“One of the curious things about Argentina’s decline and fall—a decline without reaching the heights—is that much of the decline happened during the democratic period. The acceleration of the decline coincided with a return to democracy in 1983, after the Falklands. The irony is that both of the big parties, the Peronists, the Radicals, want to outdo one another in distributionism, and there is no longer John Bull or Uncle Sam to put in the pound sterling or the dollar.
“Things worked under the British, if you assume that we were informal members of the British empire. In 1917 our GNP was about three-quarters of the United States’s. We had the markets, we had the productivity. We had the methods—the systems, the technology. Today we have none of these things.
“You must always remember in Argentina that you’re only seeing the survivors. All the others are on Boot Hill or in mental homes. Inflation keeps you on your toes.
“Our company is in an industry where we can let you have only about four or five days’ credit. Otherwise, with the kind of inflation we have, working capital gets murdered. In our company at any time we have out about twelve million dollars’ working capital as credit to wholesalers. You want to keep that money turning over quick. If you can reduce the credit period by half a day, that’s important. Companies that have a slower turnover, like consumer durables—they probably have to give sixty days’ credit. If you’re building a ship, you have to give a lot of credit, and you may sell only one ship a year. So you’re really up shit creek, as the Americans say.
“Another negative aspect of inflation is that you cease to worry about productivity and even technology. Now, that is the secret of all progress: productivity. But you really can get no more than 3 or 4 per cent per annum improvement in productivity anywhere in the world. With inflation like ours you can get 10 per cent in one day, if you know when and where to invest. In our business we have on average to pay the government taxes every fifteen days. So in those fifteen days we have to invest that money as wisely as we can. It is much more important to protect your working capital than to think about long-term things like technology and productivity—though you try to do both.
“So capital investment in Argentina is not even covering capital wear and tear. In short, when the current plant reaches the end of its working life there won’t be a provision built up to purchase new capital equipment. This is the inevitable result of inflation, which is the monetary disease. Your money is disintegrating. It’s like a cancer. You live day by day. That’s all you can do when you have inflation of more than 1 per cent a day. You cease to plan. You’re just happy to make it to the weekend. And then I stay in my flat in Belgrano and read about ancient cricket matches.
“We are now 25 per cent poorer on a per capita basis than we were in 1975. The people who are really suffering are the people you won’t see—the poor, the old, the young. These people get washed up at the big railway termini that curiously resemble Victoria and Paddington stations, because they were built by the British. The flotsam and jetsam of Argentine life—like spray from the sea, these people. I’ve never seen such signs of poverty in B.A.”
WHAT JORGE said about industry and business was also true of agriculture: you had to remember you were seeing only the survivors. In Argentina they were either very big or very dedicated.
The Indian land had encouraged an immense greed in the four hundred families who came to possess it. And then, just sixty years after the Conquest of the Desert, Perón had appeared, driven by that same idea of the limitless wealth of the land, to plunder and to punish. At that time the big landowners were livestock farmers. Tenant farmers did the crop rotation, renting the land for short periods; in between, the land was put back to alfalfa, for grazing. Perón, when he came in, froze the rents of the farmers. This was when Susana’s family, finding that their taxes were higher than their rents, panicked and sold. The people who held on endured some hard years. Foreign trade was nationalized; commodity prices were fixed by the state trade monopoly. The state looked for profit; it needed foreign exchange. So people had to sell at under world prices and sometimes under the cost of production. Agricultural production fell. In 1951 Argentina’s exports, which were mainly agricultural, were less than they had been in 1901. Argentina’s foreign reserves had been squandered on the nationalization of the railways and other utilities; and its imports now increased, to support such industrialization as had been got going. These imports could only be paid for by agriculture, in which people had ceased to invest. So the inflation began, ensuring that the land could never be worked by the small farmer.
Julio farmed three thousand acres. He was not of one of the old landowning families. He had turned late to agriculture, and was a dedicated man. In the 1960s he took over an estate which—from being prosperous and go-ahead during the war, and among the first in Argentina to use tractors—had fallen into ruin in the Perón time. Julio got a loan from a state bank. Of course, the manager made him wait, made him come back a few times, asked for plans, statements; and the clerks drank coffee and maté and looked straight through him and then invariably told him to go and see somebody else.
“We were lucky. We started all this on credit. We couldn’t have done it otherwise. We got in at the very last stage when credit was subsidized: the interest rate was less than the inflation rate. The bank manager knew very well he was doing us a favour.”
The inflation that worked for Julio at the start then became the tiger he had to ride.
“To survive, you have to do things that are unethical, strictly speaking. You have to be slow to pay your bills. Though now that all the bills are in dollars, you get no gain out of being late. You have to be diversified. And you have to be flexible. Under high inflation you start doing a lot of barter deals. You tend to leave the money economy. Say, I did a deal with wheat—getting fuel and fertilizer in return. You work out that you have to give four kilos of wheat for every kilo of fertilizer. We spend a lot of time now working on these things. It’s a tricky business. You don’t want to lose. It’s important to be in a group with an adviser who would advise you on these barter deals.
“With reasonable inflation we get paid on time, and there’s no problem. It’s helped us a lot that our main product is milk. With milk we are reasonably protected. It’s paid for like this: sixty per cent on a weekly basis, and forty per cent at the end of the following month. But once you get into hyper-inflation you’re in real trouble. In 1989, near the end of the Alfonsín government, we had a hundred per cent inflation a month for four months, and we were being paid monthly for the milk—in short, we were getting practically nothing. Of course the same thing applied to the bills we had to pay, but the loss was still there. That’s something you can’t cope with. With milk you have to sell every day. If you are producing cattle or crops you can keep them in stock to sell on a cash basis.
“Alfonsín was doing nothing about hyper-inflation. He was just waiting for the new president, Menem, to take over. And Menem had been elected on a populist platform—which always means wage increases for everybody.
“At this time the company we were selling our milk to went into receivership. That meant that we weren’t paid for the milk we had supplied for six weeks. From that stage on we asked to be paid on a weekly basis. And—even with the money we had lost—we did better than colleagues of ours who had always been paid, but on the old monthly basis. Because in hyper-inflation what matters is when you’re paid.
“I was really worried that time. That was the only time. Once for ten days the banks were closed. Everyone wanted to take out his money to spend it.”
WITH INFLATION like this everyone becomes a gambler, everyone lives on his nerves. And even people who win in some ways can feel exhausted and damaged, like Gui, now over sixty, who, starting with no capital, and acting at every stage out of desperation, managed over ten years to turn a $5,000 gratuity into a $140,000 apartment.
In the 1960s rents were rising; Gui and his family moved five times, each time
moving down. He decided to buy. He found a little $15,000 house in a suburb which he thought he could afford. But the company he worked for didn’t think so. They refused to give him a housing loan. Instead they offered him a gratuity if he left the firm. Gui was already committed to buying the house. So he left the company and took the gratuity—$5,000; borrowed a certain amount from his brother—$2,500; and with his brother’s help got a four-year loan from a bank for $7,500.
“Normally, at that time, a loan like that had to be repaid in instalments over two years—which is no credit at all. Anyway. There we were. We had a house. It was a dreadful little house, and we were all ashamed of it. It was in one of those B.A. areas where literally in a space of a hundred yards you move from the nice area to the poor area, with people sitting out on the pavement in their pyjamas at night. We were in the poorer area.
“And then we had a bit of luck. The bank we had borrowed the money from failed. That’s typical, in a way: a kind of Argentine windfall. So we didn’t have to pay back the $7,500 we had borrowed from the bank—though my brother got stuck for $150,000.
“We decided to leave the horrible little house. We rented a flat in a good area, and rented the house out—badly, to a person who turned out to be poor and couldn’t keep on paying the indexed rent. I should tell you also here that the district where the house was was famous for its bad administration. They would send you all the tax demands late, deliberately, so you had to pay a surcharge as well. That’s also typical of the Argentine. And you would stand all day in a queue a block long to pay.
“That was why we decided to sell the house. And then we had an even bigger piece of luck. In 1978–79 in Argentina we had a period of ‘sweet money,’ plata dulce, easy money, when you could get thirty per cent a month on Argentine money, and the dollar became worth nothing. The factory car parks were full of workers’ cars, and people were travelling to Miami and coming back with trolleys of electronic appliances. Land values skyrocketed, and we sold the little house for $65,000, more than four times what we had paid for it—and you must remember that half the original price we didn’t even pay because of the bank crash.
“And then we thought we were caught. You couldn’t get anything in B.A. for $100,000—at that price they were laughing in your face and you were looking at two-bedroom flats with a refrigerator hanging on a bedroom wall because there wasn’t room in the kitchenette. My wife’s family’s house was on sale at $1,800,000.
“We had to invest our money. We invested it in Argentine money, to get the thirty per cent a month. You couldn’t get a better rate anywhere in the world, and money was flooding in from abroad. The thing was to take your interest and get your money back into hard currency before the situation blew. I tell you, you were living on your nerves every minute. Every minute you were wondering whether you were doing the right thing—because at the first little whiff of insecurity or danger all that foreign money was going to leave. Within days the whole thing could blow, and you were running in to change money all the time.
“We timed it right. We got back into dollars ahead of the crash, which came in January or February 1981, when there was a ten per cent devaluation of Argentine money, followed a month later by a further twenty per cent. The whole thing just collapsed then. People who had borrowed to re-equip their factories lost fortunes.
“We invested our dollars and got a little more, and then we proceeded to lose a certain amount of what we had gained: our bank manager invested a third of our money in gold. We bought at $800, and got out at $680 an ounce. Still, at the end we had enough to buy this desirable flat in one of the best parts of the city. We bought in August 1982, when just for three weeks—because of the Malvinas war—prices were at their lowest for twenty years. At the end of those three weeks the prices rose again by more than sixty per cent. If we had delayed we wouldn’t have been able to buy.
“In a place like Argentina you make money only by being lucky. There’s always a crisis in one direction or other. What happens is that you have no sense of the future. You don’t do anything for the future. The European idea of securing your future doesn’t exist. I often wonder how I’ve adapted to this sort of thing. The other thing is the sensation you have all the time of being robbed, if you’re an employee. If you don’t have to go through that experience, and you can live in your own area of happiness, shall we say, it can be a delightful place to live in. And this, I suppose, is what lulls everybody.”
IN 1972 BORGES said he never read the newspapers. “Those things sadden me. They are also trivial.” Borges could say that—of the daily acts of guerrilla or police violence, and the manoeuvring of politicians, passing figures, who were far smaller than the moment—because for Borges Argentina was a country he had already lost.
What Borges said then others said now, in different ways. A woman I knew said, “We have become stupider.” She had been Peronist in 1972, full of expectation. Perhaps then or a little later she had also been “Marxist,” buoyant with her simplicities, ready to preach them. Now she had forgotten she had been either of those things, and—in the general enervation—was nothing; there were no political systems left to try. Women like her were turning now to “meditation”—every day the newspaper listed lectures and sessions.
Ricardo, who had known the guerrilla leaders at school and had felt some sympathy for the cause, grieved for that educated, destroyed generation. Those many thousands of New Men (and women), in whom religion and revolution had met, were the grandchildren of immigrants; they would now have been in their forties. As we were walking back after our meeting with the former guerrilla (who had presented himself as a defeated man), Ricardo said, with sadness, “Maybe we have to accept the idea that this country is not viable. The young people I meet take it for granted that Argentina will become a nation in the near future, and that might lead them to new adventures and false conclusions.”
Ricardo was talking, like Borges, out of his own grief, out of his own need for philosophical systems, his now outdated ideas of revolution and right action. Those ideas had gone with the Trojan ending Borges had prophesied; and in their place, out of the very enervation and fatigue of that ending, new and simpler ways of thinking had come to Argentina.
A businessman I met listed these new ways of thinking. Argentina no longer believed in the foreign enemy; no longer believed it was a European country; and had lost the idea of the limitless wealth of the land.
The three ideas were linked: together, they added up to an intellectual revolution. That idea of wealth—it had been part of the folk wisdom of the country. My 1972 notebooks are full of it. “This country can never sink.” “Still, you live better here.” “God undoes at night the mess the Argentines create by day.” That idea of wealth had come down from the Spanish time, and had been born again with the Conquest of the Desert. It had encouraged the great greed of the estancieros, who thought of the wealth of the country in the Spanish way, as something indivisible, which had to be denied to as many people as possible. This had in its turn encouraged the greed and plunder of Perón and his successors, and the claims of their supporters. It had destroyed the idea of the pioneer, the idea of self-fulfilment coming through work; it ennobled instead the idea of sharpness, la viveza criolla. It had encouraged the idea of blood and revolution, in unending sequence: just one more fresh start, the finding out and killing of just one more enemy, and the wealth of the country was going to cascade down.
All that had now gone. To continue, people would have to enter into a new contract with the land. This implied a new contract with other people, a new kind of political life. Argentina had made people dream too much, Ricardo had said; and now the country wasn’t viable. But this kind of despair was as much of an abstraction as Father Mujica’s revolutionary wish to undo the enemies of the people and develop the human spirit. In Argentina people needed simpler gestures, a simpler morality.
Together with news about the government’s attempt to stabilize the currency, gossip about the n
ew president’s family life, and conjecture about why the embalmed body of Perón had had its hands cut off, there were reports about the weekly March of Silence, la marcha del silencio, in the northern town of Catamarca. Catamarca, warlord country in the early nineteenth century, and now very poor, was controlled by a single powerful family. A young woman had been murdered in Catamarca. Local people were outraged by the way in which the matter had been hushed up; and in that town, where there had been an authoritarian tradition since the Spanish time, and where now most people (of the twenty-four grades) depended for their livelihood on the patronage of their local rulers, there had started this weekly protest March of Silence, led by a nun. The number of the marchers had grown; the effect had been overwhelming; the federal government had had to intervene. The powerful governor had resigned; someone else had gone to jail. Then the marches had stopped; the nun had returned to her convent. Father Mujica and the guerrillas, in their own eyes New Men confronting injustice, had never done anything as brave, or made a profounder political and moral point. Perhaps no such gesture had been made here since the Spanish conquest.
Catamarca was a late-seventeenth-century foundation. It was on the site of an older Andean settlement which the Spaniards had attempted in the early 1550’s, just twenty years after the conquest of Peru. This first town or settlement had been destroyed very soon afterwards by the local people, not yet abject. Its Spanish name—in honour of the marriage (1554–58) of Philip II of Spain to Mary Stuart—was Londres de la Nueva Inglaterra, London of New England.
* The priest was killed two years later, in 1974, by unknown gunmen, and for a few days had poster fame as a Peronist martyr.