Yes, we have no bananas...and other former imports too

[JoeGillis]

If I'm not mistaken, I believe the ban applies to Spanish language books. The government wants more books to be printed and published in-country.

 

[katti]

I am shocked. Is this really true...

Not just on books I am afraid. All kinds of factories in argentina have stopped production or will have to stop in the future because lack of materials...

Permissions for import are given randomly, without any rules or explanation one gets permission to enter a few containers while another one -same material- does not.

It is incomprehensible and change will have to come soon...

 

[scotttswan]

If I'm not mistaken, I believe the ban applies to Spanish language books. The government wants more books to be printed and published in-country.

This may be the original idea but it is having an effect right now where the current classes are having problems acquiring the books specified in the Cambridge exams as they are blocked from being imported.

 

[JoeGillis]

And the government continues to insist that all of its policies are solely for the good of the nation and its citizens. Meanwhile, plans are in the works for a multi-millions peso project to give Casa Rosada a supposedly much needed renovation. It would seem that those pesos could be better spent with the purchase of new commuter trains.

 

[JoeGillis]

I was wondering about non-Spanish language books. I've noticed lately that the book stocks of some of the English language bookstores seem to be dwindling....

 

[solerboy]

I was wondering about non-Spanish language books. I've noticed lately that the book stocks of some of the English language bookstores seem to be dwindling....

Thus providing plenty of work for Argentine photocopiers

 

[Crema Americana]

One on which for some weird reasons, including the oligopolistic structure of big parts of the economy, most of its own books, written by locals and for locals, were imported from Spain. The solution was to ban those imports, thus Argentinean companies now will need to print Argentinean books in (gasp!) Argentina.

Why are Argentine companies printing and shipping in from Spain when they coud do it here? I could understand it if perhaps most Argentine books are owned by Spanish publishers, but why would they go overseas to print in a country where wages are similar, if not much higher, than here?

Let's start where the problem is and fix it, so that companies will want to print here, and not have to because they have no other choice. That's how you grow business and industry... by promoting and encouraging within, not banning the outside world.

If Argentine companies aren't printing in Argentina it's for 1 of 2 reasosn... or perhaps both. They don't have the resources here or the country's laws are not business friendly. Both make it more expensive and less attractive to do business here.

 

[AlexanderB]

All that the article complains about is indeed a problem, but this is a bad piece of hit job journalism. Definitely one of the least even-handed articles I've read.

 

[JoeGillis]

When this book publishing situation first appeared in the news media, one of the main reasons given by booksellers here, re their preference for books published in Spain and Mexico, was the overall poor quality of so many of the books printed and published in Argentina, particularly shoddy book-binding. I'm only noting what I read in several articles that covered this initial governmental ruling.

 

[AndyD]

This part (of the article) is false:

Its submissions to the United Nations have been met by the UK’s robust rebuttal and a detailed, factual account of events going back centuries validating British sovereignty.

The UN asks both parts to talk but the UK refuses, arguing that she will only talk when the islanders desire so. Argentina argues against that stance but receives no answer. A rebuttal is something quite different.

Moreover, there is no such detailed account. Lawrence Freedman is UK's Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign and author of The official history of the Falklands Campaign, among other work on the subject. I quote from his book (page 2):

This question was considered in public in a semi-formal manner a few months after the Falkland Islands had been retaken by Britain after an Argentine attempt to settle the matter in its favour by force. A Select Committee of the House of Commons addressed seriously the question of who actually owned the Islands. The Government insisted that there was no issue, but Members of Parliament were clearly troubled by a confusing story, which went some way to explaining why it was that Argentina had been so persistent in its claim. As the Committee was about to reach a conclusion, the May 1983 general election intervened, and it took until the next year before a reconstituted Committee could issue a report. The result was hardly a ringing endorsement of Britain’s claim to a territory on whose behalf it had just gone to war. The Committee declared itself ‘unable to reach a categorical conclusion on the legal validity of the claims’ of either Britain or Argentina. It then raised the significance of the Argentine invasion of 1982 by declaring that this in effect had decided the matter. The ‘historical argument…has been rendered less relevant by Argentina’s illegal resort to arms.’

This argument of the war settling the question, which I left inside the quote to maintain proper context, was disputed even by a UN resolution.

Freedman later says that UK's case is currently based on prescription, as they have abandoned previous arguments based on historical facts, mostly because research in the early 1900s concluded that they were weak. Authoritative literature supports this version, frequently giving more emphasis on the shortcomings of the British historical case and casting doubts on the applicability of prescription. To address these kinds of doubts, the UK cast the card of self determination. Freedman says (p. 13):

In late 1981 the Research Department at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) produced a paper on the British case. The intention had been to produce a sanitised version to pass to suitable contacts but officials were clearly surprised by the conclusion that the British case rested ‘almost entirely on 148 years of continuous settlement.’ This was not a view that officials chose to put to the test, especially given the ‘probable inbuilt anti-colonial bias of most of the international institutions which might be involved if the case went to arbitration.’ ... By the time the conflict started in 1982 officials were stressing, particularly in the context of a possible referral to the ICJ, the importance of self-determination.

Yet, self determination is also disputable, as has been written in competent sources, given that the islanders are an imported population. As far as I understand, that more or less summarizes the British case, which has its value but is clearly inconclusive.

Therefore, the lines I quoted from the article are ungrounded and misleading on a key matter. There are no serious grounds to refer to alleged 'historical falsehoods and misinformation deployed in support of Argentina’s claim'. This is probably due to some pseudo-revisionist self-published texts that have been circulating, which contradict established literature and, afaik, haven't been taken seriously in educated circles. I responded to some of their challenges in the last pages of this other thread: http://baexpats.org/world-politics/19267-will-falklands-debacle-soon-repeated-6.html

Besides, we will probably agree that name giving as in 'Only the incompetent Argentines could achieve the impossible' doesn't make good journalism.

The rest of the article may have useful points, although I seriously doubt that the situation in Buenos Aires is as apocalyptic as it may be reasonably interpreted from it. If you are living here, you may judge it yourselves. Those who don't live here perhaps can't. Just as with the points above: those who are interested enough to read about the subject may identify partisan and ungrounded statements, but a majority probably can't.