Marcelo Colussi
I left Argentina more than 30 years ago. It was a voluntary exile, for various reasons that are not relevant to explain. In all this time I only made a short visit once; Life and my mediocrities led me to move further and further away from my country of origin, to the point where I no longer plan (nor could I) return. I watch him from afar, and with more and more pain.
Although I usually write some things there, I practically never write about Argentina; I do not do political, social, cultural or any kind of analysis of the place where I was born, raised and spent the first decades of my life. I do not feel in a position to do so, because speaking from a distance about something that is not known in everyday life, that is not experienced on a daily basis, can be very presumptuous. And surely: wrong. I observe and know something about everything that is happening there, but not in its smallest details; In any case, that is enough to decide today to express something in relation to what was my homeland (I say “whatever was”, because the years of distance no longer allow me to feel it as my own).
I grew up in an Argentina of relative abundance. Although I never lived in opulence, as a modest member of the urban middle class I was always well fed, I lived in a decent house with all the basic services, I had the opportunity to be educated in a not particularly bad way (if my education is deficient, this should only be attributed to my laziness), I was able to travel abroad, I did not suffer any of the humiliations that later, given my pilgrimage there, I saw that is common in many countries. In my childhood and youth, the country, always being dependent and without reaching the development of the powers of the North – although a good part of the vernacular idiosyncrasy wanted to feel like a simile of them, in a Europeanizing Latin American version – enjoyed a certain economic splendor, thus as scientific-technical and cultural. Many Argentine population boasted of producing twice as much as their closest “competitor”: Brazil. Today, Rio’s economy surpasses Argentina’s by a ratio of three to one, if not more.
All of this serves as an introduction to understanding what, with acid humor, the Russian-American economist Simon Kuznets, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1971, once said, stating that there are four categories of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan and Argentina. Why these last two? The case of the Asian country, because it constitutes a true “miracle”: having been practically destroyed during the Second World War – with the addition of two atomic bombs on its civilian population – in a few years it resurfaced monumentally, transforming in a couple of decades into a of the main world economies. The case of Argentina, on the contrary, is also worthy of study (the Argentine “paradox”, it could be called): how was it possible for a prosperous society, with high rates of what today we would call “human development”, with abundant land fertile areas, numerous water resources, oil, an enormous Atlantic coastline and a considerable industrial park, which for the first half of the 20th century had a greater strength than Canada, Australia or Spain, in a few years could decline so much, converting one in three of its inhabitants poor? How was that possible? How could you reach that pathetic reality where a good part of your youth thinks that the only way out for the country… is Ezeiza? (the international airport).
When one time, to demonstrate this fall to Latin American citizens who were listening to me, I related the case of looting of zoos that took place so that hungry Argentinians could eat some red meat, I was called a liar. Reality, unfortunately, was not a joke or a fictional story. It was not a lie: it is what happened in what was called – in another era, of course – “cow country.”
Why did all this happen? This painful letter is not at all the right place to develop explanations for such complex phenomena. It can be stated – I think without fear of being wrong – that all of this is not a product of “bad governments.” That is a false explanation, which I would rather say constitutes an attack on intelligence, a mockery so that the masses – always manipulated – find some scapegoat. The problem is structural. I do not want to expand on this, nor do I feel in a position to do so properly, but it should be said that the neoliberal plans imposed by the dominant capitals in the 70s/80s of the last century (basically from the United States, supported by its partners minors in Western Europe) reduced that regional power that went to Argentina to a country that was only an agro-exporter, impoverished, battered.
I remember once participating in a meeting of some organization of that fallacy called “international cooperation” where a Washington official said, without the slightest shame, that “Argentina consumed too much oil, which is why it had to be stopped. We prefer Brazil to be the industrial park of South America, because there is not so much middle class there that consumes.” It is clear that the presidents in power, whoever they are – including Peronism – only manage the economy, always in favor of capital. The greater or lesser corruption that there may be is marginal, almost anecdotal data. That is not the cause of our hardships, in Argentina or in any country in the world.
Argentina, without a doubt, entered a slope that, for the moment, seems impossible to overcome. Now it has the profile of any Latin American country, which a good part of that Europeanized middle class of yesteryear viewed almost with contempt. Hungry children, people begging for alms and unleashed crime are the product of the global recomposition brought about by neoliberalism, with policies that are fixed on Wall Street or the White House. It is not the “political caste” that produced this disaster. Professional politicians – starving middle class with careerist spirits – are the same everywhere: liars by trade who manage the businesses of the great, and sometimes, dropping crumbs to the poor.
The country is experiencing a disaster. A major disaster that seems to have no turning back (which is why Kuznets’s words cited above are relevant). Desperation is a bad advisor. “The dream of the reason produces monsters”, Goya illustrated. He wasn’t wrong. Today the Argentine population is desperate, which is why it can look for miraculous solutions, which make us think of the overwhelmed German population seeking refuge in the speech of a mad messiah in the 1930s. If an unbalanced person who shamelessly insults his opponents in public can be a reference for the presidency, loved and idolized, that shows that he has gone backwards. From the trial of the military Juntas to the apology of the clownish extreme right.
Any injustice hurts me and I try – to the extent of my mediocre possibilities – to confront them. But Argentina hurts me more. The place where we have buried our navel is heavy. Argentina weighs on me. I see that the dreams of revolutionary transformation with socialist ideals must continue to wait for the moment, because it does not seem very close. The pain of seeing the fall of something of your own is very bitter, much more than mate. Hopes are not lost, but…
