Argentina

• 1. Introduction

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  Argentina covers 2,780,085 square kilometres, making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil and the eighth-largest in the world. Yet its name was never Spanish. The word Argentina first appeared on a Venetian map in 1536, and it means, in Italian, made of silver. It was probably first given by Venetian and Genoese navigators chasing a legend of silver mountains in the La Plata Basin. The country that grew there would become, by 1908, the seventh wealthiest developed nation on Earth, only to slide back toward underdevelopment within a few decades. How does a place named after silver it never quite found rise to the heights of the world and then fall? And how does a nation overthrow six of its own governments in less than fifty years, then build a democracy regarded as more robust than most of its neighbours? The answers run through butchered armoured mammals, painted handprints, exiled presidents, and a long argument over what to even call this land.

• 2. A Name From Silver

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  Martín del Barco Centenera wrote a poem in 1602 called La Argentina, and it holds the first written use of the name in Spanish. The word itself derives from the Latin argentum for silver, though in Spanish and Portuguese the words for silver are plata and prata, not argento. In Italian the noun is often used on its own, said as l'Argentina. The legal life of the name took longer to settle than the poetry. Although Argentina was already in common usage by the 18th century, the Spanish Empire formally named the territory the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. After independence it became the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. The 1826 constitution carried the first legal use of Argentine Republic, while the name Argentine Confederation was formalised in the constitution of 1853. A presidential decree in 1860 finally fixed the country's name as Argentine Republic, and that year's constitutional amendment ruled every name used since 1810 to be legally valid. English speakers held onto an older habit. They called the place the Argentine, mimicking the Spanish la Argentina, a usage that fell out of fashion only in the mid to late 20th century.

• 3. Before The Map

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  In 2015, the fossilised bones of an extinct armoured mammal called Neosclerocalyptus were unearthed near Buenos Aires, and they carried cut marks from butchering with stone tools. That detail implies humans were active here during the Last Glacial Maximum, pushing the earliest recorded presence back as far as 21,000 years. At the Piedra Museo site in Santa Cruz Province, human remains and artifacts date back roughly 11,000 years. Spearheads found there sit beside extinct megafauna like Mylodon and Hippidion, evidence of early hunters who could take down enormous prey. The Cueva de las Manos, the Cave of the Hands, also lies in Santa Cruz. Its walls hold stenciled handprints and hunting scenes made between 7,300 BC and 700 AD. The peoples who followed were strikingly varied. The Selkʼnam and Yaghan in the extreme south were hunters and gatherers without pottery, while the Tehuelche and Querandí ranged across the centre and south. Farther on lived the farmers, among them the Guaraní in the northeast and the Diaguita of the northwest, a sedentary trading culture conquered by the Inca Empire around 1480. The Huarpe of the centre-west raised llama and lived under strong Inca influence.

• 4. Settlers And Viceroys

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  Amerigo Vespucci reached the region on a voyage in 1502, and the Spanish navigators Juan Díaz de Solís and Sebastian Cabot followed in 1516 and 1526. Pedro de Mendoza founded a small settlement at Buenos Aires in 1536, but it was abandoned in 1541. The map of cities filled in slowly from Paraguay, Peru, and Chile. Francisco de Aguirre founded Santiago del Estero in 1553, and Londres came in 1558, Mendoza in 1561, San Juan in 1562, and San Miguel de Tucumán in 1565. Juan de Garay founded Santa Fe in 1573, the same year Jerónimo Luis de Cabrera set up Córdoba. Garay then went south to re-found Buenos Aires in 1580. Spain valued this territory less than the silver and gold of Bolivia and Peru, so it remained part of the Viceroyalty of Peru. That changed in 1776, when the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was created with Buenos Aires as its capital. Buenos Aires proved it could defend itself, repelling two British invasions in 1806 and 1807. The ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and the first Atlantic Revolutions began turning local opinion against absolute monarchy. When Ferdinand VII was overthrown during the Peninsular War, the concern that swept Spanish America reached the Río de la Plata too.

• 5. Revolution And Civil War

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  The May Revolution of 1810 replaced the viceroy Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros with the First Junta, a government in Buenos Aires made up of locals. On the 9th of July 1816 the Congress of Tucumán formalised the Declaration of Independence, now celebrated as Independence Day. Around this moment came one of the era's stranger ideas. The Inca plan of 1816 proposed that the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata become a monarchy led by a descendant of the Inca, with Juan Bautista Túpac Amaru put forward as monarch. Manuel Belgrano, José de San Martín, and Martín Miguel de Güemes all supported it, but the Congress rejected the plan and built a republic instead. The wars reached far beyond Argentine soil. José de San Martín joined Bernardo O'Higgins, led a combined army across the Andes, secured the independence of Chile, and then proclaimed the independence of Peru at Lima. The French-Argentine Hippolyte Bouchard took a fleet to attack Spanish California, Peru, and the Philippines, even winning diplomatic recognition for Argentina from King Kamehameha I of the Kingdom of Hawaii. Historian Pacho O'Donnell affirms that Hawaii was the first state to recognise Argentina's independence. At home, revolutionaries split into Centralists and Federalists, a divide that defined the first decades. The Federalists prevailed and formed the Argentine Confederation in 1831 under Juan Manuel de Rosas. He weathered a French blockade, the War of the Confederation, and an Anglo-French blockade undefeated. Justo José de Urquiza beat him out of power in 1852 and enacted the liberal 1853 Constitution. The contest ended only in 1861, when Bartolomé Mitre overpowered Urquiza at the Battle of Pavón and became the first president of a reunified country.

• 6. The Golden Decades

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  By 1908, Argentina had surpassed Denmark, Canada, and the Netherlands to reach seventh place in the world by per capita income, behind only Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Belgium. Its income was 70 percent higher than Italy's, 90 percent higher than Spain's, and 400 percent higher than Brazil's. Starting with Julio Argentino Roca in 1880, ten consecutive federal governments pursued liberal economic policies and promoted a wave of European immigration second only to that of the United States. The numbers behind the boom are staggering. Between 1870 and 1910 the population grew fivefold and the economy fifteenfold. Wheat exports climbed from 100,000 to 2,500,000 metric tons a year, frozen beef from 25,000 to 365,000 metric tons, and railway mileage rose from 503 to 31,104 kilometres. A new public, compulsory, free, and secular education system pushed literacy from 22 percent to 65 percent, higher than most Latin American nations would reach fifty years later. The prosperity rested on conquest. Between 1878 and 1884 the Conquest of the Desert aimed to triple Argentine territory through military incursions into Pampa and Patagonian lands held by indigenous peoples. The seized territory was distributed among members of the Sociedad Rural Argentina, who had financed the expeditions, and the government treated indigenous people as inferior beings without the rights of Criollos and Europeans. In 1912, President Roque Sáenz Peña enacted universal and secret male suffrage, which carried Hipólito Yrigoyen of the Radical Civic Union to victory in the 1916 election.

• 7. Perón And The Coups

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  In 1930, the military led by José Félix Uriburu ousted Hipólito Yrigoyen, the first coup in a chain that ran through 1943, 1955, 1962, and 1966. That first coup marked the start of a steady decline that pushed a country once among the world's fifteen richest back toward underdevelopment. During a wartime dictatorship a little-known colonel named Juan Perón was made head of the Labour Department, then defence minister in 1944. Rivals forced him to resign in 1945 and arrested him, but pressure from his base and allied unions won his release. He then took the presidency after a landslide in the 1946 election. Perón nationalised strategic industries, raised wages, paid the full external debt, and pushed Congress to enact women's suffrage in 1947. His wife Eva Perón played a critical role in the party until she died of cancer in 1952. Power came with repression. Perón fired over 2,000 university professors and faculty from public institutions, and he brought trade unions under his control with violence. The meat-packers union leader Cipriano Reyes, who organised strikes against the government, was arrested on terrorism charges that were never substantiated, tortured in prison for five years, and freed only after the regime fell in 1955. That year the Navy bombed the Plaza de Mayo. Perón survived but was deposed months later in the Liberating Revolution and went into exile in Spain. He returned at last in June 1973, won the September election with his third wife Isabel as vice president, and died on the 1st of July 1974 at the age of 78. Isabel succeeded him and was ousted by the military in 1976.

• 8. Dictatorship And Recovery

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  The junta that took power in 1976 was led by army general Jorge Rafael Videla, and it launched the National Reorganization Process, often shortened to Proceso. The Dirty War that followed was part of Operation Condor, which joined right-wing dictatorships across the Southern Cone. Victims in Argentina alone are estimated at 15,000 to 30,000 left-wing activists and militants, most of them casualties of state terrorism through forced disappearance. By the end of 1976 the Montoneros had lost nearly 2,000 members, and by 1977 the ERP was completely subdued. The junta's downfall came from a war it chose. In March 1982 an Argentine force took South Georgia, and on the 2nd of April Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. The United Kingdom sent a task force, Argentina surrendered on the 14th of June, and street riots in Buenos Aires followed the defeat as the military leadership stood down. Raúl Alfonsín won the 1983 elections on a promise to prosecute human rights violations, and the Trial of the Juntas sentenced the coup's leaders, though military pressure forced the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws that halted further prosecutions. Hyperinflation later cost Alfonsín his support, and the Peronist Carlos Menem won in 1989. Menem embraced neoliberal policies, a fixed exchange rate, privatisations, and deregulation, and pardoned the officers sentenced under Alfonsín. The fixed exchange rate unwound in crisis. The December 2001 riots forced Fernando de la Rúa to resign, and acting president Eduardo Duhalde revoked the peg, wiping out savings across the working and middle classes. Néstor Kirchner, sworn in on the 26th of May 2003, ended the crisis, restructured the defaulted debt with a discount of about 70 percent, and voided the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws so the Junta's crimes could be prosecuted again.