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]
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