The Argentinian nation has faced imperialist attack for centuries, and its current globalized form is intent upon destroying the Argentinian identity and its societal values, but “the Argentinian people, with our long history of struggle, resistance and rebellion, our common doctrine and common principles, will be able to fight back neocolonialism… the more we get organized,” commented Argentinian professor and analyst Raquel Pina while discussing the situation of Argentina under the administration of President Javier Milei.
Since the self-described “libertarian” and “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei took office as the president of Argentina in December last year, the country seems to have spiraled into a socio-economic abyss. Nevertheless, this may be nothing new under the sun, given that Argentina has lived through a vicious cycle of alternating capitalist destruction and progressive recovery at least over the last seven decades. In addition, Argentina is one of the countries that still experiences the reality of British colonialism, apart from the neocolonialism which is the order of the day for most of the world.
These issues were addressed by Dr. Raquel Pina, an expert in Latin American cultural and literary studies and history, in an interview with Orinoco Tribune on November 5. Born in Santa Fe, Argentina, in the 1970s, to a working-class family, she was a first-generation university student. She studied at the Ohio State University, USA, and currently teaches at the Columbus State Community College, Ohio. She has written numerous articles on contemporary issues in Argentina and Latin America, as well as authored two books, including El Sujeto en Escena, on the impact of globalization on contemporary Argentinian cinema. At present she is researching on the native Antarctician people, descendants from Argentinian and Chilean parents, and their cultural significance for Argentina and Chile, within the framework of the bicontinental nature of these countries of the Southern Cone.
Socio-economic deterioration under Milei
Within 10 months of the Milei administration, more than half the population of Argentina has fallen below the poverty line, while child poverty has reached an alarming level of 66%, “that is, two out of three children are poor in Argentina,” Raquel Pina highlighted. “This is important, because when a child is poor, they don’t eat well. That means less physical and brain development, receiving less than what they need to become a whole citizen, to pay attention in school … This is really jeopardizing the future of our country in terms of education too.”
She also highlighted the issue of poverty among working-class and middle-class families. “Between 30 and 64 years old, 48% of our people has fallen into poverty. This means that workers are poor in spite of having a job, which is really sad,” she said. “Then we have our retired people, the elderly, 30% of whom are in poverty now.”
Poverty and indigency have considerably impacted people’s buying power, leading to a 30% drop in the consumption of meat in a country where beef is a fundamental part of the daily diet, and the consumption of vegetables and milk has reduced significantly as well.
Pina further referred to the informalization of jobs in Argentina, originally ushered in by the Videla dictatorship that opened up the country to neoliberal experimentation in 1976, but now the situation has reached a critical point, with at least 52% of the working population engaged in the unorganized sector. “This means they are either self-employed or they are employed but not registered with the government,” she explained. “So, they cannot have the possibility of retiring… And out of them, 46% are what we call working in negro in Spanish, that is, they are not registered at all. Therefore, they receive no benefits, no health insurance, no vacations, no child support, the workers’ rights that the laws of Argentina have established.”
Amid this bleak socio-economic situation, resistance is emerging, as evident from the nation-wide protests by university students and retirees.
Peronismo and the crisis of representation
When consulted about the situation of the Argentinian left, especially the divisions within Peronismo and the Justicialist Party (PJ), Pina first clarified the confusion that exists surrounding these two. She explained that Peronismo is the “movement of the organized community” while the Justicialist Party is its “political and electoral tool.”
“Being a Peronista means being a nationalist, which means using all our efforts and resources and intelligence to achieve the greatest good for the people, their welfare, their happiness… and social justice is a big thing for us,” she continued. “The organized community has unity of thought, of doctrine … while the fragmentation that you see is due to the party … We have a crisis of representation in the party. We have been frustrated because the party is not representing the interests of the movement, it is not following the principles of the movement, and it has been co-opted in some sense—some trends of globalism have entered and co-opted the party.”
In this regard, she emphasized that the word “progressive” is not appropriate to describe the movement. “But we are not saying that we are conservative at all,” she stressed. “For a neocolonial country like Argentina, European terms like conservative, progressive are not for us. What I want to say is that we the Peronistas have a long tradition of national and Latin American doctrine and principles around which to build our identity, and the party is not doing a good service to the movement at this moment. Not to mention that the movement has also been fragmented.”
However, she expressed hope that the movement will be able to reorganize and regroup itself, based on the changing realities, and the unions need to carry out some serious organizational restructuring for this to happen. “Let me give you an example: the informalization of our working class means that 50% of our workers are not unionized,” she explained. “There are all these lines of work of isolated people, the entrepreneurs, the self-employed, people who work with the new technologies, delivery workers—they don’t have unions. All the workers of transnationals in Argentina, they are forbidden to unionize … So, we have to revisit the question: what is it to be a worker these days? What is the working class today? How can we provide not only for the unionized worker but also for those who are not in a union? This is what we are discussing right now at the bases.”
Malvinas and Antarctica
The designation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a zone of peace and a region free from nuclear weapons has been interrupted by the British colonization of the Malvinas Islands and the Antarctic islands of Argentina since 1833. Calling it an “active occupation,” Raquel Pina highlighted that British interests consist of “predatory exploitation of seafood, oil, rare earths… They are devastating the region that does not belong to them, and they are also renting it out, giving licenses to companies from other countries to exploit the resources too. I see more and more effective occupation and ecological devastation.”
It is dangerous for not only Argentina but also for the entire region that one of Britain’s main “business partners” in the occupied islands is the Zionist entity.
Moreover, Britain maintains a NATO military base in Monte Agradable of the Malvinas Islands and is expanding the militarization of the region, turning it into one of the most militarized zones in the world.
According to Pina, another reason behind the British-NATO occupation of the Malvinas and the San Pedro Islands (called “South George” by the UK) is that they constitute “the point of entry to Antarctica, a region that is also disputed by the colonial powers” for natural resources. Nevertheless, the islands are not the only Argentinian territory occupied by Britain, as Pina pointed out. A British businessman, Joe Lewis, is illegally occupying federal land in Lago Escondido area in the province of Tierra del Fuego, and there is de facto occupation of the Paraná river, a principal commercial waterway of the country, by foreign—US, British, Canadian, and European—companies.
She blamed the Milei administration’s foreign policy for the accelerated militarization and occupation of the archipelago. “This is the first time in history that Argentina has not claimed sovereignty over the islands,” she highlighted, referring to the recent meeting between the now former foreign minister of Argentina, Diana Mondino, and her British counterpart David Lammy, allowing a weekly British flight from Argentina to the Malvinas Islands, a decision that has been roundly criticized by the ex-combatants of the Malvinas War (1982) and the families of the deceased soldiers. “If Argentina doesn’t drastically change gears in its foreign policy, emphasizing territorial integrity, it will be very dangerous for the country.”
In this context, Pina described Argentina as a “bicontinental” country, being part of both the American and Antarctic continents, joined with Antarctica through the continuation of the Argentinian continental shelf, of which the occupied islands are integral parts. “In 2010, then President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner passed a law, establishing that from that moment onwards, we had to use the bicontinental map of Argentina in our education system,” she explained. “The goal of that map was to show that we are more of an insular country, and the center of Argentina is not Buenos Aires but Ushuaia [in Tierra del Fuego], and that our territorial extension is double of what we had in our imagination … We can defend our territory only if we are aware of it—all of it.”
Nevertheless, “the legal map of Argentina” experienced extreme resistance from all sectors of the education system—”the teachers, the schools and even the bookstores that sell the educational material,” Pina commented. “Even in 2024 the neighborhood bookstores don’t sell the real map of Argentina that they are bound by law to sell … This is an example of the erosion of our national identity.”
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The Antarctic people of Argentina
Raquel Pina also provided a glimpse into her current research, which involves the “native Antarcticians.” In this regard, she pointed out that Argentina has an uninterrupted presence in Antarctica dating back to 1904, when the first Argentinian expedition landed in the Orcadas del Sur island, and until 1944 Argentina was the only country with human presence to the south of the 60°S latitude. Thereafter, during the first government of President Juan Domingo Perón (1946-1955), a project was launched to establish civilian settlements, complete with homes, a school, and a church, in the Antarctic islands, but it came to a halt with the military coup against the Perón government in 1955.
“The project re-emerged at the end of the 1970s, and families were asked if they would like to go and live in Antarctica,” Pina explained. “That happened, and with these families living there, eight Argentinian children were born in Antarctica between 1978 and 1982-83 … Chile did the same afterwards, during 1993-1996, and three Chilean babies were born in Antarctica in the same way. During the Covid pandemic, the Chileans closed their base, but Argentina kept open its settlement in Base Esperanza—it is kind of a fun fact that the only school that was functioning all throughout the pandemic was there, in Antarctica.”
To trace the lives of the eight Argentinian Antarcticians and to make their history visible, she has got into contact with them. “These native Antarcticians no longer live in Antarctica. Remember, they were from military families, so they moved a lot, and settled in different places,” she described. “Some of them are living in Argentina while others are abroad. My research involves getting in contact with them, doing interviews about their experiences as native Antarcticians, what their families’ experiences were.”
However, Pina lamented that this history is not generally known in Argentina, let alone the rest of the world. “Yet, our history of exploration and permanent presence in Antarctica makes it part of Latin America, because Argentina is Latin America,” she stressed. “This gives a human dimension to Antarctica… a lot of people are talking about the animals, the environment, the science, the meteorological research, but this has to do with the fact that the Argentinian and Chilean areas become part of Latin America because we have a legal claim on the territory. This is very important regarding the claim of sovereignty over the Malvinas, over Argentinian Antarctica, because it shows the determination and will of our people to peacefully integrate those parts of the territory to the rest of our country, to Latin America.”
Question of identity: past and future of Argentina
As a final point, Raquel Pina stressed that a recovery of the national identity is essential for Argentina not only to recover and move forward from the Milei “mis-administration” but also to heal the wounds of the civic-military dictatorship of the 70s-80s.
“The dictatorship caused tremendous levels of cultural damage in Argentina. The damage on human rights, in people’s lives, was huge, but it is from the long-lasting cultural damage that we could not recover,” she expressed. “One of its major effects is the distrust among peers in all ambits. We cannot completely confide in our schoolmates, workmates, neighbors, even our family members—many families were divided during the dictatorship … Then there is distrust of our political peers, this kind of belief that the political adversary is an enemy instead of somebody with whom we can have some common ground and come together for the welfare of everyone … The world before the dictatorship was completely different from the one that emerged from the dictatorship mainly because we can no longer trust each other.”
In addition, she highlighted the role of the hegemonic media in the “neo-colonization” of the Argentinian psyche. “The system of 24/7 TV is really destroying the culture of Argentina, the identity of Argentina, our collective memory; it is eroding the values of community and education,” she decried. “Add to that the emergence of the internet and online platforms like Netflix—there you have a bigger picture of how our culture has entered into dissolution.”
Addressing how the hegemonic media, including television, print media, and social media, gained such enormous power, Pina stated that this is the result of the “trans-nationalization of media,” of media houses and social media not being subject to State authority but becoming transnational companies. “Everything inside a country should be subject to the laws of the State, and then we have international law to regulate relationships between States, but there is no legislation controlling transnational powers,” she pointed out.
Apart from trans-nationalization, media, like other resources, is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of a few, leading to unprecedented monopolization. “If you look inside Argentina, you will see that there are tons of channels, lots of newspapers, but they all come from the same source,” she highlighted. “And alternative media cannot keep up, facing issues regarding resources, technology, and the preparation of those who work in these media … There are people in alternative media who are working a lot, but there is generalized chaos, and the mainstream media’s situation is infinitely superior.”
Furthermore, with its hold on culture, the West has been able to “colonize the Argentinian mind,” Pina opined. “For now, they have won a big battle, they were able to conquer not only the conscious part of the mind of a person but also the unconscious part … So, we get accustomed to consuming more, but the material has a limit, it cannot bring infinite happiness, it produces anxiety, and it is clashing with the awareness of our traditions, our doctrine, our principles of family, of organized community, of living in peace, finding common grounds, common sense. And that is the battle that we have to fight, against individualism, against consumerism, against this sense of competition and consumption without limits. We have to understand the real meaning of freedom. We have to rebuild our national voice, our sense of belonging to Latin America.”
She expressed hope that decolonization of Argentina, both economic and cultural, is possible. “Anything material can be repaired as long as we can recover our identity,” she concluded.
Featured image: Poster for Orinoco Tribune’s interview with Argentinian analyst Raquel Pina. Photo: Orinoco Tribune.
Special for Orinoco Tribune by Saheli Chowdhury
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Saheli Chowdhury
Saheli Chowdhury is from West Bengal, India, studying physics for a profession, but with a passion for writing. She is interested in history and popular movements around the world, especially in the Global South. She is a co-editor and contributor for Orinoco Tribune.
