Beyond Buenos Aires, Argentina unfolds as a true treasure trove of terrain and peoples, from the tropical jungles and arid deserts of the north, to the glaciers and untamed wilderness of the south, from the large provincial cities of Cordóba and Rosario to the windswept isolation of Patagonia, from the wine country around Mendoza and the ski pistes of Bariloche to the beaches of Mar del Plata, from the pre-colonial peoples of the northwest, the Welsh of Chubut, and the Swiss of Misiones to the Italians, Spaniards, Eastern European Jews, and the plethora of others that call Buenos Aires home—Argentina is a nation of natural extremes and countless cultures.

Over 11,000 years before the arrival of the first Europeans in the region, the vast lands that make up Argentina were already settled by many indigenous civilizations whose lifestyles differed with the variations in terrain, from marine-oriented fishing cultures in the far south to sedentary agricultural groups in the forested north and nomadic hunters across the great central plains and southern steppes. The Andean civilizations were probably the most advanced, having developed trade routes northward into modern-day Bolivia and across the mountains to the Pacific.

In 1516, Juan de Solis, a Portuguese navigator sailing for the Spanish Crown, explored the expansive estuary of the River Plate before being slaughtered, most likely by the Charrúa people of its eastern bank (the so-called Banda Oriental that later became Uruguay). Magellan followed in 1520, sailing south along the Atlantic coast and through the straits that bear his name. The first major European settlement on the western shore of the River Plate (a misnomer given the supposed “river of silver” by the explorer Cabot) was Santa María de Buen Aire, founded by the Spaniard Pedro de Mendoza in 1536. The riverside settlement did not fare well, as starvation and raids by the Querandí people decimated the outpost, forcing operations to move north to Asunción. In 1580, a new group of settlers came downriver from Asunción, refounding Buenos Aires on the present-day site of Plaza de Mayo.

During its first century or so of existence, Buenos Aires proved of little interest to its Spanish rulers. Surrounded by seemingly endless plains and scattered, hostile indigenous groups, Buenos Aires procured few of the treasures that “New World” colonial centers like Lima and Mexico were producing. And despite possessing a good river port, the settlement’s growth was stifled by imperial trade policy that prevented it from using Transatlantic routes and emphasized riverine and overland trade toward Peru and the Caribbean. During the 16th and 17th Centuries inland settlements like Tucumán and Cordóba that supplied the imperial bonanza in the Viceroyalty of Peru quickly outgrew the backwater town of Buenos Aires, a pattern quite contrary to later developments.

But Buenos Aires had a sleeping advantage over the other settlements: the offspring of the horses and cows abandoned by the original 1536 settlement. Having grown exponentially on the fertile grasslands of the Pampas, these animal populations became the unlikely engine for Buenos Aires’ growth—alongside a fair amount of contraband trade with the Portuguese colony of Brasil. Spreading out from Buenos Aires into the Pampas, Spanish settlers created vast estancias (ranches) while gauchos (cowboys) tended huge herds of roaming cattle. The estancieros would eventually become independent Argentina’s oligarchic leaders, and the gauchos, its soldiers of national consolidation.

In 1776, Spain recognized the economic boom in the Pampas by declaring Buenos Aires the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, a mammoth swath of territory that included most of modern Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay. This region was far from devoid of its indigenous population, but the success of the expansion into the Pampas had created an imperial myth of the “empty interior” akin to the U.S. concept of Manifest Destiny; both were used to justify the westward (and southerly, in Argentina’s case) expansion of the Euro-descended people and the enslavement or extermination of the indigenous populations, who resisted fiercely but were largely unable to prevent their defeat or marginalization.

As the supply of indigenous labor dwindled, Buenos Aires became a center for the trade in African slaves, bringing more wealth—and exploitation—to the colony. At the same time, Britain’s new dominance of the Caribbean forced Spain to direct more of its commerce through Buenos Aires, which fast became a chief South Atlantic port despite Spain’s continued proscription of its free trade. In the late 18th Century, tensions over the Crown’s restrictive policies began to boil over in the River Plate region, as wealthy merchants in Buenos Aires and Montevideo sought to trade with powers outside the Spanish imperial orbit. Though by no means anti-royal, the free traders became increasingly vocal advocates for reform of the Viceroyalty’s relations with Spain.

Two key events in the early 19th Century further set the stage for independence from Spain. The first was the 1806 British invasion of Buenos Aires that, while successfully running the Viceroy out of town, was soon repelled by a spontaneous popular rising loyal to Spain. When the British regrouped and attacked a second time, they were once again defeated, imbuing the citizens of Buenos Aires, or porteños, with a sense of their ability to handle their own affairs. The second event was Napoleon’s invasion of Iberia, which ousted the Spanish king and drastically affected the River Plate’s trade, thus confirming the increasingly common sentiment that the Spanish Empire was in collapse.

On 25 May 1810, the free traders of the porteño merchant class met in the Plaza de Mayo to oust the Spanish Viceroy and declare home rule by the so-called Primera Junta. Importantly, the junta did not dissolve the Viceroyalty as an administrative unit, and royalists among it continued to swear allegiance to the Spanish Crown, setting off a power struggle that grew into a full-fledged war of independence. On 9 July 1816, a group of revolutionaries including General José de San Martín, who would lead the war against Spain, gathered in Tucumán and formally declared independence for the Viceroyalty, recasting it as the United Provinces of the River Plate. In the midst of the independence war against Spain, a series of internecine wars broke out amongst provincial caudillos seeking to create their own micro-states so as to avoid subservience to either Buenos Aires or Spain, or both. The Spanish were mostly expelled during the 1820s, and by 1828, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Uruguay had all emerged from the short-lived United Provinces as independent states. Despite independence from Spain, the Argentine proto-state remained at war with itself, as unitarist forces seeking strong central rule from Buenos Aires fought federalists favoring decentralized power in the provinces.

These two currents found an odd middle ground in the figure of General Juan Manuel de Rosas, a federalist who hailed from Buenos Aires. As a caudillo with dictatorial power over the bulk of Argentina from 1829 to 1852, Rosas’ iron fist did much to establish his home province’s domination in the affairs of the Argentine state. After his downfall, the unitarists gained the upper hand through a further series of internal struggles and in 1862, a unified Argentine Republic was declared. Under its first president, Mitre, the state began modernizing (with significant capital inputs from Britain) and joined Brasil and Uruguay in crushing the federal-leaning Paraguay. Mitre was followed by Sarmiento, who stressed the battle between what he saw as civilization (“European” Argentina) and barbarism (the caudillos and the unconquered indigenous cultures), thus launching Argentina’s full-on expansion into the “empty interior” of Patagonia in the center-south and the Chaco in the north. By the 1880s, some 300 years after the refounding of Buenos Aires, Argentina roughly occupied its present day borders (although the frontier with Chile would remain a persistent problem well into the 20th Century).

With the consolidation of the immense state complete, Argentina embarked on an ambitious program of modernization. Improvements in railroads, ports, and refrigeration facilities allowed the country to export the beef and grains for which it is still renowned, feeding mouths abroad as well as the bank accounts of the domestic oligarchy and merchant class. At the same time, the labor-starved state’s appeals for European immigrants were answered: Some six million immigrants arrived in Argentina in the three decades following 1880. Most of these were Italian and Spanish, although there were also significant numbers of French, Russians, various Balkans, Irish, and Welsh. As the chief port of entry, Buenos Aires mirrored New York in its absorption of wave after wave of immigrants. The city grew rapidly both in terms of cosmopolitanism and population, becoming Latin America’s largest city at the turn of the century, with over a million people. As the country expanded, so too did labor strife in an economy very much tilted toward the upper crust.

In the early 20th Century, Argentina became one of the world’s wealthiest countries, leading optimistic observers at home and abroad to hail it as a model “can-do” civilization, a Latin American rival to the United States. The country’s cultural light burned brightly, with the rise of such figures as author Jorge Luis Borges, painter Xul Solar, and tango deity Carlos Gardel. But political instability, uneven income distribution, and weaknesses in its export-driven economy would destabilize Argentina for decades to come, leaving many Argentines wondering how to recapture that fabled past. Argentina’s first major calamity of the 20th Century was the 1930 coup that toppled the elected (middle class-oriented) Radical Party government struggling with the onset of the Great Depression. The subsequent rightist regime returned the political reins of the country to the oligarchy, whose corruption ensured that dire social needs were not met and society became more polarized, despite a short-lived return to elected civilian rule in the early 1940s. In 1943, the military again took power in a coup. With World War II raging, Argentina’s military leaders debated which side to support, joining the Allies in March 1945 shortly before the final stages of the war.

The unassuming Secretary of Labor for the World War II-era junta was Col. Juan Domingo Perón. While developing a mass base of support with the state-affiliated unions, Perón also learned a fair amount about populism from European nationalist dictators, particularly Mussolini. After other members of the junta grew wary of Perón’s increasing popularity and jailed him, his wife Eva, a former actress, helped mobilize a mass worker protest that forced the junta to release Perón, who promptly won the scheduled presidential election of 1946. During his two terms as president, Perón inaugurated countless new plans to rectify the economic and social problems that hounded Argentina. Combining aspects of capitalism, socialism, authoritarianism, and populism, the charismatic Perón launched a massive, state-guided industrialization program aimed at maximizing Argentine self-sufficiency. The state also managed beef and grain exports, plowing the proceeds into welfare programs that did much to improve the lot of the workers and the poor, who became particularly enamored of Eva’s state-funded charitable campaigns. Not everyone was pleased: traditional elites—the oligarchs, the church, established political parties, and conservative military officers—resented what they saw as class warfare by a gruff colonel and an ex-actress, while the post-war United States was worried by this potential challenge to its hegemony in the Americas. And Perón was not above the suppression of opponents, including the press.

When international price drops shook the economy and Perón lost his wife—and her invaluable charisma—to cancer in 1952, his grip on power began to slip. In 1955, a coup ousted Perón and he went into exile, where he continued to guide the Peronist party. The 1960s were characterized by constant economic instability and numerous elections—many of which excluded the still popular Peronists—of weak civilian administrations that deferred to the military authorities on all matters of importance. Politics veered more to the right as the decade went on, with one military-civilian regime replacing another. By the early 1970s, social unrest was boiling over, left-wing Peronists were turning militant, and the economy was still languishing. The government decided the safest way forward was to allow for Perón’s return from exile, and in 1973, he won his third election, installing his third wife—Isabel—as vice-president. The extreme polarization and economic distress proved too much for Perón, whose 1974 death left the ineffectual Isabel in a hopeless position. In 1976, the military once again seized power, leading to one of the darkest periods in Argentine history.

Convinced it was the only agent capable of salvaging the country, the military junta unleashed a brutal wave of repression on anyone it considered subversive. Along with the Argentine junta, U.S.-supported dictatorships in Bolivia, Brasil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay all coordinated their repressive activities through a scheme called Operation Condor. In Argentina alone, some 30,000 people were snatched from their homes and workplaces, dragged off to clandestine concentration camps, sadistically tortured, and often murdered. Many of these desaparecidos (disappeared) were never heard from again; the military disposed of unknown numbers of victims by throwing them—alive and drugged—out of airplanes into the River Plate. The regime also pushed through an economic agenda that gutted welfare programs and some state industries while amassing an enormous foreign debt (that still plagues Argentina today). As relatives of the disappeared, spearheaded by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, demanded answers ever more vociferously, the junta tried to play the nationalist card by seizing the British-controlled Falklands/Malvinas Islands, long claimed by Argentina. The generals’ 1982 decision to send a poorly equipped force against the British showed their ineptitude even in military matters, and it was not long before the dictatorship collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence.

Argentina’s return to civilian rule under Raúl Alfonsín in 1983 saw brave attempts to deal with the recent horrors. A first-of-its-kind truth commission released a damning report on the military regime’s abuses, leading to trials for some of the junta’s top brass. Roiled by these moves, the military rattled its saber repeatedly, leading the fragile Alfonsín government to declare an unpopular amnesty and an end to prosecutions. Meanwhile, hyperinflation became the order of the day. In 1989, the ostensibly Peronist Carlos Menem became president. With no easy options before him but blind faith in the IMF gospel, Menem undertook a series of neoliberal reforms that privatized most remaining state industries and rescinded what was left of Perón’s welfare state.

Menem’s policies and those of his successors did little to resurrect an Argentine economy crippled by impossible debt burdens. In 2001, the country experienced an economic, political, and social meltdown in which millions of Argentines lost their life savings and hope for the future seemed dashed. Remarkably, while unemployment remains critical and poverty and crime loom large on the popular conscience, Argentina seems to be bouncing back, slowly but surely. The Monkey is thankful for the opportunities he’s had to experience life in this wonderful, vibrant country, and he hopes to be back again very soon. ¡Hasta entonces, Argentina!

Buenos Aires_

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The Western Andes_11

Tierra del Fuego_12__13__14__15__16

Congress, Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires cupolas.

Plaza San Martín, Buenos Aires

San Telmo, Buenos Aires

La Boca, Buenos Aires

¿Tomamos un café?

¿O tomamos un mate?

The High Andes

Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego

Huskies in Tierra del Fuego

The End of the Earth

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