Plastic waiting chairs await me in the spacious immigration offices built for streams of millions of European poor from Italy, Spain and other nations at war. The huddled masses arrived flea-bitten and seasick in their millions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These fine buildings are reminiscent of the best of British Edwardian and Georgian architecture.
Twice this port town of Buenos Aires repulsed British military invasions, first in 1806 under the Viscount of Beresford, then in 1807 under John Whitelocke. The first invasion was an individual enterprise with no sanction from the crown run out of South Africa with 1,500 men under arms; the second larger invasion of 8,000 men was met by organized resistance. Poor Lord Beresford spent six months in a dingy jail before escaping and John Whitelocke was ostracized as a result of his ignoble defeat at the hands of Santiago de Liniers.
After the second British attack on Montevideo and Buenos Aires the Empire gave up their Colonial ambitions and resorted to do with Argentina what they do best: they enslaved the Argentine nation using the hegemony of the Pound Sterling and loans from private London Banks.
This investment strategy added Argentina to the commercial British Empire, managed by the scurrilous Argentine “families” under the whip of the London banking sector with the ever-present threat of gunboat diplomacy. Argentine lands were to be run for the benefit of the British Crown and the deep pockets of the mercantile food corporations of the British Empire. “The Argentine” played a significant rural role as the grain bank and meat producer of England. Shiploads of food fed many a European war with bully beef and grains.
Fast forward to today’s Bicentenary and Argentine agricultural lands now power German trucks with inefficient “biodiesel” from Soybean oil. Sold to the European governments, soybean oil is another false solution to climate change and “energy security”. Biodiesel is, instead, a product that makes about as much sense as high fructose corn syrup –sugar from corn not cane or beet. It produces an inferior product at a higher cost both in monetary and environmental terms; a ludicrous result of the shady alliances between the global agro-industrial sector and public tax funds from Europe and North America.
The useless Biodiesel industry brings millions from northern taxpayers to the private agro-business sector by means of subsidies, meanwhile converting excellent Argentine land from human food production to pig feed and inefficient fuel –both for export to pay the ever present debt.
Today’s Argentine landowning families have sold or leased more than 50% of this vast nation’s arable land for transgenic Soybean cultivation. The soybeans, mashed into biodiesel and high protein pig-food, produce subsidized inputs for two other useless industrial sectors: inefficient fuel and factory-farmed meat.
Much of what is now Argentina is in fact, a giant land mass of excellent territory sold or rented to the ABCD’s of transgenic human and pig food: A: Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), B: Bunge, C: Cargill and D: Dreyfus. It is an ignominious end for a proud gaucho nation whose economy once produced useful products for themselves and for export, and whose economy in the Belle Époque rivaled that of the US.
Here in Buenos Aires on the 25th of May 2010, the decaying megacity of about seventeen million souls is ringed by slums of mestizo Argentines, Bolivians, Peruvians and Paraguayans driven off these beautiful lands and into this capital of the new third world. Here the new immigrants sit with me on these same plastic seats in the offices of immigration. Today Argentina celebrates its bicentenary with less independence than ever of its corporate masters. A third military invasion was never necessary. The Argentine class system fuelled by the two-tier dollar and peso economy, was all that was required to drive this export-based economy back into the Third World.
Happy birthday Argentina.
Comentarios recientes