[A-List] "Richness" in some currencies

["Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Re: [A-List] Analysis of A. Woods about Argentina,
el 24 Dec 01, a las 15:35, Rob Schaap dijo:

> Perhaps then there are currencies in which the poor and desperate of Argentina
> are richer than their northern counterparts - an historically grounded and
> social sense of self, an institutionalist sense of how things work, and a
> self-conscious sense of how they might be transformed.

This is somehow what the Argentinean poor express by "remaining Peronist". But
the other side of the coin is that if history is so much alive (or lurking
beneath a heavy layer of manipulation of consciousness) it is because the
conflicts of the present are the same conflicts of the past, only that not
superated.

I have quoted the _Martín Fierro_ many times here. This is our national epics,
our national poem. It was written as a piece of political struggle by José
Hernández, a bold and rebel national-democratic politician, in order to escape
censorship.

What does the _Martín Fierro_ talk about? It talks about the tragedy of a whole
people (the Creole Argentinean poor, the gauchos) who had been condemned to
oblivion and nothingness by the regime in power. The "new country" that was
under way held no place for them. This is exactly the same tragedy that fell
upon the mass of the Argentineans after 1976. When one reads the _Martín
Fierro_ one cannot but be startled by the applicability of the poem to our
struggle today.

The poem consists of two parts. The first one, written in the darkest moments
of the Mitre-Sarmiento constitutional tyrannies, is hard and hopeless. The
second one was written at request of the readers(1) at a more hopeful moment,
when with President Avellaneda forces of the Inland country had begun to modify
the political setting (albeit not through revolutionary participation of the
masses, as a movement of the upper classes of the Inland provinces instead).

Hernández thus opened up a gate to a mild hope in the second part. Well, this
is somehow what may begin to happen now with the Rodríguez Saá administration
(he has been chosen by the Legislative Assembly for 70 days, a period that will
end with general elections for President in early March, 2003). All the
Argentinean masses are as expectant as to what R.S. will do as the gauchos of
the times of Hernández were in relation to President Avellaneda.

Avellaneda attempted to break the back of the antinational bloc of Buenos Aires
by means of legal measures. In the end, a civil war had to take place, the
civil war of 1880. To fulfill the hopes of the poor and the wretched, legal
measures were not enough back then. Most probably they will not be enough now.

The oligarchic economists, the very same gang that brought Argentina to this
terrible situation, are already beginning to raise their ugly heads in defiance
of the almost elementary measures adopted by the new President.

That is why history is somehow "alive" in the consciousness of our organic
intellectuals and best militants. And that is why ordinary people recognize in
R. S. a candlelight of hope.

*******************************************************************

(1) the M.F. was our first "best seller", literate gauchos read it to crowds
gathered around them in the _pulperías_, the country general stores which were
the center of their social life.

Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx


"Orden General del 27 de Julio de 1819".


Compañeros del exercito de los Andes.

...La guerra se la tenemos de hacer del modo que podamos:
sino tenemos dinero, carne y un pedazo de tabaco no nos
tiene de faltar: cuando se acaben los vestuarios, nos
vestiremos con la bayetilla que nos trabajen nuestras mugeres,
y sino andaremos en pelota como nuestros paisanos los indios:
seamos libres, y lo demás no importa nada...

...Compañeros, juremos no dejar las armas de la mano, hasta
ver el país enteramente libre, ó morir con ellas como hombres
de corage.

Jose de San Martín.