Argentina

A Modern History

Jill Hedges

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857730572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In the early 20th century, Argentina possessed one of the world's most prosperous economies, yet since then Argentina has suffered a series of boom-and-bust cycles that have seen it fall well below its regional neighbours such as Chile. At the same time, despite the lack of significant ethnic or linguistic divisions, Argentina has failed to create an over-arching post-independence national identity and its political and social history has been marked by frictions, violence and a 50-year series of military coups d'état. Such difficulty in defining and resolving a common past has increased the complexity of resolving a national project for the present and future. This lack of a national sense of identity, highlighted by continuing frictions between Buenos Aires and the 'interior' over the centralization of power in the capital, is perhaps one factor explaining the enduring attraction of Peronism since its origins in the early 1940s: Juan Peron's maxim, "if I define, I exclude", provided for a broad form of identification covering a range of different regional, socioeconomic and political experiences. However, it also provided the basis of an amorphous and ideologically vacuous political platform that has eluded precise definition for 50 years, thus distorting the country's entire political spectrum. Jill Hedges here analyses the modern history of Argentina from the adoption of the 1853 constitution until the present day, highlighting the political factionalism, the weakness of and lack of trust in political institutions and economic dependence on foreign capital which have contributed to its political instability and economic fluctuation. Exploring political, economic and social aspects of Argentina's recent past, this book will be invaluable to anyone interested in South American history and politics.

1 National Consolidation
1853–80

The rising importance of Buenos Aires vis-à-vis the other provinces of the newly constituted Argentina generated widespread resentments and cemented (or promoted) inequalities among the units that would eventually make up the country’s 23 provinces.

Despite resistance by Buenos Aires to the San Nicolás accord and the threat of seeing its own assets ‘nationalized’ by Urquiza’s project, the constitutional convention was held in Santa Fe, without delegates from Buenos Aires, from November 1852 and in May 1853 approved a constitution that remains substantially in place today. The constitution established Argentina as a federal republic with a division of executive, legislative and judicial powers, whose federal government ‘sustains’ the Catholic faith (until 1994, the president was required to be a Catholic). Liberal in social terms, the constitution abolished slavery and established equality before the law, with no rights arising from birth or title. It established a bicameral Congress to represent both the provinces and the population, giving it authority to impose limitations on executive power over customs and foreign policy issues previously handled at the discretion of Buenos Aires. However, despite giving Congress broad legislative powers and setting out a number of federal guarantees, such as the establishment of a federal capital and the right of provinces to adopt their own constitutions and elect their own authorities, the constitution also institutionalized the federal government’s authority to intervene in provinces ‘to guarantee the republican form of government’ or to ‘re-establish public order’, both vague concepts whose openness to interpretation provided the pretext for many politically motivated interventions designed to oust unfriendly governors, as discussed in Chapter 11. Federal intervention was exercised 132 times between 1880 and 1891 alone.

Much criticism has centred on the fact that the Argentine constitution was largely modelled on that of the United States and the ideas of the French Revolution, without taking into account the substantially different political and cultural circumstances prevailing, and indeed in many respects it may be seen more as an expression of ideals than a reflection of reality. Criticism has also focused on its stipulated intention of boosting immigration: the constitution both guarantees equal rights for the foreign-born and commits the government to ‘foment European immigration’ without restriction on those wishing to come to Argentina to work. These provisions reflected the views of the constitution’s chief intellectual authors, notably Domingo Sarmiento and Juan Bautista Alberdi, whose view that ‘to govern is to populate’ was influenced by the belief that Argentina’s ills arose in large part from its Spanish heritage and domestic population, and that they could be redressed by importing Northern European migrants able to bring a different cultural background. The view that European immigration and free trade would tip the balance towards civilization and away from barbarism was later attacked by revisionist historians, who argued that the constitution sought to negate Argentina’s national identity and Spanish heritage. In any case, the dominant position of large landholders undermined the prospects for real success of this planned immigration policy, while the constitution itself was insufficient to impose ‘the republican form of government’.

The tendency to equate ‘Argentina’ with ‘Buenos Aires’ has glossed over the regional diversities and divergences, making it still more difficult to understand the interests and influences (often dysfunctional) that both define and divide the country and its provinces as a whole. Those provinces range from highly developed to very poor, from industrial to rural, from long-established colonial societies to sparsely and recently populated spaces with little common history.

Federalism in Argentina was clearly based on the US model where, unlike the Argentine case, the western frontier was expanded and settled in the first instance, chiefly by established US citizens from the east, thus ensuring at least a certain basis for uniformity of national and cultural identity. The USA has been described as a form of ‘centralizing federalism’, while Argentina might be described as a sort of ‘federalizing centralism’, as the central government has tended to promote federal relations and decentralization to the provinces when it has suited its convenience. However, the US constitution devolves much greater powers to the states than does the Argentine constitution. Although under Article 104 of the constitution the provinces ‘conserve all power not delegated by this constitution to the federal government’, in practice this in fact limited the provinces’ remit chiefly to the election of provincial authorities and the promotion of industry, immigration and transport with provincial funds. In cases of overlap or inconsistency between federal and provincial law (e.g., in areas such as labour and penal law, primary education and provincial judicial systems), the federal system will dominate.

The principal limitation on federal autonomy, contained in Article 6 of the 1853 constitution, is the right of the federal government to intervene in the executive, judicial or legislative power of any province at any time it is felt necessary ‘to guarantee the republican form of government’. The mechanism has been distorted for the political convenience of the central government and its allies on repeated occasions since 1853, and has been refined to make it an even more useful political tool. The faculty of intervention to combat sedition or invasion was arguably a valid provision in 1853, when the country was far from being consolidated and uprisings and inter-provincial strife were frequent. Between 1860 and 1880 a number of federal interventions were carried out to support the elected authorities or for guaranteeing the electoral process, although this type of intervention largely disappeared after the intervention of Buenos Aires on the grounds that its government was in armed insurrection against the national administration. This intervention, which ended with the federalization of the city of Buenos Aires and terminated the civil war between Buenos Aires and the provinces, consolidated the federal government’s dominance. Thereafter, however, the use of intervention increased. Julio Roca intervened in only one province (Santiago del Estero) during his presidency, but his successor Miguel Juárez Celman used the mechanism on a number of occasions (notably in Tucumán in 1887, where the only opposition governor in the country was elected). Hipólito Yrigoyen and Juan Domingo Perón were the main users of the mechanism: Yrigoyen made 13 interventions during his 1916–22 term alone.

The constitution was also intended to eliminate the dominance of provincial caudillos such as Rosas and Quiroga through the construction of a strong central state, although in practice, here too it failed to either satisfy provincial autonomies or establish a central authority capable of imposing its will on divisive provinces. Indeed, the federal system was more akin to the defensive alliances formed by medieval city states than to a state of national unity, given the lack of agreement on an overarching national identity, and reflected (then as now) the weakness of states rather than their strength. Nevertheless, the federalist tone of the constitution cemented resistance by Buenos Aires, which remained outside the Argentine Confederation although still theoretically a part of a putative Argentine Republic. That resistance was driven to a large degree by self-interest, and the unwillingness to hand over control over its revenues and its militias to a national government – and indeed, to part with a federalized city of Buenos Aires destined to become the national capital.

As a result of this posture, an uneasy de facto coexistence continued through the 1850s, with a Confederation comprising 13 provinces and both the executive (under Urquiza, as the Confederation’s first president, and the ‘forgotten’ Santiago Derqui, from 1860 its second and last president) and Congress temporarily based in Paraná, Entre Ríos. This position seriously undermined the viability of the provinces, with much trade still forced to pass through Buenos Aires and foreign interest concentrated there. Access to the port became more crucial with the rise in wool exports during the 1850s. Buenos Aires by this time was well ahead of the Confederation in terms of wealth and progress: by 1853 it had a limited railway system – the 25-mile Western Railway out of the city – and by 1857 gas lighting, while the provinces struggled with a minimal income base. It also had a thriving cultural scene, with literary salons and performances of plays (both local and imported) and operas, often soon after their European debuts. The first permanent opera house, the original Teatro Colón, opened in 1857 with a performance of Verdi’s La Traviata. However, Buenos Aires on its own also had limited viability as a stand-alone economy or a magnet for foreign interest: although economically dominant in the area, it was politically weakened by its stand-alone status, implying that over the longer term it was in the interests of neither party to maintain the status quo.

However, the road to eventual union was tortuous and still punctuated by military conflicts. In 1854, Urquiza was driven from Buenos Aires, but his forces won the Battle of Cepeda five years later, in October 1859, after which Buenos Aires accepted the Pact of San José de Flores, under which it promised to join (or at least subsidize) the Confederation in exchange for some reforms to the constitution. The following year, Bartolomé Mitre (who would be a prominent politician, military officer, historian, journalist and first president of the Republic, and who had led Uruguayan troops on Urquiza’s side at the Battle of Caseros) became governor of Buenos Aires and sought a means to attain national unity on Buenos Aires’ terms. At the Battle of Pavón in 1861, Mitre’s militia successfully held off Urquiza’s troops and then advanced as far as Rosario, where Urquiza, recognizing the practical need for an accord with Buenos Aires, capitulated and withdrew from public life. Thereafter, Buenos Aires ratified the 1853 constitution, under which the city itself became the nation’s capital, although it continued to resist limitations on porteño power.

In 1862, Mitre (1821–1906) was elected president of the newly united Argentine Republic and began a series of reforms that formed the basis for consolidating the new country. Mitre established the national treasury and customs services, as well as the legal and tax systems; in 1864 a national army was created, followed by a civil code in 1870. Moreover, during his term, a railway linking Rosario and Córdoba was largely completed, mainly with British financing, thanks to substantial government concessions such as land grants, exemption from import duties on coal and a guaranteed 7 per cent annual return. In 1862, Congress authorized the contracting of European immigrants to settle isolated territories such as Chubut, although in practice this policy was only partially successful. From the 1850s efforts to settle European farming families in provinces such as Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Corrientes and Córdoba, often with government subsidies, had met with some success, generating the basis of a rural middle class. Moreover, the rise in the wool (and eventually mutton) trade, aided in the 1860s by the impact of the US Civil War on the cotton trade, led to a sharp rise in sheep farming and attracted immigrants from Ireland and the Basque Country already experienced in this area. By 1859, wool exports accounted for about a third of total export revenues, and through the 1860s annual exports averaged some 50,000 tons. The need to fence lands previously occupied by cattle increased labour demand in sheep-producing areas, favouring immigration in those areas, as well as fomenting improvement in breeding techniques in order to improve the quality of wool (and eventually meat) available for export.

However, the concentration of land in few hands in Buenos Aires and the south, and outright porteño opposition to the establishment of farming colonies, militated against the success of this policy more broadly, and the number of migrants responded more to economic cycles in Europe than to Argentine immigration policy. Moreover, the rise in sheep farming shifted cattle production, as well as traditional activities such as tanning and the production of tallow or salted beef, to more marginal areas to the south of Buenos Aires. Immigration patterns would change only gradually, as the rise in Indian attacks in the post-Rosas period increased support for clearing new territory for settlement, and for the settlement of immigrants as a bulwark against the Indians. Nevertheless, average annual immigration would rise from some 5,000 in the 1850s to 50,000 in the 1880s, although most of those immigrants would swell Buenos Aires and other cities rather than populating the almost uninhabited hinterland.¹

These early attempts at consolidation were insufficient to stamp out provincial uprisings, which continued under Mitre, led notably by Vicente ‘Chacho’ Peñaloza of La Rioja and his lieutenant Felipe Varela in 1867. The caudillo uprisings would not be largely defeated until around 1870, after a series of rebellions by Ricardo López Jordán in Entre Ríos that culminated in the murder of Urquiza in that year, and then to a considerable degree only by the rise of a central power, a national army and an infrastructure base as a result of the War of the Triple Alliance.

The impact of the 1865–1870 War of the Triple Alliance on the nation-building process was dramatic, although not without conflicts. The war itself was sparked initially, at least in part, by internal conflicts in Uruguay between rural (blanco) and urban (colorado) interests. Although Argentina and Brazil both supported the colorados, Paraguayan leader Francisco Solano López supported the blancos. At the same time, border disputes between Brazil and Paraguay had begun to increase. In late 1864 Paraguayan authorities captured a Brazilian gunboat on the Paraguay River, causing a Brazilian declaration of war. López thereupon decided to invade Brazil, and sent Paraguayan troops through the Argentine province of Corrientes for that purpose, provoking a declaration of war by Mitre. The war itself was catastrophic for Paraguay, which saw its population virtually halved (and its male population decimated) during the five years it continued and faced punitive reparations to the victorious Argentina and Brazil thereafter.

In Argentina, the war led to implementation of national conscription, with some 28,000 troops called up, which generated a surge in unity behind Mitre (who initially commanded the troops himself) and also resistance to the cost of the war – indeed, resistance reached such a pitch that Salta at one point threatened to secede. Nevertheless, the professionalization of a national army created new career opportunities for the middle classes in the officer corps, as well as a new mechanism for national unification and consolidation of central power. Much of the soldier class was made up of men of mixed or African origin, and the war is cited as one of the reasons for the virtual disappearance of Argentina’s black population. At the same time, the need to feed and equip the army generated new opportunities for cattlemen, as demand for leather and beef increased. These opportunities were magnified by the parlous state of government finances as a result of the war, which led to the sale of large stretches of land – some 4 million hectares by 1871 in Buenos Aires alone.²

In 1868 Sarmiento (1811–88) succeeded Mitre as president for the period 1868–74, with the backing of the Partido Autonomista, a faction that split off from Mitre’s Partido Liberal. A self-made, self-educated man from the interior province of San Juan, Sarmiento had spent much of his life abroad, notably in Chile, Europe and the USA, an experience that informed his strong admiration for the US political system and for the liberal currents of thought then prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic. However, this admiration often tended, as in the case of Alberdi, to translate as a rejection of many characteristics inherent in the Argentine system that could not readily be eliminated through either education or immigration.

As governor of San Juan during the early part of Mitre’s presidential term, Sarmiento passed the first law making primary schooling mandatory; in particular after a three-year stint as ambassador to the United States (1865–68), he also became increasingly convinced of the need to modernize Argentina, moving from an agricultural economy to an urban one. Famed as the father of Argentina’s education system, Sarmiento quadrupled education spending in a bid to make primary education free and universal, opening 800 schools and increasing teacher training (notably for women) in the belief that citizens must be educated in order to exercise their citizenship – or, as he said, ‘the sovereign must be educated’. However, Sarmiento was less concerned with higher education for the poorer classes, believing that basic reading and writing skills were primarily what were needed to make them more valuable as workers. Sarmiento also clearly believed that an educated population would be less susceptible to the blandishments of caudillos such as Rosas, although in practice neither he nor other modernizing influences were enthusiastic about universal political participation, fearing that the less enlightened classes would represent a regressive rather than modernizing influence. Indeed, education was supposed to make them more useful to those in government, rather than a class capable of self-government. Also, due in part to his experiences in the United States, Sarmiento favoured increased separation of church and state, a position that implied greater religious freedom and (it was hoped) greater encouragement for potential immigrants from Protestant northern Europe.

Sarmiento continued the efforts at modernization instituted under Mitre, undertaking the construction of nearly 1,000 kilometres of railways and 5,000 kilometres of telegraph lines and improving the postal system; before leaving office, he opened the first telegraph line linking Argentina with Europe. Following on from the practice under Mitre, railways continued to be constructed solely to bring goods from the provinces to the port of Buenos Aires and vice versa, creating a hub-and-spoke system that forced all communications and trade to go via Buenos Aires, rather than creating connections among the provinces, a design that persists today. This system continued to favour Buenos Aires to the detriment of the provinces, and to favour imports to the detriment of many regional economies. Sarmiento also conducted the first national census, which indicated that, out of a population of some 1.8 million, 75 per cent lived in poverty, 71 per cent were illiterate and 31 per cent lived in Buenos Aires.

However, his government was not broadly popular; by the time he took office, support for the costly Paraguayan war (in which Sarmiento’s own son died) had waned, while rising immigration was blamed for an outbreak of yellow fever, which also began to raise questions over the relative conditions enjoyed by immigrants. Immigrants were not obliged to complete military service, and in general enjoyed at least limited social mobility, to a much greater degree than the native-born rural poor, who were largely consigned to menial occupations while immigrants were more likely to accede to positions as shopkeepers or tenant farmers. However, although immigration increased sharply during the period, its profile remained at variance with that imagined by Sarmiento and Alberdi – instead of attracting large numbers of northern European farmers, the bulk of migrants came from Southern Europe (mainly Spain and Italy) and from neighbouring countries. Sarmiento’s term was marked by an economic crisis already brewing in the mid-1860s under Mitre; the end of the US Civil War brought a sharp fall in wool prices and a reduction in markets, which affected both producers and speculators who had bought up land during the wool boom; the fall in land prices hit not only buyers, but also the banks that supplied cheap credit to purchasers. The decline in wool also militated further against the development of smaller farming and in favour of large-scale cattle ranching in Buenos Aires in particular. Plans to create immigrant colonies of farmers similar to the successful experiment in the town of Chivilcoy came to nothing; an 1871 land law that aimed to settle farmers on 4 million hectares in the province was largely flouted, with the lands also falling into the hands of large ranchers.

At the same time, the efforts of Sarmiento to ‘Europeanize’ Argentina and to consign the ‘barbarism’ of the caudillos to oblivion generated their own cultural backlash, with a rise in ‘gauchesque’ literature that sought to paint the independent, long-suffering, honourable nature of the gaucho as defining the national character. Although not the first, the most famous of these works were the epic poems by José Hernández, El gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) and La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879), of which the first is virtually the defining work of Argentine literature. This original work is a protest over Europeanization and the marginalization and ill-treatment of the gaucho at the hands of the landowner, the capitalist and ‘progress’. However, the second volume takes a substantially different tone – instead of lauding the hero’s capacity for resistance and upholding gaucho honour, the second volume sees Martín Fierro renouncing the struggle in favour of order and peace. The ‘gauchesque’ genre would remain popular in the twentieth century, notably in the works of Leopoldo Lugones and Ricardo Guiraldes, whose 1926 novel Don Segundo Sombra casts the title character as the quintessential strong, silent gaucho whose character imbues Argentine history and nature.

Outside events also affected other economic developments. The impact of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71, as well as the collapse of the railway boom in the USA, saw a sharp decline in both trade and investment, while foreign creditors began to insist on debt repayments rather than rollovers. The recession in Europe led to a severe dr...