From: "Alejandra Korstanje" <alek-AT-unt.edu.ar>
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2002 15:29:18 -0300
Subject: Who will cry for Argentina?
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">I sent this article two days ago to
the Washington Post, as a reply to</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">one of their editorial articles. As
they will never publish it, I</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">thought it may be intresting to shate
it with this list. Alejandra</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">WHO WILL CRY FOR ARGENTINA?</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">(An Argentinean answer to "Do
cry for Argentina" by Robert Samuelson,</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Wednesday, January 16, 2002; Page
A19)</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">By Alejandra Korstanje</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Besides complaining tangos and Evita's
shows, tragedy has certainly</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">arrived in Argentina and the "crying"
issue is a reality more than a</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">title for all the creative articles
that have being using the</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">metaphor. And thanks to Internet,
which is a really good horizontal</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">tool to allow more people read the
news, we have read most of those</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">articles wondering and analyzing the
situation. Some of them are kind</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">of naive, some of them are just informative,
but many of them are</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">obnoxious in the analysis. These last
ones are the ones that made me</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">angry today, and yesterday, and last
week. You can use Internet too to</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">read our newspapers but, since they
are in Spanish, I want to give our</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">point of view about this situation
to your people (your "pueblo"). I</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">think it's not fair all the analysis
in the media is coming from your</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">universities -even in the cases than
the one that writes was born in</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Argentina-, because it's still only
one point of view and reality is</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">much more complex than that. </span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">I agree there's no reason - I mean
no logical reason- for Argentina to be
a poor country as it is today. I would like to go beyond and ask if there's
any reason for any country or any person to be poor. No. There's no
logical reason either. The reasons are there, but they are not "logical",
they are historical and therefore they are political, economical and social.
If we could only walk a step behind our navel, we would realize that the
only logic lies in the fact that the planet, Earth, the Pachamama is
waiting us to understand poverty and inequality as the major dangers for
life, and therefore for our human specie as well. </span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Historical reasons for Argentina to
be a poor country go back far away in
time, always related with the colonial concept, a concept you understand
quite well and I do not have to explain, but anyhow: we are going to
focus closer now. I'm not going to put figures and statistic in this storyYou have shown many of them and most of them may be true.
Eventually, I only want to tell the people that we have learned to be
skeptical and we had lost the innocence about that too. Who makes the
statistics? Where and how are the data collected? What are the
questions they want to answer? Any way, you can go on using them. No
problem. </span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Argentina current infra development
levels and predictable crisis started
around the 70's. Petrol prizes, Liquid happy money, Cold War, Military</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">dictatorships supported and "educated"
by US in all Latinamerica.</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Neoliberalism. And all the Third World
constrained by debts. You all</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">know what I am talking about. You
do not need figures or statistics</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">for these, right? If you do let me
know, because I can certainly show</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">them. But you may reason, maliciously
or innocently: "<i>But you were</i></span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt"><i>free to take the credits!</i>".
I'm going to forget the malicious and</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">answer only to the innocents: "<i>Freedom
is not the same if you are in</i></span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt"><i>the core of the power than if you
are in the periphery, in the</i></span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt"><i>colonies"</i> (oh, sure, I
forgot we are in the postcolonial era!, sorry!).</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">So, who was "free" to choose?
We had a fascist military government
who took the happy money for some happy few friends, and afterwards
passed that debt to the whole population (including me, yes). World
Bank and IMF know that too. It's all recorded. Next step is a known old
story too: if you have a debt, the creditor is the one that will decide what</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">you are going to do until you pay
it. He or she will become your boss,</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">and he or she will decide what interest
rates are right and adequate.</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Sure, I know, when we are talking
about countries you also need a</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">corrupted person on the other side.
And if there's no one, you will</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">corrupt someone. "<i>Everybody
has a price</i>", says Robert Redford in a</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">film. Well, I truly agree that here
it was easy for corrupters, they</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">shouldn't have had much effort in
finding some.... That's easy in</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Argentina. I assume it's like that.
Especially since it's not just by</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">chance that we lost a whole generation
during the dirty war year's</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">-los desaparecidos-. </span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Maybe you, people in the US, don't
know or don't want to see that we
were the best "students", the "golden boys" for IMF. Our fault has been
to follow all their recipes to pay this debt, partially due to our economical
weakness and in part because we have politicians that agreed to be
subordinated to that extreme (including recipes about work flexibility that
seems Sebastian Edwards ignores. Does he? If in Argentina you can't
fire anyone, how did we arrive to a 20% of unemployment? ). But what
you don't know for sure is how people feel and suffer all of this from this
side of the world. You will never understand that if you can't see the
whole picture where foreign governments and international investors are
part of the corruptive chain too. And if you don't do any effort to
understand that... well, you are far away from Argentinean problems, so
please, do not pontificate about them. When I read in the media how the
international press puts the blames only on Argentinean politicians,
"cultural roots", or that Argentineans spend too much money (!) to
explain the crisis, I cannot believe the hypocrisy of this world! I should
say, the hypocrisy of this system, because I'm optimistic about the
people and the world. </span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Now it seems IMF may give some financial
help, as your</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">president said today, but he made
clear that the credits are only</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">going to arrive if our government
fix a program following the same</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">recipes we have already followed:
no protection for Argentinean</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">industry or production, completely
free markets, and no guarantees for</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">population, only for the financial
system. That's not help. That's a</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">death sentence for the "golden
student". As a teacher, I know my best</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">students are not the ones that reproduce
all what I say. Best students</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">are the ones that have enough autonomy
and critics sense to find their</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">own way, use alternative information
and are brave enough to contrast,</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">discuss and implement their own ideas.
But of course, I'm a teacher</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">looking for the truth, while IMF it's
just a collector. Well, folks,</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">as I said at the beginning we, Argentineans,
have lost the innocence</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">many years ago. We hate the corruption
in our governments and we
fight against it, but we also know someone helped from the First World,
in the central countries, in the neoliberal system, to corrupt them, in</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">order to make their "businesses"
possible. And we cannot do much
about that from here, but we want you to include in your analysis the
whole global situation, or either you stop claiming YOU are crying for</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Argentina.</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Alejandra Korstanje is a Professor
of Latinamerican and Argentinean</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">History and a Professor of Archaeology
at the Universidad Nacional de</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Tucumán, Argentina</span></font></div>
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<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Instituto de Arqueologia y Museo</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">Universidad Nacional de Tucuman</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">San Martin 1545 - 4000, Tucuman, Argentina</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">tel: 54-(0381) 4233962</span></font></div>
<div align="left"><font face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10pt">http://www.unt.edu.ar/fcsnat/arqueo/Default.htm</span></font></div>
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