Gorojovsky
Sat, 07 Apr 2001 12:13:57 -0700
En relación a [CrashList] Financial Times: Milosevic's murky fo, el 6 Apr 01, a las 6:51, Mark Jones dijo: > G17, an independent economic think-tank, says hyperinflation was used to > transfer wealth from the public to the state and its associates. By printing > cash to pay its bills, the regime stayed a small step ahead of the inflationary > curve at its citizens' expense. Again. This is an old line for Argentineans who are aware of our history. The 1890 crisis, AKA the Baring crisis, was blamed on Argentina, which was ruled, up to those times, by a decaying expression of the national movement, the Roquista movement, expressed by the President Juárez Celman. Juárez Celman incurred, or so it was said, in so enormous financial blunders that we shook the world and put the Baring Brothers in turmoil long before Nick Leeson took them to the slaughterhouse that they had always belonged to. This is, of course, sheer idiocy, and blaming a victim for what the victim did not want to allow. Juárez Celman, who was not precisely a man devoid of sins, was however an Argentinean from the Inland country. If, on the one hand, he committed the terrible mistake of giving the ownership of our state=owned railroads to British syndicates, at the same time he requested that railroad lines be built in the Inland country, exactly against the interest of the British stockholders, who wanted to concentrate on the Pampa region. During the late 1950s, an Anglo Canadian historian, H.S.Ferns, with a sharp eye, defined Juárez Celman as "a representative of the landed interest, particularly the landed interest of the poorest Andean provinces of the West and the Northwest" (Ferns, 1966: 409, ff.). Immediately after this definition, which sets Juárez Celman apart from the pro-imperialist oligarchy whose base of power was the port of Buenos Aires and the rich Pampa plains, Ferns complains: "His most enthusiastic supporters were those who were more decided to use credit and the resources of the State to build railroads in the Inland country. A policy that, under the direction of Mitre [the arch-representative of the Buenos Aires oligarchy, the man of Britain in the River Plate, NG] and Sarmiento [a pedagogic murderer of gauchos, NG], and even of Roca [see the subtle deprecation in the "even": Roca came to power in direct confrontation with the oligarchy, NG], had been sensibly conceived as a way to politically link the Argentinean community and to favor its economic development, became during the rule of Juárez Celman a formula that would authorize the construction of railroads where the friends of the administration wanted them built." Later on, Ferns states that it would have been better if Argentina had concentrated its efforts around the Buenos Aires and Pampa areas. Allow me to point out that the "friends of the administration" so much deprecated by our lovable Oxonian history maker were, oh, surprise, Argentineans. Allow me to point out that the British interests in Buenos Aires took revenge on Juárez Celman in 1890, when under the pretext of the financial crisis he had to resign. "Ya se fue, ya se fue / el burrito cordobés" (The Cordobés donkey is at last away) chanted the Mitrista mobs of the man who only a day ago was the President, in the streets of Buenos Aires. The charges of corruption made on Milosevic (who, at worst, made some Yugoslavs richer, and not some Englishmen) are of the same moral nature as the similar charges made against every Latin American ruler (and I am not excluding wavering and even reactionary rulers here) each time some money is diverted from the pockets of the Empires. It is thus important for us Latin Americans to stand up against these interpretations, because if we accept that others be victim of them, then we shall be victimized again. In the end, by the way, all this historicism is directly related with the Crash List: what the FT is blaming Milo for is that he cut a morsel of the pie for himself and Yugoslav friends, that is he did not allow a part of the booty to end in the pockets of the financial oligarchy of London, thus made it less easy to keep the whole economic structure running, thus he helped the rate of profit to fall a little bit more. Of course, the FT will never admit this. As Bernard Shaw said once, the English will always have a principle handy, in order to kill you in the name of that principle. Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base