Pour le reste, tonton GéPi, je partage assez votre avis… Mon côté..."
Posté le Lundi 8 novembre 2010 par Letel
“Tucumán thus became a backwater of social exclusion and poverty, having the highest illiteracy and infant mortality rates in the country. The migrants’ shacks and makeshift shantytowns encircled the city; Tucumán was too small to hide their misery and the discrimination they suffered. Social violence against Indians was still widespread and broadly condoned. In 1903, a police chief and fourteen soldiers north of Tucumán attacked and killed one hundred Indians in retaliation for the alleged rape of a white woman (1). Men, women and children were tied to horses in group of tens and dragged by their feet into the river, where their heads were cut off. There were no arrests.” (p. 18)
The Life and Times of Raúl Prebisch 1901-1986, de Edgar J. Dosman, McGill University Press, Montréal, 2008
“His motivation for leaving Germany was not so much financial as to escape from the tedium of farming and rural life. Restless, anxious to get out of Europe and see the world, he began his global wanderings in England, where he made ends meet by teaching German, and then took a ship to India. Unhappy with the noise and confusion there, he set out again, searching for a frontier country where he could begin a new life; when his voyage around the world landed him in Buenos Aires, Prebisch (2) knew at once that he had found his new homeland. Here lay a country of the future, a million miles square – so huge that Germany would fit inside it many times, and so geographically diverse that it included the Andean region, the rainforests of the northern lowlands, and the endless grasslands of the central pampas extending all the way to Patagonia. Here at last he felt welcome. In this New World dream country, seven thousand miles distant from New York or the English Channel, he could build the life he pleased.” (p. 9)
“After 1896, the Argentine economy took off, and by 1914 it had become the world’s leading exporter of meat and grain. To anchor its export trade economy, the railway network expanded from 2,516 km in 1880 to 16,563 in 1890 and 33,510 in 1914. By 1914 Argentina had entered the group of ten top trading nations with a per capita income double that of Italy and a third more than France. Enriched by a flood of 3.3 million immigrants from Europe between 1857 and 1914, the country was bursting with entrepreneurship and energy. Over three-quarters of industrial and commercial establishments were owned by foreign-born citizens. The most advanced public school system in Latin America had produced a large middle class with expectations of social mobility, and by 1914 Argentina had become the second wealthiest country in the world after the United States.” (p. 12)
“Raúl, at age seventeen, was too sheltered to participate in their nightlife in La Boca, the port area across the downtown core from upper-class Palermo and chic Recoleta, a sliver of land facing the Atlantic on one side and the Riachuelo River on the other. This had become the most lively and picturesque quarter of greater Buenos Aires, where a community of Italians, Greeks, Arabs, Jews lived in precariously built but brightly painted houses (standing on piles to allow for floods), and the center of brothels and nightlife of all kinds – the only place in the capital where the tango was not prohibited. Instead Raúl was a model student during his first year at the Faculty of Economic Sciences.” (p. 21-22)
“Discontent and tension in the capital were deepening as Raúl arrived in Buenos Aires, and six months later there was a pitched battle between packinghouse workers and police. By January 1919, a metalworks strike degenerated into a week of street fighting between anarchist gangs and Patriotic League thugs that left over a thousand dead. The so-called “Tragic Week” stunned the country. President Yrigoyen called in the army to restore order but otherwise provided no clear leadership or initiatives for dealing with the causes of this class warfare.” (p. 23)
1. La Prensa, 21 Noviembre 1903.
2. Le père de Raúl.
Latin America’s Keynes, The Economist
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