Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

La larga historia de los saqueos en la Argentina: De la independencia a nuestros días

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-8178270

1527-1900

Carlos S. Dimas,

Argentine historical studies

This edited volume assesses the place of looting in Argentina's history, from the era of independence to the December 2013 police revolts. Three of the volume's ten chapters center on the nineteenth century. The remaining seven address the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, five on the period from 1983 to the present and two on the period from 1930 to 1955.The overarching argument of this edited volume is that lootings are complicated outbursts that are a conglomeration of historical narratives, current social turmoil, and ideological underpinnings. Indeed, one of this volume's major points is to remind readers how ubiquitous lootings have become in modern Argentine identity. Yet, as the editors point out, these acts of collective violence are rarely instances of collective action. Context is everything, an argument that each chapter advances. In doing so, the authors have brought to the forefront the underlying tensions that pushed people to the streets to loot and challenge the social order. Lootings are, therefore, micromoments that show how a society has or has not processed social change.By emphasizing context, this edited collection presents certain historical trends. Looting in the long nineteenth century became a vehicle for wealth accumulation as the consequence of the numerous political upheavals that plagued Argentina from independence to the civil wars. Such looting occurred as the settler-colonial state advanced into indigenous lands and in other spaces in which the project of nation-state building unfolded. After the Saenz Peña Law passed in 1912, which created secret ballot elections and gave all male citizens the right to vote, looting became a new language to express political dissatisfaction and incite change. However, only two chapters cover the era after this law's passage. More might have been said of the aftermath of the 1909 bombing of Buenos Aires chief of police Ramón Falcón, who undertook violent repression against the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation (FORA) and other left-leaning labor groups; the Semana Trágica of 1919; or the Década Infame (from 1930 to 1943). The last half of the volume addresses the inflation crisis of the 1980s, the 2001 economic crash, and the impact of the 2001 collapse on Argentina today. Overall, lootings have become calculated social responses to the impact of neoliberalism, with hunger, the widening socioeconomic gap, and the spatial segregation of the urban poor pushing citizens to the streets.The first chapter looks at looting among soldiers fighting in the wars of independence. Looting, desertion, and subversion were forms of exerting agency and gaining wealth. The following chapter focuses on the looters themselves. For Gabriel Di Meglio, the lootings that took place in Buenos Aires the day after Juan Manuel de Rosas fell from power were a byproduct of political change. Di Meglio shows that during this looting women and Afro-Argentines were scapegoated. Chapter 3 questions the correlation between looting and wealth accumulation. Focusing on the southern plains where the Argentine state and indigenous communities clashed, Ingrid de Jong and Guido Cordero argue that looting fits within the larger narrative of political allegiances and border disputes. These authors show that Argentina's southern border remained a negotiated space until policy changes came in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.Chapter 4 details the looting of Radical Civic Union president Hipólito Yrigoyen's home following the coup that removed him from power. In chapter 5, Juan Pablo Artinian advances the point that such looting was a sociopolitical statement by analyzing the lootings that took place in the final year of Juan Perón's first administration. The chapter shows that political groups were systematic in choosing what to loot, only targeting, for instance, Catholic churches that were attended by elites.Chapter 6 looks at the first lootings that occurred after the return to democracy, in response to rising inflation, the widening socioeconomic gap, hunger, and poverty. One of this chapter's main points is that looters were aware of what they were doing and the message that their actions were meant to convey to the state. Chapter 7 examines lootings in the interior province of Santiago del Estero in 1993. Marina Farinetti demonstrates the long-term impact of the economically turbulent 1980s on this province, one of the poorest in the nation. Mónica Gordillo's chapter focuses on the picket lines, marches, and cacerolazos that erupted after the 2001 crash. Gordillo posits that this eruption was not solely in response to the great crash of 2001. Rather, in order to understand the crash from a broader perspective, Gordillo holds that the lootings of 2001 were in response to the underlying social tensions that the economic bubble of the 1990s temporarily abated. Thus, society was still reacting to the economically and politically tumultuous 1980s. Jorge Ossona's contribution assesses the significant changes at the turn of the century in the small town of Villa Fiorito. The final chapter studies the police strikes in all but two provinces in 2013, which were in response to inflation and low wages.