealings with outsiders, including the livestock market and trade across the Andes (Nicoletti and Navarro 2000: 54–55). The military campaigns of the 1880s, however, exterminated most of the indigenous people, and state agents and Argentine criollos (people of Spanish descent) were able to assert control over Patagonia. The government in Buenos Aires attempted to repopulate the land with European settlers by rewarding soldiers with land grants and facilitating the creation of enormous farms and ranches. Contrary to the dominant national narrative, the Mapuche were not entirely wiped out, but the survivors joined poor criollos in becoming laborers on the new farms and ranches or fiscaleros, precarious occupants of the semiarid grasslands and arid plains retained by the national state because they were undesirable for settlement (Nicoletti and Navarro 2002: 73–81, 90).⁸

The Argentine economy expanded tremendously as the country’s farms and ranches increasingly fed the cities of Great Britain and Europe, but the growth was slow to reach the newly conquered Patagonian territories. The area that would become the Neuquén oil region was designated for grazing animals but was too dry for this use, so most settlers abandoned their allotments (Nicoletti and Navarro 2002: 81). The place called Huincul stood as an isolated way station for travelers across the Andes, purportedly run by a woman known as “the Green Pasture” (la Pasto Verde) (Contreras n.d.). All this changed when the railroad was extended through the area in order to bring livestock and agricultural commodities from the interior of the Neuquén Territory to the Atlantic coast (Nicoletti and Navarro 2002: 89). At the same time that an enormous influx of immigrants arrived in Argentina, Huincul became a stop on the new southern train line. The railroad encouraged Italian and Spanish farmers to venture south from Buenos Aires in search of land and helped Syrian and Lebanese merchants to extend their filial trade networks across Patagonia. While official state discourse spoke of “Argentizing” the new settlements, it was not until oil was found near Huincul that the state’s oil company took over the project of populating the region and governing it through biopolitical means.

After a state team found oil along the Patagonian coast at Comodoro Rivadavia in 1907, the federal state established a national oil reserve and founded the first state-owned oil company, within the Ministry of Agriculture, to produce and market the region’s petroleum resources. A few years later, the Argentine Bureau of Mines, Geology, and Hydrology sent an exploration team to examine a promising spot in Northwest Patagonia. When the exploration team struck oil near Huincul, President Hipólito Yrigoyen designated a seventy-square-kilometer area centering on the first productive well as a second national oil reserve for exclusive exploitation by state agents (Favaro and Bucciarelli 1999: 230). Chapter 3 recounts with greater detail how battles between liberals who advocated “free-market” economic policies and nationalists who defended state-led industrialization have shaped the history of Argentina’s oil industry ever since the founding of the first state oil enterprise. It is important to note here that the liberals restricted the growth of the state oil company in the first decades of the twentieth century, but energy shortages brought on by the two world wars allowed the nationalists to put in place the conditions for the state-managed oil regime that lasted from the 1920s until the 1990s. As will be explained below, it was military officers who spearheaded the founding of YPF Estatal in 1922 and invested it with a notion of national progress.

As oil exploration turned to oil extraction in the Neuquén Territory, the spot known as Huincul was transformed from a trade outpost into a work camp called “the Octagon” (Contreras n.d.). The state’s hastily established camp soon grew into a company town, dotting the windy desert landscape with administration buildings, employee barracks, and other facilities. The population, which was highly mobile and mostly male, grew as the availability of jobs and the promise of above average salaries drew people to the...