I'm still trying to wrap my head around someone who is leaving the US b/c they're afraid of the state of politics and thinks Argentina is the place to go. Um... how much do you know about gov't in Argentina (historical and current)?
Oh, well, let's see. From memory, without cheating, this is what I
think I know, which may or may not be correct.
In the beginning Simon Bolivar had a dream of a sort of a United States of Latin America, called the United Provinces. After his death, this didn't work out, and what are today the nations of Uruguay and Paraguay and Bolivia went their way, and what was left more or less corresponds to modern Argentina. After that, there was a 75 years or so, on again and off again civil war that seems to have consisted of Buenos Aires against everybody else. In the years before WWI, Argentina was a sort of capitalist's golden dream, fit to give Ayn Rand a wet spot in her panties. The currency was sound, employment was high, and there was a middle-class of sorts.
The Great Depression hammered Argentina's economy into the dirt, but the WWII years were a period of slowly returning prosperity. Contrary to rude American jokes, the Nazis with rank and money mostly fled to Paraguay in 1945, generally only the low level German refugees wound up in Argentina. The 1950's and 1960's saw the rise of populism in Argentina.
Juan Peron was a very good man, though he made his mistakes as all mortal men will. Things started out well, and Evita was beloved by all, but then she died and his reforms of the economy were sabotaged by capitalist speculators and reactionaries. His new wife became President after his death, but she was led astray by bad advice, and the economy faltered as the military grew more restless. By 1974(?) or so popular unrest was very high, and the CIA-led coup against the Allende government in Chile the year before had provided a stark example of what could happen. So La Presidenta handed over the government to a military junta, and then came some very, very bad years that we will not talk about in any detail, lest we should offend our hosts.
After the return of democracy in the early 1980's, Argentina was forced to pay massive reparations, which had to be paid in hard currency. Yet the war had left the economy in ruins. So publicly owned properties and industries were "privatised", sold to rich people for pennies on the dollar. This amounted to a massive looting of the public treasury, and combined with the massive outflow of hard currency, further devastated Argentina's economy. Default was inevitable, and default there was. Settlements were made on the defaulted debt, but vulture capital firms bought up the unsettled defaulted debts and continue to pursue the issue through a variety of dirty tactics.
The Menem years I do not understand. I got nothing on that.
Nestor Kirchner was in some ways like Juan Peron come again, and Christina was more than fit to play the role of his Evita. Together they struggled valiantly to revive the dream of Juan Peron, to return power to the people, to restore the economy and rebuild the middle class, to bring about a more equitable distribution of income, and to eliminate corruption in government. And yet, it would seem that on the side they slipped in a few little insider real estate deals that netted them several million, demonstrating that we are all flawed, we all have feet of clay.
Today, the conservatives and their allies are on the march yet again, sabotaging the economy and creating popular unrest by undermining access to basic services, making the nation suffer in the hope of toppling La Presidenta and her administration. And even her most faithful supporters begin to waver and doubt, under the weariness of long years of inflation, turmoil and uncertainty.
And in the background, unspoken, is the fear that the nightmare years of the late 70's and early 80's could come again, because while the leaders who gave the orders were brought to justice, the lieutenants and captains who carried out those orders were not, and today they are the colonels and generals.
According to one security survey publicly available, Argentina is the most heavily-surveilled nation in Latin America.
Well, that's all I have. I did that from memory with the lone exception that I did look at a map to be sure I wasn't making a total fool of myself when I said Bolivia. Now you see what happens when you ask a question like that of a student of history?
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EDIT: I was off by two years, it was 1976, not 1974. That's why I call myself a student of history rather than a historian.
