Times

SATURDAY JANUARY 12 2002 Argentina, a land shopped to death MATTHEW PARRIS I always knew there was something queer about Argentina. You do not need to be psychic to pick up a sense that something is wrong with a place. Scores of countries are inhabited by scores of ills, but they muddle through. Argentina felt wrong in a different way. Travelling there was more akin to the experience of visiting a company which, though trading, later turns out to have been a front for quite another operation; or driving down a modern and expensive-looking motorway (as I once did in Cuba) where the sliproads turn out to be dead ends, the bridges across it bridge nothing to nothing, and the crowds of people milling inexplicably round beneath them are found to be desperate hitch-hikers, there being no cars and no petrol.

It just didn’t add up. Nor did Argentina. Arriving at the frontier by bus from Bolivia some years ago after a 20-hour journey over atrocious roads from La Paz, we found that from the border post to the nearest town lay a short stretch of tarmac along which the ten-minute taxi ride cost more than the cost of the whole Bolivian bus journey. In the next town, Juyuy, we paid in Argentine pesos and were given change in crudely printed notes issued by the state government, there being an insufficiency of funds from central government in Buenos Aires.

This seemed like anarchy — some kind of breakdown. So how come, when we reached the next town, Salta, the women were wearing fur and taking toy dogs for walks on leads? I have felt the same “Huh?” about Israel, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

Like Tintin’s little dog, Snowy, one surveys the scene with a question mark suspended above the head. The reasons for puzzlement vary but the sense of disjunction is the same: a circuit board with an unfinished circuit; an Escher print where the perspective disappears up its own staircase; those people from Moral Re-Armament who invited you unaccountably to lunch in the 1970s; a telephone kiosk in the desert; Mormons. One observes quizzically yet unable even to frame the question. Years later, when the thing implodes, one says: “I always knew there was something dodgy there; I should have looked into it; I should have said something.”

But what? This was at a time when all the wise people said Carlos Menem was doing things right, the peso had linked to the dollar and the entire Spanish banking system was taking a punt with Argentine economic prospects. To talk of the inherent madness would have appeared, in itself, mad.

Now, at least, there is acceptance that something is wrong. Let me take a stab at saying what. I think the problem with Argentina is shopping.

There is much too much shopping in Argentina, and it has been going on for a long time. Everybody in Buenos Aires seems to be shopping and when they are not shopping they are at yacht clubs, or with their psychoanalysts.

Another favourite pastime is visiting cemeteries, at the most fashionable of which I was astonished to encounter something more resembling a city than a place of burial. Family mausoleums vied with each other for marbled splendour. Some were multistoreyed, and some went down a couple of floors beneath ground. One was said to have a lift. Through the streets of this macabre metropolis women in mink walked miniature poodles in tartan coats.

Where, then, was the money coming from? I saw some breweries, a cement works and a Coca-Cola bottling plant, and there were rumoured to be factories (on strike) in another part of town. There were also a great many waiters, hotels, bars, clubs, and sexily skirted shopgirls selling sickly-sweet pastries and treacly cream. There were window-dressers. And, everywhere, there was shopping.

Well, it’s fairly clear — is it not — what was amiss? The country was living way beyond its means. People did know this, on one level at least. They knew what the figures said, and they blamed the Government for not getting the figures right. It was all due, they said, “to corruption”; no doubt somebody, probably the political class, was salting it away. Government needed to be “cleaned up”, people said (while boasting about how cleverly they were fiddling their own taxes); but in the meantime much hope was being placed by some, and much disbelief by others, in whatever it was President Menem was doing with the currency.

Those who supported pegging the peso to the dollar thought this would rescue the Argentine economy; those who did not, thought it would wreck the Argentine economy. On one thing, however, there seemed to be wide agreement: getting the currency right would be the basis for economic revival.

To another question, however, little attention was directed. Given that currency is really just a medium of exchange, what of the things — the goods and services — to be exchanged? What were Argentinians making? What were they doing when not shopping? How hard were they working? What were they paying themselves for this work? About such questions I heard less discussion and sensed a lack of focus. This was very different from neighbouring Chile, a humbler country where the hussle and buzz of economic activity filled the air.

Currency and Corruption became the great evasions of political discussion in Argentina. Currency was something somebody else — a politician — had to get right before the economy would work.

Corruption was the reason why, even after many fine minds had applied themselves to Currency, the economy was still refusing to work.

When a political leader has been spat humiliatingly out by the voters we are understandably disinclined to hitch our judgment to his star, but Fernando de la Rúa, President for two years since 1999, does seem to me to have been right. And in the end, the bangers of pots and pans got him.

They will soon be banging their pots and pans outside the house of their latest President, Eduardo Duhalde. Whatever left-wing window-dressing the 60-year-old Peronist veteran brings to his appointment, the real need and only solution is austerity, massive spending cuts and an end to featherbedding. As a Peronist he will not find it easy to lead this way. Already the pots and pans beat for fresh elections and the eviction of the entire political class.

Listen to those pots and pans in Argentina. They are a voice, and a powerful one, of democracy. The voice says “let us have our cake and eat it”. The voice has shouted down government after government in that country.

Nor do you need to remind me that Argentina has only fitfully enjoyed elected government. It is a great fallacy of post-1945 political science to equate democracy with elected government. Democracy is the crowd, the majority, the mob; the crowd may get its way by electing a government or by sustaining a dictator. Some of history’s most notorious populists have been dictators and generals; for most dictators, if they are to survive, must be or become demagogues.

A dictator — as was Juan Perón — is in some senses more at the mercy of his people than an elected government, for his position is inherently precarious and his tenure, however long, will always have a temporary flavour. Nobody rules for ever without the love of the people, but elected governments can on the whole get away with it for longer. A dictator — an Amin, Mussolini, Mugabe, Hitler, Galtieri — needs to work more assiduously to please the crowd, and has a greater power to carry into effect the will of the people, than a prime minister or elected president. When it suited him, Perón and his trade unions had no difficulty in winning elections.

But with elections come constitutions, terms of office, courts and rules of law. These, often thought of as characterising democracy, are impediments to the will of the people, and intended to be. So are the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank, the World Bank, world trade and “globalisation”. They are bulwarks against the mob.

And they, or a fair few of them, will now have to serve as President Duhalde’s allies against the Argentine electorate, banging its pots and pans in the face of reality. Lemmings do not always know what is good for them. Lemmings can be democrats, too.

-- Anonymous, January 13, 2002