Its Education System Terminally Ill, Argentina Has No Future

Henry Kissinger can die happy: His project is coming to fruition. In 1938, pursued by the Nazis as a 15-year-old German-Jewish adolescent, he fled with his parents to the United States. There he became the architect of some of the most aberrant strategies the U.S. has pursued in Latin America. Between 1969 and 1977, he served as secretary of state under [former U.S. Presidents] Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The foreign policies he imposed in his “backyard” are manifestations of his imperial ideas and the diabolical clarity with which he used to impose his plans of subjugation over the medium term, with no concern for the methods used or their human and material costs.

When Kissinger assumed office, the Latin American continent seemed like enemy territory, home to dangerous aspirations of sovereignty and justice. Torrijos in Panama, Velasco Alvarado in Peru, Torres in Bolivia, Allende in Chile, laborers who supported Peron joining with young students to form a resistance movement in Argentina, popular movements in Uruguay: Displaying various degrees of radicalism, all of these rebel movements questioned the political-cultural hegemony of economic elites. At the same time, protectionist policies and tariff barriers stymied the expansion of multinational corporations and banks that had begun seeking economies of scale through hemisphere-wide markets in the 1960s.

In this context, at the beginning of the 1970s, the United States began to promote Kissinger’s strategy to restore the conservative agenda. Its objective was to re-establish U.S. hegemony: The aspirations of the military dictatorships that state terrorism bolstered under the Condor Plan were to be annihilated. Military coups followed: in Bolivia in 1971, Uruguay in 1972, Chile in 1973, Peru in 1975 and Argentina in 1976. Our country, Argentina, received special treatment. In July 1976 — just a few months after the military coup — the U.S. secretary of state traveled to Brazil and signed a protocol agreement with the dictatorship that had been in power there since 1964. Basically, the agreement anointed Brazil as the imperial representative in South American and the South Atlantic. And so began the policy of privileged satellite states. As part of the protocol, the U.S. and Brazil planned to hold bilateral meetings every six months to decide on the policies they considered appropriate within their spheres of influence. They hoped their approach would neutralize the ongoing global and regional rebelliousness within the United Nations, the OAS [Organization of American States] and the Inter-American Defense Board. Lacking unconditional majorities in these entities, the U.S. and its interests were facing serious challenges.

In addition to its political duties, a privileged satellite state was supposed to focus on industrial production by transnational corporations in support of developing markets across the hemisphere — after reducing trade barriers and imposing free market principles.

According to this framework, Argentina would lose its industrial base as factories closed or moved to Brazil, the country that was supposed to re-establish itself as a supplier of exportable raw materials — grain, meat, oil, gas, minerals and fish — all products with low value added. Likewise, the most profitable businesses and public services along with the railroad system had to be eliminated in favor of the oil and automobile companies. By using inhuman repression and imposing a reign of terror to eliminate all forms of political and social opposition, Minister Martínez de Hoz began dismantling all industry — especially SMEs [small and medium enterprises] relying on local financing — while accumulating an exorbitant national debt, following the lead of international financial capital. In addition to the economies of scale gained by concentrating production in Brazil, the de-industrialization of Argentina enabled the structural breakdown of the workers’ resistance movements through underemployment and job instability. A dramatic paradox, this process reached its conclusion during the 1990s under the guise of popular political traditions.

The deterioration of the public education system at all levels was a key part of Kissinger’s project and fostered the decline of the social majority. If an industrial society relies on a skilled manual labor force, then a radical overhaul toward agro-mineral exports creates unemployment and social marginalization, turning education into a liability. In this way, Kissinger’s restorative strategy validated the convictions that Latin America’s dominant social sectors have held since the colonial period. In 1785, the Viceroy of Peru asserted the following:

“Setting up schools in communities may have pernicious consequences so the Indians should be taught only Christian doctrine. Other teachings are very dangerous because, since the time of the conquest, it seems that all of the revolutions among those people were started by the better educated ones.”

Argentina’s public education system had produced three Nobel Prize winners in science. Such a danger needed to be eliminated. National universities were hit hard by the dictatorship’s Night of the Long Truncheons, which began in 1966. This aggression continued in 1976 with a massive pursuit of teachers and researchers — in marked contrast to how the military dictatorship in the privileged satellite treated universities and scientific research centers. With the complicity of the political elites, the degradation of primary and secondary education reached its conclusion in the 1990s in a democratic regime: The 1993 Federal Education Law pushed by [then-President] Menem became the main policy instrument.

Over the long term, the results of this strategy are easy to see: Brazil has been transformed into an emerging power, whereas a plundered Argentina continues to decline. With the establishment of predatory extractive industries that are often prohibited in Western nations, Argentina has come to be known as the Land of Sacrifice. Another indicator is the dramatic decline of the public and private education system, which in recent decades has dropped from one of the top ranked systems to 59th place among 65 countries. We cannot close our eyes to this economic, social and cultural catastrophe. Almost 50 percent of our adolescents and youth between the ages of 13 and 18 either have not enrolled in secondary school or have dropped out of it. The majority of those attending school cannot understand what they try to read, have difficulties in solving relatively simple math problems and have the highest rates of absenteeism in the world. These are the signs of a nation with no future, which was Kissinger’s objective. We must choose whether to submissively accept this situation or to take on the challenge of becoming the protagonists of the second emancipation.