illustration: Camila Lo Forte
ARGENTINA BURNS: AUTHORITARIANISM, FARMS AND AGRICULTURAL HEGEMONY
August 20, 2020
Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon walk through a maze of young bodies stripped down to their underwear with tags hanging from their toes. This is one of many horrifying images in Costa-Gavras 1982 film Missing, and a moment of realization for Lemmon, a middle-aged apathetic New Yorker who travels to Santiago, Chile at the beginning of the US-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to search for his missing son, a freelance investigative journalist. Missing was amongst my first exposures to the authoritarianism that swept across the Southern Cone in the 1970s.
When I came to study in Argentina soon after, I learned about their military occupation through film and literature as well. In a Spanish class we watched La Historia Oficial, about an upper class woman who begins to suspect that her adopted daughter is the child of a desaparecida, one of the 30,000 people who were systematically disappeared during a US backed military dictatorship from 1976 and 1983. With friends I watched more, like the operatic Garage Olimpo, about an activist who is kidnapped by the military squad and tortured by a man who was once her tenant, or La Noche de los Lápices, about a group of high school students that participate in a series of student strikes and are eventually kidnapped as well.
In Argentina, at least, the military dictatorship is omnipresent in art, both as protagonist in films like The Clan or as the backdrop like in The Angel (both excellent films, by the way), and remains a divisive conversation outside the boundaries of pop culture. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared, are powerful political voices, and their violent opposition is still vocal in established political circles, like when then President Mauricio Macri famously suggested that the number of disappeared might be closer to 9,000, as if the number is the important part. In the streets, plaques mark the last known whereabouts of the kidnapped, and the phrase Nunca Más, or never again, is part of the national vernacular.
We tend to ruminate over authoritarianism as temporal—lapses of political violence with a beginning, middle and an end that are retold and remembered through a very narrow lens of human rights abuses. This, of course, makes perfect sense. Physical wounds and emotional trauma are impactful; they are easy to see and empathize with. Authoritarianism is about pillaging power and unfairly redistributing it, and thus, its ‘end’ is little more than our perception of it. The effects of state violence lingers long after the military has fallen, and as is the case of Argentina, we continue to eat up its consequences here and export it to the rest of the world in shiny bags of tofu. It is important to view political occupation in this way, as not just the pain stagnant in time but rather a poison that runs downward and contaminates the entire system and grows into a new one.
Cecilia Gárgano is a history professor at the University of Buenos Aires who focuses on the history of contemporary science and technology. She wrote her thesis on the relationship between Argentina’s military dictatorship and knowledge production in the agricultural sector with an emphasis on seed production. We sat down over zoom (with three dogs and a cat between us) to discuss the historic concentration of power in Argentine agriculture, the role of the military dictatorship in laying down the foundations for that agro industrialization that began in the 1990s and the symbolic construction of ‘place’ that allow the pillaging of natural resources.
Tucuman Arde, a 1968 art project about the precarious conditions of the working class in the northwest rural state of Tucumán. Left, “Tucumán burns” and right, “Visit Tucumán: The Garden of Misery”.
Argentina is a country that since the colonization and the Vice Royalty has always had a strong connection to agriculture from all angles, socio-political and economic. To understand a bit more about the modernization that happened during the 20th century, can you tell us the role the countryside and agriculture had historically and the traditional national model pre-modernization?
Argentina is a country whose national identity from a cultural and social perspective was built through agriculture the start of its formation as a nation state. There are a lot of myths in literature, especially centered around the gaucho, and the conflicts that arose between the various federal regions during state building. Obviously a key piece of the formation of the economy and entrance into the global capitalist market that existed was as a major agro exporter that constructed this economic mold from the get go. There were also a this identity building [sic] the role of the land and Argentina’s position as the ‘world’s silo’. In political terms, the dominant class historically was connected to the control of the land. That control started with the so-called ‘desert campaigns’ which in reality was the invasion of territory that was occupied by indigenous communities and this symbolic construction of empty territory. That territory belonged to a people that were demolished in order to work that land. When we talk about a desert, it is to think about those spaces as empty to set aside the concrete consequences that comes with this type of production in agro exportation for the people that live on that land and is a symbolic construction that persists today in a different context.
Was there always a concentration of land and power or did there exist a culture of small producers?
There was always a powerful concentration of land and wealth. But this also varied by region. In the north, there were lots of problems with small landholding against these enormous plantations, particularly the sugar plantations, but in the region of La Pampa, small and medium sized producers, which we call ‘chacareros’, were much more powerful. Beginning around the 1970s there was a gradual growth of concentration of land and an exodus of small producers.
In the 70s there was a strong reaction against modernization and industrialization in agriculture, lots of activism, and in Argentina that was related to the military occupations that swept across the continent during a short amount of time. What were the causes here for mobilization?
In Argentina, there were a lot of attempts to exit this economic model that was dependent on agro exportation to incorporate more diverse industrialization that predates the military dictatorship. Even in these moments of national nostalgia underneath Peronism when regional development really advanced. The agriculture sector was always what sustained the national economy and there were many attempts to redirect the economy. This is still a problem that we are dealing with. There were repressive advances mostly against social organizations that were seeking our certain concessions, and in agriculture specifically, there were unified leagues of producers. There was a long process of dismantlement that came long before the dictatorship, that honestly, once the dictatorship arrived had basically been decimated. But those concessions that were visible in social mobilizations didn’t have a lot to do with the transformation of production processes that were being seen across the agriculture system that came with the Green Revolution. In other countries, the groups of rural workers that spoke up and denounced the use of chemicals and other toxins, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, that conversation that was becoming very present in the United States, it didn’t really develop here. Here the socio-environmental issues that are becoming very present in today’s social movements, it hadn’t taken political root at that time. There had started to develop a sort of questioning, how we should investigate these issues in a country like ours where there is enormous social inequality and problems with access to land and investigate their role within rural issues. Obviously the military intervention put a stop to that questioning and investigation.
What was the role of the dictatorship in setting the stage for the agriculture we see today?
Their objective was to take apart social fabrics and strike down all political militancy or critique. There were a bunch of measures that were taken in the agriculture sector that totally sterilized the role of the State [sic] the end of control over beef and grain production and regulatory organizations. There was a lot of repression over the economy that had strong support from those sectors of society, you know, of traditional economic groups that were participating in that power grab. There were huge advancements in the privatization of public land and the consolidation of the modernity process that was brought during the Green Revolution where they’d seen success in increasing production despite it coming at the cost of stressing social inequality and expelling small farmers from the land. It was a total restructuring of the rural world.
from “The Human Cost” by photographer Pablo Piovano, a photo series that captures the side effects of Monsanto and other agrotoxins across the Argentine northeast.
So if the dictatorship was a moment of tearing everything down, it facilitated the construction of what we see now. The introduction of transgenics in the 1990s and the total neoliberalization of the economy. Tell me about how the scene changed in the 90s and what we see now.
The 1990s was a totally different process of modernization. What began in the 1960s and 70s on a global scale [sic] by the 1990s the concentration of power and the neoliberal model, it was something completely different. If we look at who today controls seed production and chemicals, those worlds are completely intertwined, so the person that sells you the seed is the same one that sells you the agrotoxin that is associated with that seed. Those processes were a lot more visible. And in agriculture, it is impossible to separate technology from its social framing. The Green Revolution sparked this financial-philanthropic movement. Companies like Ford and Kellogg began forming alliances for progress and this public discourse began to emerge about stopping the next Cuba in South America and this whole question of combating hunger and poverty. The unique thing about the introduction of transgenics in Argentina in 1996 was how quickly it was authorized without any type of public discussion, no official studies about the possible environmental or health impacts. I think it is really important to think about the role of the State underneath a neoliberal model. The idea is that the State shrinks and privatizes everything [sic] water, electricity and public land. But this idea of shrinking the State, the State is playing a very active role that is fundamental in permitting the concentration of power and the union of the public and the private which are two very different spaces. The organizations that are in charge of regulating transgenics, when we look at who is sitting at that table, who is speaking, the voices are from the private sector and the multinationals. Where are the family run farms? There are so many examples of small business owners and farmers that are working with new forms of production that have not been given a voice on an official level. There is a lot of movement coming from the bottom at a small scale that isn't permitted to permeate these spaces.
The negative side effects that come from the massive and concentrated use of agrotoxins like contaminating waterways, causing illnesses, the exodus of small producers from the land, how long did it take to see those problems?
It was very quick. Soy was transformed into a monoculture and it expanded across the country [sic] so much land that had never been produced before, that was very fast. The ones that started raising the flag and spoke out against the damage it was causing was the population. It is a fight from the people themselves that continues today and there are so many scientists and researchers studying the environmental and social impacts and examining the way life has changed in these places. The thing is that there are no official reports. That is something very macabre because for example with the wetlands, that is happening right now, the population that suffers has to demonstrate officially with scientific evidence the damage to their immunological system. So once the damage has already been produced the population has to tell you and prove to you with scientific evidence but the authorization of that type of economic activity doesn’t require any kind of study of possible damages.
[Editor’s note: since the beginning of the year, an estimated 100 thousand hectares of wetlands in the state of Santa Fe have been set on fire to clear land for cattle ranching. Fires have caused massive losses of local animal populations and air quality has been severely affected across Central and Northeast Argentina.]
I think it is a really important point to make about that paradigm. Basically what is legislated and effectively has become the State position is this very reactionary take rather than a preventative measure. And it is very important to what is happening now with the debate over the agreement with China to produce millions of pigs for pork export. It is very unclear the knowledge or information that the government is analyzing to make that decision, whether it is purely economic or if scientists and sociologists are being consulted with too in a profound way.
What sounds the alarm for the agreement with China, besides the obvious which is that it is being discussed in the middle of a global pandemic, is that suddenly a country wants to delocalize production and insert it into another territory. So the first question is, what are the problems they want to avoid there that we are going to have to deal with here? And to answer your question, there is very little official information and very specific voices that are being brought to the table, obviously the producers that would be involved are there, and then all the voices that are not invited to the table. We already know what happens from lived experience when these types of experiments play out and it is necessary to have voices that are plural and transparent. Bringing transgenics here was a kind of experiment and we have lived it, we have studied the negative impacts that are a part of that package.
It is interesting to see the argument that has arisen about the pigs being necessary for the advancement of the country. That is a mental and social construction. What are the conditions of that construction that allow for this kind of agriculture to continue to be perceived as necessary?
The argument is based around an idea of political realism that speaks about hegemonic production as something that we need to bring in foreign currency, to bring in dollars, to stimulate exportation. That a country like Argentina can’t be a giant agroecological, environmentalist farm. And the other side of this attack on environmentalism is an argument that this is a middle class concern or a first world problem about filling our stomachs with organic food. The conditions for that argument is dependent on a socio-economic imbalance that invisibilizes those that are most vulnerable to this kind of production. So there are two questions here. The first is, how do we organize the Argentine economy? There are a lot of people who die from hunger even though we produce enormous amounts of food. And then it's this construction you point out. What is another way? What do we do? If this is an agro exporting country, if this isn’t what we live off of, what do we live on? I am just amazed at how much power these ideas have. Because if I showed you photographs of the people behind that GDP, if we put a face and a name to the sacrifice of land and people, you would never be able to create this national proposal of to sustain this system we are willing to put this many Argentines at risk of having spontaneous abortions, of contracting preventable cancers and using the land in a way that will make it useless for the next generation. What is the cost of this construction, you know? When you actually travel to these places it becomes very difficult to say this is what the country needs. And in a lot of the developed world, in parts of Europe for example, there are a lot of restrictive policies. But in the Global South, in the periphery countries, in the most impoverished places, those places are used as experiments and we are supposed to think that this is some magical solution that is going to line our pockets with dollars. How? From where? What producers are going to be expelled? What producers are going to multiply? What happens to the small family farms?
I know that this is a very big question and you won’t have a single response, but where do you see the road towards dismantling that construction and building something new based around healthier ideas and alternative ways to produce and consume?
Something important to understand is that there is no magic solution that will change everything and it definitely doesn’t happen one day to the next. But it is also illogical to suggest that if we don’t produce in this way that a robust GDP is impossible, it isn’t logical that we live in a country with millions of hectares of land and so many children that die of hunger. But that is what the system has done, it makes it so that thinking of an alternative is impossible to even imagine. It is totally naturalized. If we pull everything back more abstractly, it is really difficult to justify this as necessary damage just because. And it is a lie, mostly, that this kind of agriculture is necessary. If we were to have a national production, all the money that is produced by that agriculture could be used by the State to reinvest in the country because currently a lot of that wealth is stuck in private hands. But in order to plant new alternatives, first, we have to deconstruct these ideas in order to think about alternative consumption habits. We can look at things on a smaller scale, more local. I see a lot of places that are building their own alternatives that function according to their needs and produce, consume and exchange in different ways. I think it is possible to transport those small alternatives to a national discussion.
correction: in the original version of this interview, I used the term “Dirty War” in reference to the military dictatorship. This is a term that was utilized by the military junta to justify institutionalized state violence and should not be normalized or utilized to describe that time period.