"Julio Cortázar's Unexpected Patriots and the Crisis in Argentine Agriculture"
By Edgardo Arrivillaga.
Commemorated by a few NGOs, the March 24th anniversary of the 1976 military coup made scarcely a ripple in Argentina. Instead, flesh-and-blood Argentines insistently demanded the presence of TV cameras on the highways where three social sectors contradictorily converged, both dialectically and mediatically.
In a somewhat spurious Southern Cone simile of Elena and Nicolae Caesescu in their picturesque Transilvanian home before being shot by post-Communist—in truth recycled Communist—fellow citizens, the local First Couple had the peace and quiet of their refuge in Calafate shattered by the first of these sectors: the total unconditional mobilization of the Argentine countryside.
Productive sectors running from the large landowners of the Socedad Rural to family farmers belonging to the Federación Agraria Argentina and small dairy owners, plus the people who revere the good old days in good old Argentina, fiercely independent country folk all, were there.
Plain dressers and gutsy, these people count on neither HMOs nor 911 to solve their problems. And their words carry a deja vu of the tango talk only octogenarians in certain neighborhoods in the port city of Buenos Aires use anymore.
Caballito?
Little horse?
La Boca?
A morbosely urban view of things.
The second sector, not recorded in the memory that forgets itself Orwellian figures compiled by a revolving door array of government statisticians, is the self-sacrificing driver returning home from his mini-vacation only to find himself trapped, like a hide on a tannery stretcher, among farmers, his, her and their but all detestable children, sun and thirst, the always unforeseen lack of a bathroom and nary a gas station in sight, when the National Gendarmes in full battle dress disembark, looking like RoboCops who missed a turn, adding a surprising and somewhat staged touch to the scene: The War of the Worlds meets the pastoral world of Echeverría.
The fact that the trucks carrying the peacekeepers bore the name of the company that made them, Haganah Lt., which is also the name of the first Israeli Army resulting from the fusion of Mossad Aliya Bet, Irgum and the very Haganah, added an unexpectedly amusing exotic, almost uchronic, touch, to this skirmish that sent knifefighters from the hinterlands into the ultra-technified world of agribusiness.
But the one for the books on the part of the government was not the hard-line taken by the Minister of Economy figurehead Lousteau, which sounded also like a clamor for a glorious exile—in Harvard perhaps? Nor was it the declarations of predictable agents of virtual chaos like Delia. Rather it was the unexpected appearance of Hugo Moyano’s black-shirts in 400 trucks trying to establish a kind of Teruelian advanced line of defense, in an anachronic metaphor of the Spanish civil war, against the advance of the prodigiously Fascist—naturally—reactionary forces of national agriculture.
Perhaps government authorities forgot to check the school curriculum programs approved during the period when the somber, bearded Filmus headed the Ministry of Education.
There recommended reading for teenagers includes the short short story, “The Highway of the South,” by Julio Cortázar, which anticipates the story of a traffic jam caused by a strike and the Sartrean no exit feeling it provokes in the people trapped in their cars on the outskirts of Paris, desperate to get home. Cortázar wrote about urban overcrowding and ecology, but one suspects that, in this particular Argentine situation, he would not find it at all easy to determine which side he was on. Would he be on the that of the possible left with its unmistakable Stalinist tint that is K, the side with the traditional values and an inevitable Pasolinian wink satisfying both metro sexuals and anti-industrialists? Or would he be instead on the side of the local version of the Teamsters, men familiar with oil, gears, tires and brakes, as well as hungover insomnia?
Indeed, even Cortázar himself would find himself trapped in a Stockholm syndrome in which victims and victimizers live together, even exchanging skins and identities, which has simultaneously entrapped Peronism and the entire left wing of the Argentine political spectrum.
Industrialism vs. Agriculture is the false equation posed by the government as if agroindustrial power were an Aristotelian entelecheia, a chimera forged and revisited by the yanquis after a long, necessary civil war.
Interesting in this regard is the fact that the government, cultivator of Cortazarian progressive politics, has ended up calling on Moyano, who debuted last year fighting quite successfully, in terms of the rigorous and strangely epic national elegy, against Chinese supermarkets.
Of course the Chinese are not viewed sympathetically, but they do sell cheap and come from a country represented as trade partners of the old grain-consuming Great Britain that bedazzled Argentina and spurred its development from 1856 to at least 1927.
But in the present case, and despite Moyanist participation, the results of the crisis in agriculture will be much more extensive and painful than the solution proposed by Cortázar, the Argentine expat, in his short story.
Meanwhile, this time around an enormous corralito or playpen has been thrown up around the farm population.
A corralito that protects the market share of large multinational companies like Bunge and Benetton, a playpen whose aim is to concentrate the soybean oil that is feeding Argentina and the interventionist model for producing it in very few, generally, transnational, hands.
And also in some friends of friends.
Don Enrique Ezkenazi, the man who’s been in contact with London since 1975—in point of fact he was one of the unselfish cultivators of the March 24 military offensive and understands these things very well. A military Processer for all seasons, just like the father of the Minister of Economy, Martín Losteau, child prodigy from an expensive private university.
But this much larger corralito contains a common element that subsists as unstable tectonic plate: the oblique, transversal social harm done the interwoven sectors of Argentine society that triggered the earthquake that opened the first cracks in the Alliance structure, catapulting then President Fernando De la Rúa out of office.
The women and children herded by Moyano are accustomed to ritually consuming meat, broiled, stewed and barbecued, and drinking good-quality milk.
The kind that doesn’t produce cellulitis you understand . . .
The Moyanists are truck drivers, and at the same time consumers.
And wage earners.
Like everybody else.
The Argentine crisis, with its Pedro Páramo destiny, has just begun.
