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Jonathan A.C. Brown sözleri ve alıntılarını, Jonathan A.C. Brown kitap alıntılarını, Jonathan A.C. Brown en etkileyici cümleleri ve paragragları 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.
No matter what their views on populism, few people can ignore the remarkable success that Argentines garnered in the period of industrialization.
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Nearly all the great cities of today’s Latin America had been established between 1492 and the second founding of Buenos Aires in 1580. Thus, the conquest phase in Spanish America ended at Buenos Aires, 88 years and 4,000 miles from the scene of Columbus’s original contact. It was, however, only the beginning of a 300-year struggle for Argentina between the land’s tenacious first inhabitants and the European interlopers.
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Argentina has a population that ranks among the most educated and skilled in Latin America, and its citizens have made major contributions to the world. Illiteracy scarcely exists among even the poor and working-class citizens, and Argentina’s middle class historically has been large and politically engaged.
Once again, the judiciary proved too weak to overcome the impunity enjoyed by members of the executive and legislative branches. Some of the cases came before judges appointed by Menem himself. The president had also expanded the Supreme Court and appointed a majority of the justices. Some functionaries accused of corruption brought libel suits against the newspapers and reporters who had exposed them. Government television announcers routinely attacked print reporters who wrote stories about bribery and corruption. One reporter was even assassinated. At one moment during Menem’s first term, nearly a dozen cabinet-level and senior officials had been tainted by charges of corruption. “Menem has so centralized power in the judiciary that I am very worried,” said one prominent attorney quoted in yet another New York Times article. “But what makes me most afraid is that people don’t seem to care. All they seem to be worrying about is whether there is low inflation” (Nash 1991, 15).
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The Spaniards had to settle the region through a long series of small conquests over the indigenous inhabitants, all the while developing a European-style commercial and agricultural base. They had to painstakingly defeat nearly each and every decentralized group in piecemeal fashion. The defeat of no one clan group resulted in the submission of their indigenous neighbors. Even then, several important native groups continued their successful resistance for nearly 400 years following the arrival of the first European.
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The original inhabitants of the region that became modern Argentina were either agriculturists who had to supplement their diets with hunting and gathering or nomadic peoples who subsisted entirely on hunting and gathering. They may have numbered almost 1 million people in 1492, when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean. They lived dispersed over an area that now supports 41 million Argentines.
Today one might wonder why these indigenous peoples were so impoverished when they inhabited a land of such rich and now-proven agricultural potential. The answer lies in their lack of technological sophistication. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the native inhabitants used only Stone Age technology.
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Questions about corruption among the highest officials plagued Menem’s administration from the beginning. The president had appointed his relatives to high government positions, which they used, reporters alleged, to launder drug money. Questions also arose about the duty-free import of foreign luxury cars. A group of Italian businessmen gave President Menem, who loved fast cars, a new Ferrari.
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Argentine society of late has gained even greater heterogeneity and diversity. The present economic troubles have impelled the best and brightest of the middle class to emigrate, while mestizo laborers from Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chile have formed the new wave of immigration. The diversity and divisiveness of the social order, aided and abetted by continuing discrimination, reinforce the other historical predator stalking the nation—the authoritarian impulse.
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Carlos Saúl Menem further weakened the judicial system during his terms in office to such a degree that Argentines had to laugh at the irony implicit in one joke circulating in the 1990s. Menem was on a state visit to Bolivia, so the apocryphal story goes, and his counterpart was introducing the Argentine head of state to the Bolivian cabinet ministers. “And this is our minister of the navy.” “Minister of the navy!” Menem exclaimed. “Bolivia is a landlocked country and has no navy. Why do you have a minister of the navy?” “Well,” replied the Bolivian president, “you have a minister of justice.”
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Argentine society today does not compare to that of the 1880s either. The unions have lost some of their power from the glory days of populism, but the organized working class has reconstituted itself behind the large body of the permanently unemployed. The ranks of the disemployed grew during the neoliberal privatization schemes of President Carlos Menem. Then the prolonged economic downturn from 1997 through 2001 expanded the jobless population even more. The IMF riots, the looting of the supermarkets, the blocking of highways, and the marches on the public squares gave this class a new sense of empowerment. The middle class tolerated—even sympathized with—them for a while; politicians like Néstor and Cristina negotiate informally with them. Public spending has provided a safety net for this more or less permanently impoverished sector of society like never before. This fact explains the redistributive tendencies of today’s body politic. It is not textbook neoliberalism but political expediency.
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