The financial page; the Argentine machine.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 14-JAN-02

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

In the spring of 1940, a middle-aged Argentine Army officer named Juan Domingo Peron took a Cook's tour of Europe. Although the Second World War had just broken out, Argentina was officially neutral, so Peron travelled freely across the continent. What impressed him most was the spectacle of German organization. For Peron, Nazi Germany was a model of true popular democracy, where the people worked for the nation's good with lockstep efficiency. When Peron orchestrated a coup and became the President of Argentina, in 1946, he believed that his country, like Germany, could become "an enormous machine that functioned with marvellous perfection, where nothing -- not even a tiny screw -- was missing."

Half a century later, nothing in Argentina seems to function at all. After four years of recession, its economy is...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.