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Para los que lean ingles , tratare de traducir con mas tiempo si interesa .
Quizas muchos digan que se meten los yanquees en nuestros temas , go home , bla,bla ,.....la realidad es que estos articulos influyen cuando se piden prestamos o se negocian contratos . Y lo mas triste es que lo que dice ES LA PURA VERDAD .
THE OPINION PAGES | OPED
COLUMNIST
Cry for Me, Argentina
FEB. 27, 2014
Roger Cohen
USHUAIA, Argentina — A bon mot doing the rounds in post-commoditiesboom
South America is that Brazil is in the process of becoming Argentina,
and Argentina is in the process of becoming Venezuela, and Venezuela is in
the process of becoming Zimbabwe. That is a little harsh on Brazil and
Venezuela.
Argentina, however, is a perverse case of its own. It is a nation still
drugged by that quixotic political concoction called Peronism; engaged in
all-out war on reliable economic data; tinkering with its multilevel
exchange rate; shut out from global capital markets; trampling on
property rights when it wishes; obsessed with a lost little war in the
Falklands (Malvinas) more than three decades ago; and persuaded that the
cause of all this failure lies with speculative powers seeking to force a
proud nation — in the words of its leader — “to eat soup again, but this
time with a fork.”
A century ago, Argentina was richer than Sweden, France, Austria and
Italy. It was far richer than Japan. It held poor Brazil in contempt. Vast
and empty, with the world’s richest top soil in the Pampas, it seemed to the
European immigrants who flooded here to have all the potential of the
United States (per capita income is now a third or less of the United States
level). They did not know that a colonel called Juan Domingo Perón and
his wife Eva (“Evita”) would shape an ethos of singular delusional power.
“Argentina is a unique case of a country that has completed the
transition to underdevelopment,” said Javier Corrales, a political scientist
at Amherst College.
In psychological terms — and Buenos Aires is packed with folks on
couches pouring out their anguish to psychotherapists — Argentina is the
child among nations that never grew up. Responsibility was not its thing.
Why should it be? There was so much to be plundered, such riches in grain
and livestock, that solid institutions and the rule of law — let alone a
functioning tax system — seemed a waste of time.
Immigrants camped here with foreign passports rather than go
through the nation-forming absorption that characterize Brazil or the
United States. Argentina was far away at the bottom of the world, a
beckoning fertile land mass distant enough from power centers to live its
own peripheral fantasies or drown its sorrow in what is probably the
world’s saddest (and most haunting) dance. Then, to give expression to its
uniqueness, Argentina invented its own political philosophy: a strange
mishmash of nationalism, romanticism, fascism, socialism, backwardness,
progressiveness, militarism, eroticism, fantasy, musical, mournfulness,
irresponsibility and repression. The name it gave all this was Peronism. It
has proved impossible to shake.
Perón, who discovered the political uplift a military officer could
derive from forging links with the have-nots of Latin America and
distributing cash (a lesson absorbed by Hugo Chávez), was deposed in the
first of four postwar coups. The Argentina I covered in the 1980s was just
emerging from the trauma of military rule. If I have a single emblematic
image of the continent then it is of the uncontrollable sobbing of Argentine
women clutching the photographs of beloved children who had been taken
from them for “brief questioning” only to vanish. The region’s military
juntas turned “disappear” into a transitive verb. It is what they did to
deemed enemies — 30,000 of them in Argentina.
Since 1983, Argentina has ceased its military-civilian whiplash, tried
some of the perpetrators of human rights crimes and been governed
democratically. But for most of that time it has been run by Peronists,
most recently Néstor Kirchner and his widow, Cristina Fernández de
Kirchner (shades of Perón’s widow Isabel), who have rediscovered
redistribution after a Peronist flurry in the 1990s with neoliberalism.
Economic whiplash is alive and well. So are reckless spending in good
times and lawless measures in bad. So, too, are mawkish evocations of
Perón and Evita and Isabel: On earth as it is in the heavens.
Cry for me, my name is Argentina and I am too rich for my own good.
Twenty-five years ago I left a country of hyperinflation (5,000 percent
in 1989), capital flight, currency instability, heavy-handed state
interventionism, dwindling reserves, uncompetitive industry, heavy
reliance on commodity exports, reawakening Peronist fantasies and
bottom-of-the-world complexes. Today inflation is high rather than hyper.
Otherwise, not a whole lot has changed.
Coming ashore at Ushuaia on Argentina’s southern tip, the first thing
I saw was a sign saying that the “Malvinas” islands were under illegal
occupation by the United Kingdom since 1833. The second was a signpost
saying Ireland was 13,199 kilometers away (no mention of Britain). The
third was a packet of cookies “made in Ushuaia, the end of the world.” The
fourth was a pocket calculator used by a shopkeeper to figure out dollarpeso
rates.
Hope is hard to banish from the human heart, but it has to be said
that Argentina does its best to do so.
A version of this oped
appears in print on February 28, 2014, in The International New York Times.
Quizas muchos digan que se meten los yanquees en nuestros temas , go home , bla,bla ,.....la realidad es que estos articulos influyen cuando se piden prestamos o se negocian contratos . Y lo mas triste es que lo que dice ES LA PURA VERDAD .
THE OPINION PAGES | OPED
COLUMNIST
Cry for Me, Argentina
FEB. 27, 2014
Roger Cohen
USHUAIA, Argentina — A bon mot doing the rounds in post-commoditiesboom
South America is that Brazil is in the process of becoming Argentina,
and Argentina is in the process of becoming Venezuela, and Venezuela is in
the process of becoming Zimbabwe. That is a little harsh on Brazil and
Venezuela.
Argentina, however, is a perverse case of its own. It is a nation still
drugged by that quixotic political concoction called Peronism; engaged in
all-out war on reliable economic data; tinkering with its multilevel
exchange rate; shut out from global capital markets; trampling on
property rights when it wishes; obsessed with a lost little war in the
Falklands (Malvinas) more than three decades ago; and persuaded that the
cause of all this failure lies with speculative powers seeking to force a
proud nation — in the words of its leader — “to eat soup again, but this
time with a fork.”
A century ago, Argentina was richer than Sweden, France, Austria and
Italy. It was far richer than Japan. It held poor Brazil in contempt. Vast
and empty, with the world’s richest top soil in the Pampas, it seemed to the
European immigrants who flooded here to have all the potential of the
United States (per capita income is now a third or less of the United States
level). They did not know that a colonel called Juan Domingo Perón and
his wife Eva (“Evita”) would shape an ethos of singular delusional power.
“Argentina is a unique case of a country that has completed the
transition to underdevelopment,” said Javier Corrales, a political scientist
at Amherst College.
In psychological terms — and Buenos Aires is packed with folks on
couches pouring out their anguish to psychotherapists — Argentina is the
child among nations that never grew up. Responsibility was not its thing.
Why should it be? There was so much to be plundered, such riches in grain
and livestock, that solid institutions and the rule of law — let alone a
functioning tax system — seemed a waste of time.
Immigrants camped here with foreign passports rather than go
through the nation-forming absorption that characterize Brazil or the
United States. Argentina was far away at the bottom of the world, a
beckoning fertile land mass distant enough from power centers to live its
own peripheral fantasies or drown its sorrow in what is probably the
world’s saddest (and most haunting) dance. Then, to give expression to its
uniqueness, Argentina invented its own political philosophy: a strange
mishmash of nationalism, romanticism, fascism, socialism, backwardness,
progressiveness, militarism, eroticism, fantasy, musical, mournfulness,
irresponsibility and repression. The name it gave all this was Peronism. It
has proved impossible to shake.
Perón, who discovered the political uplift a military officer could
derive from forging links with the have-nots of Latin America and
distributing cash (a lesson absorbed by Hugo Chávez), was deposed in the
first of four postwar coups. The Argentina I covered in the 1980s was just
emerging from the trauma of military rule. If I have a single emblematic
image of the continent then it is of the uncontrollable sobbing of Argentine
women clutching the photographs of beloved children who had been taken
from them for “brief questioning” only to vanish. The region’s military
juntas turned “disappear” into a transitive verb. It is what they did to
deemed enemies — 30,000 of them in Argentina.
Since 1983, Argentina has ceased its military-civilian whiplash, tried
some of the perpetrators of human rights crimes and been governed
democratically. But for most of that time it has been run by Peronists,
most recently Néstor Kirchner and his widow, Cristina Fernández de
Kirchner (shades of Perón’s widow Isabel), who have rediscovered
redistribution after a Peronist flurry in the 1990s with neoliberalism.
Economic whiplash is alive and well. So are reckless spending in good
times and lawless measures in bad. So, too, are mawkish evocations of
Perón and Evita and Isabel: On earth as it is in the heavens.
Cry for me, my name is Argentina and I am too rich for my own good.
Twenty-five years ago I left a country of hyperinflation (5,000 percent
in 1989), capital flight, currency instability, heavy-handed state
interventionism, dwindling reserves, uncompetitive industry, heavy
reliance on commodity exports, reawakening Peronist fantasies and
bottom-of-the-world complexes. Today inflation is high rather than hyper.
Otherwise, not a whole lot has changed.
Coming ashore at Ushuaia on Argentina’s southern tip, the first thing
I saw was a sign saying that the “Malvinas” islands were under illegal
occupation by the United Kingdom since 1833. The second was a signpost
saying Ireland was 13,199 kilometers away (no mention of Britain). The
third was a packet of cookies “made in Ushuaia, the end of the world.” The
fourth was a pocket calculator used by a shopkeeper to figure out dollarpeso
rates.
Hope is hard to banish from the human heart, but it has to be said
that Argentina does its best to do so.
A version of this oped
appears in print on February 28, 2014, in The International New York Times.
