Argentine Territorialism Escude

Argentine Territorial NationalismAuthor(s): Carlos EscudeSource: Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (May, 1988), pp. 139-165Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/157332 .Accessed: 19/02/2015 06:10

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J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 20, I 39-65 Printed in Great Britain

Argentine Territorial Nationalism

by CARLOS ESCUDE

Introduction One important cultural factor which has contributed to inhibiting regional cooperation and integration in Latin America lies in the intense territorial nationalism prevailing in several of the Spanish-speaking countries. This frequently underrated phenomenon is an outgrowth of the great number of territorial disputes still to be found in the region and the indoctrination of public opinion through the educational systems and the mass media that often accompanies them.1 At least the following disputes can be considered as having greatly affected the international relations of these countries in recent years:

Argentina vs. Chile. The core of the problem (the dispute over three tiny islands in the Beagle Channel) was solved with the Treaty of Peace and Friendship signed in 1984 and ratified in 1985, but it almost led to war in 1978 and was an excuse for intensive nationalistic indoctrination over several years. It generated arms races and military mobilisation, concomitantly frustrating a natural potential for economic complementarity and integration. The territorial disputes yet unsolved are very minor, but distrust will probably linger on for many years.

Argentina vs. Great Britain. This is and has been an excuse for indoctrination and for the expression of extreme chauvinist feeling. The 1982 war warrants no comments.

1 A. M. Seitz de Graziano, 'Los Conflictos Territoriales Iberoamericanos', America Latina (5th. Bimester 1984), listed Latin America's territorial disputes on a country by country basis as follows: Argentina with Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Great Britain, and the signatories of the Antarctic Treaty; Chile with Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Great Britain, and the signatories of the Antarctic Treaty; Uruguay with Argentina; Brazil with Argentina, Paraguay and French Guiana; Paraguay with Argentina and Bolivia; Bolivia with Chile, Peru and Paraguay; Peru with Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador; Ecuador with Peru in two parts of its border; Colombia with Venezuela and Nicaragua; Venezuela with Colombia and Guyana; Panama with the United States; Costa Rica with Nicaragua; Honduras with the United States and El Salvador; Nicaragua with Costa Rica and Colombia; El Salvador with Honduras; Guatemala with Belize and its guarantors; Mexico with the United States; and Cuba with the United States.

I39


140 Carlos Escude

Bolivia vs. Chile. This leads to periodic ruptures in the diplomatic relations between both countries. Originating in the Bolivian territorial losses of over a hundred years ago, it is fed by the Bolivian educational system, generating intense anti-Chilean feeling.

Bolivia vs. Paraguay. Frontier skirmishes between the military forces of both countries take place from time to time. The dispute makes it difficult to put into use the irrigation potential of the Pilcomayo river. The present-day disagreements are the product of unsolved problems left from the Chaco War of 1933-5.

Chile vs. Peru. This dispute arises from the same causes as the Chile-Bolivian dispute, an outgrowth of the Chilean victory in the Pacific War of 1879. Distrust and arms competition are the normal state of affairs.

Peru vs. Ecuador. The territorial dispute, which is as old as Peruvian and Ecuadorian independence, led to wars in I828 and I941, and again to the outbreak of armed conflict in 98 i.

Venezuela vs. Guyana. This is the outgrowth of an old dispute with Great Britain, as a consequence of which Venezuela claims approximately two- thirds of Guyana's territory.

Colombia vs. Nicaragua. Five islands off the Nicaraguan coast, two of which are occupied by Colombia (the other three being temporarily lent by Colombia to the United States) are claimed, sometimes loudly, by Nicaragua. Former Colombian President Turbay Ayala took military measures to reinforce Colombia's position, although Colombia's participation in Contadora under President Betancur generated a more flexible Colombian attitude, while the Nicaraguan attitude was likewise softened with the general deterioration of the Central American situation.

Honduras vs. El Salvador. The boundary between these two countries is officially undefined. Fighting broke out in I969 after a soccer match. The brief armed conflict led to the paralisation of the Central American Common Market.

Because many of these disputes are substantively unimportant from a pragmatic point of view, social scientists have tended to underestimate them. The chauvinistic, ultranationalistic sectors of these countries' populations are frequently obsessed with territorial disputes and geopolitical strategies, while more pragmatic sectors tend to shrug them off as irrelevant. But the chauvinistic sectors are often influential amongst (some) political and (many) military leaders. And thus the 'objective' irrelevance of the disputes per se leads to a situation in which practically the only information which the public receives comes from the


Argentine Territorial Nationalism 141

chauvinistic sectors. Hence, chauvinistic feeling is reinforced, arms races are perceived as reasonable (and high military spending appears justified), economic integration becomes more difficult, and when war finally breaks out the world is amazed with a situation which it should have been able to foresee, at least as a possibility.

Of the cases listed above, one of the more interesting ones is that of Argentina, both because of its intensity and the misperceptions involved.

The Argentine case

Argentine territorial nationalism is a phenomenon of which politically conscious people all over the world are by now aware, but which was practically ignored even by Latin-Americanists until the Falkland/ Malvinas war of I982, despite the fact that it is a cultural characteristic which at least to some extent is shared by Argentina's neighbour, Chile, and which has been an important variable in the determination of Argentine-Chilean relations, and hence in the frustration of these countries' potential for economic complementarity. This territorial nationalism is, in my opinion, rooted in a shared misperception - that is, the idea prevailing in a great deal of bibliography on both sides of the Andes that substantial territorial losses were suffered during the nineteenth century. In Argentina there is a widespread perception of Chilean expansion at Argentina's expense in the south and of additional territorial losses elsewhere. In Chile there is a parallel perception of Argentine expansionism at Chile's expense, although this is somewhat mitigated by the perception of Chile's northward expansion at the expense of Bolivia and, more undeniably, Peru. In Chile there is a generalised perception that the whole of Patagonia should have been Chilean. In Argentina there is a parallel perception that all of Chile south of the River Bio-Bio should have been Argentine. In Argentina this perception is made more acute by the fact that Buenos Aires, the capital of the Argentine state, was once the capital of the colonial state of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate. Hence, the perception of territorial losses is extended to those countries which, having been a part of the colonial state, became separate states after Independence (that is, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay), and this fact makes the analysis of whether Argentina's perception of territorial losses is warranted or not somewhat more complex.

In the case of Argentina, territorial nationalism is a relevant phenomenon not only because of its political and economic consequences, but also because of the contrast between the perception of territorial losses and the reality of territorial gains: it is in this respect a phenomenon that


142 Carlos Escude

lies intellectually within the realm of the sociology of knowledge and/or political psychology. It is different from economic and political nationalism in Argentina insofar as the political groups which are more prone to it do not coincide, though they do sometimes overlap, with the economic and political nationalists: take, for example, the case of La Prensa, a traditional newspaper which consistently embraces both extreme economic laissez-faire attitudes and territorial nationalism. It is also different from the territorial nationalism prevailing in other Latin American countries, owing to the said contrast between the perception of territorial losses and the reality of territorial gains. Of the Latin American countries, only Argentina, Brazil and Chile have had huge territorial gains; Argentina and Chile share perceptions of territorial losses, but in Chile these perceptions coexist with perceptions of territorial gains in the north, whereas in Argentina there is only the perception of huge losses everywhere.

This perception is, as I have said, historically rooted, and it is so widespread that some foreign scholars have, for example, taken for granted that Patagonia and the whole of the far south were included in the Viceroyality of the River Plate, accepting without challenge the claims of the Argentines. Such is the case of John Lynch, in his Spanish Colonial Administration, s782-1810,2 though it must be said in his defence that the territorial issue is only a marginal aspect of his book and by no means the focus of his research. This being the case with Lynch and others, however, I cannot take for granted in this paper that the idea of territorial losses is a misperception. In order to get to the core of what is a contemporary problem in the sociology of knowledge which has deep political and economic reverberations, we must dig deep into history, with the objective of coming to some sort of conclusion with respect to whether the perception of territorial losses is or is not warranted.

The expansion southwards A long history underlies Argentina's and Chile's shared perceptions of territorial losses in the south at each other's expense. This, obviously, is the history of Argentine-Chilean territorial competition for the region, a history which in turn has two facets: one linked to negotiations,

2 J. Lynch, Spanish Colonial Administration, 1782-1810 (London, I958). See maps pp. 321 and 322. See also Preface, p. vii: '...in 1776, in the interests of defence, the vast land stretching from Tierra del Fuego to Upper Peru, from the Atlantic to the Andes... was erected into an independent viceroyalty'. The maps include nearly all of Tierra del Fuego, including some coasts formally in the Pacific ocean, in the Viceroyalty. As will be seen later on in this text, this is not warranted by the overall evidence available.



settlement and military operations, and one linked to the scholarly debate with respect to title deeds. The political and military facet is relatively well known. The far south, though claimed by the Spanish Crown, was not actually settled by the Spaniards, and remained Indian territory until the end of the nineteenth century. Chile acquired a good head start, expanding southwards because its consolidation as a state was produced long before Argentina's. It was a small, homogeneous power which did not suffer Argentina's balkanisation and prolonged civil wars, and by 1843 had established a military station in the Strait of Magellan, which soon afterwards became a settlement, Punta Arenas. Through alliances with Indian tribes, Chilean influence in Patagonia grew slowly but steadily; what is today the Argentine province of Neuquen became a territory in which the cattle which was stolen by the Indians in Buenos Aires was fattened, previous to its transport to the other side of the Andes for sale in the Chilean markets. The Indians took the cattle through the present- day province of Buenos Aires, then Indian territory, along a trail known as el Camino de los Chilenos - the Chileans' Road. Chilean claims in the south grew concomitantly with their influence: although the Chilean Consti- tutions of i822, I823, 1828 and 1833 established the frontier between Chile and Argentina along the Andes Mountains all the way down to Cape Horn, by the i87os they claimed all of Patagonia south of the Rio Negro.

Meanwhile, Argentina had been a balkanised country which was in no position to compete. The provinces not only had standing armies and warred against each other; they sometimes even signed treaties with neighbouring states, as was the case between Corrientes and Paraguay in 1841, which acknowledged Paraguayan jurisdiction over territories which are presently Argentine. This situation was modified by stages:

(I) With Mitre's I 860 triumph in the Battle of Pav6n, which established an initially fragile but eventually lasting territorial unity.

(2) With the war against Paraguay of 865-70, known as the War of the Triple Alliance, in which allied with Brazil and basically thanks to Brazilian men, arms and money, Mitre managed to:

(a) Destroy a powerful territorial competitor - as was Paraguay, which was a consolidated state with a population of approximately 800,000, whereas Argentina, with a population of approximately 1,200,000, was to such an extent fragilely unified that not long before the war the powerful Entre Rios leader Urquiza had offered Paraguayan President L6pez his alliance against Mitre.

(b) Win important territories from Paraguay and hence consolidate


144 Carlos Escude

Argentina in the northeast. The Department of Candelaria, for example, which is part of the present-day Argentine province of Misiones, had been put under Paraguayan jurisdiction by a Royal Warrant in 1659. In 1726 it was transferred to Buenos Aires, but in 1746 it was once again put under Paraguayan rule, this being ratified in I784. In I806, after a period of three years during which the entire territory of Misiones (that is, considerably more than Candelaria) was separated both from Paraguay and from Buenos Aires, the whole of it was incorporated into Paraguay. In 181I General Manuel Belgrano signed a treaty with Paraguay in the name of the Buenos Aires government acknowledging that Candelaria was Paraguayan. Finally, in I852 a new treaty was signed between the Paraguayan government and the Argentine Confederation by which Candelaria was to be transferred to Argentine jurisdiction, but which acknowledged the present-day Argentine province of Formosa (and a part of the Argentina province of Chaco) as Paraguayan. This treaty was not ratified. These territories were conquered by Argentina during the war, which was a genocidal affair in which nearly the entire male population of Paraguay was killed.3

(c) Destroy his internal enemies, and thus consolidate Argentine unity, while the war was being waged mostly by the Brazilian army and navy. Indeed, due to the uprisings which took place in the provinces, Mitre was forced to withdraw most of the Argentine troops from the Paraguayan front. It is probably no exaggeration to say that the war forged Argentina's unity thanks to Brazil's participation, which made it possible to destroy at once both Mitre's Paraguayan and provincial enemies.4

The war against Paraguay was thus a turning-point in Argentine history, a turning point towards the better if judged from the narrow perspective of her national interest, and with the territorial, political and military consolidation it produced a turning-point in the competition with Chile over the southern territories. Finally, one last event helped greatly to turn the tables in Argentina's favour in this competition; that is, the third of the stages referred to above:

(3) Chile's decision to wage war on Peru and Bolivia. 3 P. H. Box, Los Ortgenes de la Guerra del Paraguay (Asunci6n, I93I; Illinois University

Press edition, 1927), ch. 3. 4 F. J. McLynn, 'The Causes of the War of Triple Alliance: An Interpretation', Inter-

American Economic Affairs (Autumn I979).



Indeed, General Roca's so-called 'Conquest of the Desert', in which Argentine forces occupied the Indian territories up to the Rio Negro, was initiated days after the official Chilean declaration of war. Argentina now stood on a much stronger bargaining position, and the negotiated outcome, the Treaty of i881, was signed three years before the Chile-Bolivian peace treaty of 1884, at a time when, although the war had been won, Chilean energies still had to be concentrated in the north. Almost miraculously, hence, a very fortunate sequence of events helped Argentina to gain an advantage in a competition in which she had been at a distinct disadvantage. Nevertheless, the outcome was a border which was substantially the same as the one that would have corresponded to the initial perception the Chileans had of their territories, as shown by the boundaries set in the aforementioned Constitutions of I822, I823, 1828 and I833.

The debate over title deeds While the 'real' - that is, political and military- contest for Patagonia was being waged, an intense and erudite debate took place among Argentines and Chileans with respect to title deeds. Although it probably had little to do with the outcome of the negotiating process, it was perceived as the very centre of it, and it has moulded the attitudes towards territorial issues of generations of Argentines and Chileans. The two main actors were Vicente G. Quesada on the Argentine side, and Miguel Luis Amunategui on the Chilean side. They endeavoured to demonstrate, from Spanish Crown documents, that the entire region, bathed by both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, corresponded to the legal jurisdiction of their respective countries. In order to do this they had to resort to all kinds of fallacies. They were trying to demonstrate that the Spanish Crown's intention had been that the southern lands be included in their respective jurisdictions, because there had been a previous agreement with respect to the fact that each republic would be legal heir to the dominions which the Crown had previously granted to each colonial jurisdiction.5 5 The debate evolved slowly, after the occupation of the Strait of Magellan with the

establishment of Fuerte Bulnes by Chile on 21 September I843. The Argentine protest was filed on I5 December I847. The first presentation of the Argentine case was probably Pedro de Angelis, Memoria Histdrica sobre los derechos de soberani'ay dominio de la Confederacidn Argentina a la parte-austral del continente americano comprendida entre las costas del Oce'ano Atldnticoy la gran Cordillera de los Andes desde la boca del Rio de la Plata hasta el Cabo de Hornos inclusa la Isla de los Estados, La Tierra del Fuegoy el Estrecho de Magallanes en toda su extension (Buenos Aires, 8 5 ). This was refuted by Miguel Luis Amunategui, Titulos de la Reptblica de Chile a la soberani'ay dominio de la extremidad austral del continente


146 Carlos Escude

This agreement, known as the I8Io uti possidetis juris, was quite reasonable with respect to lands which had been well explored and relatively settled. With respect to lands that had never been under the effective control of any conquistador, however, the agreement was absolutely impractical because, at least in the case of the southern territories, the title deeds were overlapping and contradictory.6 That it should have been so is really quite to be expected purely on logical terms. The Spanish king had an interest in ensuring himself against the potential pretensions of other powers. In order to do this, he had to encourage successive conquistadors to explore and settle in the region. But this region was so unattractive that not only did no Spanish conquistador settle there; neither did other powers. Successive incentives were given to

americano (Santiago, I853). Amunategui was in turn refuted by Dalmacio Velez Sarsfield, Discusion de los titulos del gobierno de Chile a las tierras del Estrecho de Magallanes (Buenos Aires, I854). This in turn motivated a new publication by Amunategui, a leaflet printed in Santiago in 1855. As a consequence of this, two works were published in Buenos Aires, one by Ricardo Manuel Trelles, Cuestidn de limites entre la Repiblica Argentinay el Gobierno de Chile (i865), and one by Vicente G. Quesada, La Patagoniay las tierras australes del continente americano ( 875). Trelles also published his views in 'La Reptiblica Argentina y Chile', La Nacidn, 3 April I874. These Argentine writings motivated Amunategui into publishing what was probably the most important and serious work in this debate, that is, Cuestidn de limites entre Chiley la Repiblica Argentina, (Santiago 1879). Finally, Amunategui's work generated Quesada's reply, his 'Historia Colonial Argentina', published in successive issues of the Nueva Revista de Buenos Aires during 1884 and I885, that is, after the signature of the I88i boundary treaty.

6 Diego de Almagro, Pedro de Mendoza and Sim6n de Alcazaba were granted their jurisdictions on the same day, 21 May 5 4. Almagro was to have 200 Spanish leagues along the Pacific coast, south of Pizarro's jurisdiction. Mendoza was to enter his jurisdiction through the River Plate and reach the Pacific coast, where he was to have 200 leagues south of Almagro's jurisdiction; his title did not clearly establish how many leagues he was to have along the Atlantic. Alcazaba was to have 200 leagues along the Pacific coast south of Mendoza's jurisdiction, and he was also free to sail from the Pacific to the Atlantic and explore Patagonia, where eventually, said the King, he might also be granted jurisdiction if it so suited his royal interest. According to Amunategui, one Francisco Camargo, of whose title only one paragraph survives, was heir to Alcazaba, and afterwards was in turn succeeded by Fray Francisco de la Rivera. Concomitantly, the king had granted the lands south of the Strait of Magellan to Pedro Sancho de Hoz. Supposedly, Pedro de Valdivia later unified under his title the jurisdictions of Rivera, de Hoz, Almagro, and Mendoza's Pacific coast, but the Chilean proofs of this unification are extremely obscure. Whatever the case may be, by Valdivia's time the governorship of Chile was established, and he was confirmed as governor of Chile by the king on 3I May 1552. Yet in I569 the king was still appointing his adelantados in the River Plate-Paraguay region as heirs to Mendoza's entire jurisdiction, as was done with Ortiz de Zarate in that year, theoretically awarding him central Chile, precisely the core of Valdivia's jurisdiction! This, of course, had no practical consequences whatsoever.



successive conquistadors, to no avail. An objective study of the title deeds clearly shows this overlap and contradiction to be present. The jurisdictions granted were enormous, especially at the beginning; the territory actually explored and settled was a very small portion of the total theoretical jurisdiction. A large theoretical jurisdiction, however, gave the conquistador ample freedom to move about and choose the land in which he would establish himself and found his cities. The Monarch sought to ensure his rights by expanding the effective conquest of the territory through an administrative practice which was never meant to establish the sovereign rights of anyone but himself. In the case of unoccupied territories which lay in between settled ones, the Crown often transferred jurisdictions when it believed that in so doing the interests of the conquest would be better served. Also, for administrative reasons, settled territories were often transferred from one jurisdiction to the other.7 This was usually done in an orderly way, without contradictions, in order to avoid conflicts among conquistadors, governors or viceroys. But in the case of remote, unoccupied territories, no such care was taken, and contradictory jurisdictional overlaps, without a valid nullification of previous titles, were not infrequent.8

7 As an example of unsettled territories which were transferred and which were situated in between settled ones, take the case of Paposo in the Atacama desert. Due to a priest's ambitions to a parish there and to his successful lobbying at the Spanish court, the governor of Chile was ordered to make important investments there on 3 June i80o and 26 June I803. The orders were not complied with, and a royal order of i October 1803 transferred the territory to Lima's jurisdiction, much to the Viceroy's dismay, who complained to the court on 8 March 1804. At times, what a governor or a viceroy least wanted was the incorporation of unattractive territories into his jurisdiction. On the other hand, the case was very different with respect to attractive territories. Take the case of Arica, under Lima's jurisdiction but coveted by Charcas, which lobbied in the court to have it transferred, thus generating an ambiguous situation when by royal warrant of 22 June 1593 it was ordered that Arica remain under Lima's jurisdiction but that its Corregidor follow the mandates of the Real Audiencia de los Charcas. See J. Vial Solar, Los Tratados de Chile, vol. i.

8 It is not necessary to go as far as Patagonia to come across these contradictions. Take, for example, the case of the Atacama desert. According to the royal warrant of 1o November 1542, the Audience of Lima bordered with Chile along the Pacific. The royal warrant of 26 May 1573, however, established a larger territorial jurisdiction for the Audience of Charcas, granting it lands along the Pacific coast between Lima's and Santiago's jurisdiction, in the Atacama region. This measure was never nullified, Nevertheless, in 1801 Paposo was dealt with as corresponding to Santiago's jurisdiction and in I803 it was transferred to Lima's jurisdiction, as was said in note 7 above. Not surprisingly, Chileans and Peruvians have interpreted the royal warrant of 1573 as an error, while the Bolivians have used it as proof of the legitimacy of their occupation of Atacama in the nineteenth century, considerably before the War of the Pacific once again deprived them of it. The truth would appear to be that it was simply a theoretical


148 Carlos Escude

However, Quesada and Amunaitegui structured their arguments as if the Crown's wishes were an absolute and as if a contradiction were unthinkable. In so doing they both indulged in fallacies, and they both cheated. Quesada's tricks were perhaps less subtle than Amunategui's, but the latter's arguments were in the end not much better than Quesada's.9 For the Argentine the major difficulty stemmed from the very embarrassing fact that the Royal Warrant of i August 1776, which founded the Viceroyalty of the River Plate, makes no mention at all of the southern territories when it defines the jurisdiction of the new viceroyalty. Quesada argues, rather unsuccessfully, that it is not mentioned because it was taken for granted that it belonged to Buenos Aires. In turn, Amunategui argued equally unsuccessfully that the Chilean rights could be traced through several royal warrants, some of which had been lost, to the dominions granted to Sim6n de Alcazaba in the south on 21 May 1534. This argument ran into trouble both because of the obscure nature of some of the connecting titles and because it implied an interpretation of Amunategui's grant which exaggerated the actual terms of the capitulacion. The one very strong point that the Chilean had in his favour was that in 1775 -that is, one year previous to the establishment of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate - Cano y Olmedilla, the Spanish Court's geographer, had published a map showing the southern territories as

jurisdiction which was uninteresting to the conquistadors, who preferred not to be burdened with it. In such cases, the Crown frequently omitted efforts to be consistent in the granting of jurisdictions; previous titles were not always formally nullified. My source with respect to the contents of the royal warrants is Vial Solar, op. cit.

9 Quesada went as far as going to Seville and bringing back an adulterated copy of Mendoza's title, which instead of saying that he was awarded 200 leagues hacia (towards) the Strait of Magellan, said hasta (up to) the said strait. The correct text can be consulted in Coleccidn de Documentos Ineditos del Archivo de Indias, vol. 22, p. 35. This was, of course, inconsistent with the words used in the other two titles awarded on the same day by the king, where the word hacia was used, and it is absolutely contradictory with Alcazaba's title, which granted him a jurisdiction south of Mendoza's hacia the Strait of Magellan. The king did contradict himself frequently, but not so blatantly and on the same day. Besides, the capitulaciones were available. Quesada's lie is so naive that it could not possibly convince experts. Rather, it would appear that his purpose was probably to set up a pseudo-juridical justification which would facilitate indoctrination in the (then likely) event of war. Amunategui resorts to more subtle but equally dishonest tricks. For example, he refuses to acknowledge that Mendoza's jurisdiction along the Atlantic coast is not clearly defined, and wants to make believe that it is the same as his 200 leagues along the Pacific coast. He also attempts to make his readers believe, through extrapolation, that Alcazaba's right of exploration of the Patagonian coasts amount to a title deed, when the king explicitly says that he may grant him such lands, which were not included in the award, if it suited his royal interest, and he never did.



Chilean. On the other hand, the strong point the Argentine had was that, after the creation of the viceroyalty, most expeditions to the Patagonian coast were put in charge of Buenos Aires.'?

This fact fits well into a more realistic line of reasoning. It is more than likely that, whatever the previous titles might have been, the establishment of Buenos Aires as a viceroyal capital would have eventually produced the transfer of Patagonia, east of the Andes, to its jurisdiction, for practical administrative reasons - if only because once there were enough resources in the city it would be easier to order an expedition by sea from there than from any point in settled Chile, which was much further away. The same line of thinking, however, leads to the conclusion that the Pacific coast would never have been put in Buenos Aires' jurisdiction. Supportive of this hypothesis is the map presented to the king, at his request, by the

Spanish court's secretary of marine, Juan de Langara, published in 1798, which along the southern Pacific coast reads 'Reyno de Chile' (Kingdom of Chile), and along the southern Atlantic coast reads, in equally important letters, 'Patagonian coasts'; the difference with Cano y Olmedilla's earlier map, although not conclusive, is interesting. After the creation of the viceroyalty, practical reasons made it unwise to include eastern Patagonia in the Chilean jurisdiction. No royal documents clarifying the status of the territory had been issued, however, when the

10 The Cano y Olmedilla map can be consulted in Oxford's Bodleian Library Map Room. It is also available at the Public Record Office, Kew Gardens, London, and at the Archivo General de Indias, Seville. If Patagonia was in Chilean jurisdiction in I775, then it could not be in Buenos Aires' jurisdiction when the Viceroyalty was founded a year later. The only way to argue that it came under River Plate jurisdiction in I776 is by proving that it belonged to Cuyo, which by virtue of the royal warrant that created the Viceroyalty was transferred from Chile to the River Plate. Yet the Argentine arguments nearly always tried to prove that it belonged to Buenos Aires. In contrast, some Chileans did make an effort to prove that it was not a part of Mendoza (in turn, part of Cuyo); they took the map as absolute evidence and felt that there was no need to prove that it was not a part of Buenos Aires. On the other hand, after the creation of the Viceroyalty many an expedition to Patagonia was put under the charge of Buenos Aires. Quesada mentions several well-documented cases which the Chileans do not refute. The Argentines argued that an order to explore, establish settlements, or expel foreigners is demonstrative of jurisdictional rights. Pragmatic considerations such as the fact that the king would do so with whatever capital had the necessary resources at a given time, and that he need not be consistent about an administrative practice which had nothing whatever to do with the establishment of sovereign rights, are never taken into account by either of the sides. Further support for the pragmatic (administrative) assumption lies in the fact that nearly all expeditions to the present-day Argentine province of Neuquen, in Andean Patagonia, were ordered by the central authority to be organised and depart from Santiago, which was geographically closer.


5 o Carlos Escude'

Independence crisis broke out in 1810. If the Chileans had a slight edge in the by-and-large very contradictory set of royal documents available, they certainly lost it by defining their own territory as limited by the Andes all the way down to Cape Horn, as they did in their previously mentioned Constitutions - showing, as has been said, that their own perception of their country's legal boundaries before an enhanced power could make them aspire to more did not include the southern territories east of the Andes. On the other hand, the Argentine claim that the southern Pacific coast should also fall in River Plate, and hence Argentine, jurisdiction, is totally unwarranted. Although early royal warrants do grant Rio de la Plata conquistadors shores along the Pacific Ocean, there is no possible way of reaching such a conclusion from an objective analysis of the entire set of available documents. All things considered, the boundaries set by the 881 treaty appear to be as close to the ones the Spanish Crown would eventually have established as we can reasonably get, even if the whole idea of trying to figure out what the king had theoretically wanted out of a contradictory mass of documents, and after the subversive experience of the Independence wars, makes little sense."

Myth vs. reality The debate, however, was passionate, erudite and dishonest. This is not wholly surprising: indeed, very much was at stake. What is surprising is not so much the debate and its characteristics, but the fact that in the one hundred years that followed no one, at least in Argentina, should have had an interest in revising its terms. The arguments used by each side became sacred in each one of the countries involved, and while both countries had expanded southwards, occupying new lands which had never been occupied by Spain and which pragmatic observers considered res nullius,l2 the feeling that prevailed in both countries was not that each had won

" The Langara map can also be consulted at Oxford's Bodleian Library. It is bound together with the Cano y Olmedilla map, in a volume titled Los Dominios Espanoles en America.

2 Although Spain had treaties with other European powers which established her rights to these regions, such compacts with respect to unsettled areas were not really taken seriously when an interest arose over them. France, for example, did not respect the terms of the Family Compact and established a garrison in the Falkland Islands (Port Louis). When Spain complained, she turned the settlement over to that power, but only after a Spanish payment of the considerable sum of ?24,000. The lack of effective occupation by Spain was obviously a factor in this affair. Sebald's Islands were not res nullius previous to 1764? Maybe not juridically, but from any practical point of view they were: France behaved as if they were, and although Spain protested, she was willing to pay to make her protest valid. On the other hand, in the context of Spain's


Argentine Territorial Nationalism I 5

what it had, but that each had lost what it had not been able to win. Mid- nineteenth century English, German, French and American maps mark the southern territories on both sides of the Andes as res nullius. They could have been occupied by any other power and it is doubtful that either

Argentina or Chile would have had sufficient strength to wage war successfully. This did not happen, and both Argentina and Chile succeeded in expanding southwards, yet both these countries' cultures were impregnated with the belief not that they had won but that they had lost, and frustration and harmful nationalism were thus generated.

Apparently, there was a shared cultural need to justify each country's claims not in terms of realpolitik but in juridical and moral ones. This seems to be the reason why the historical and juridical debate was so intense. And this generated the need to lie, since the absolute rights to the entire region which both sides attempted to demonstrate were far- fetched, and since a need for success coexisted with the need juridically to justify their claims. Hence, after the issue was settled there ensued the impossibility of acknowledging the gains each party had achieved.

Admitting gains was admitting that one had lied, that one had not been in the right in one's claims to the entire region. Therefore, it was culturally preferable to mourn a loss: at least in Argentina, a crude, success-

declining power successive treaties between England and Spain represented temporary balances of power which soon became obsolete, after which the treaties were violated, war ensued, and a new treaty with further concessions from Spain would follow. This happened throughout the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, English, Dutch and other non-Iberian cartographers usually place the southern limits of the Spanish empire in Chiloe Island on the Pacific coast, and north of the Rio Salado (present-day province of Buenos Aires) on the Atlantic. The entire Patagonian region usually appeared as res nullius and was called Terra Magellanica (see, for example, Bowen's well-known map of 1747, which can be consulted at the Bodleian Library, Oxford). The fact that in their treaties the British had theoretically committed themselves to refrain from settling these uncolonised territories did not affect these pragmatically minded cartographers. With respect to contemporary historical atlases, I have not come across one such work printed in the United States or non-Iberian Europe which does not consider the far south to have been res nullius until the mid-nineteenth century (take, for example, the easily accessible Hammond, Anchor or Penguin editions). Despite the treaties, these territories were indeed res nullius for all practical purposes, especially if we consider the additional conceptual difficulties involved in extrapolating Argentine and Chilean rights from theoretical Spanish rights. The idea that these subversive states should 'inherit' the theoretical (and themselves debatable) rights of Spain to, for example, Tierra del Fuego, was not to be easily accepted by the European powers, and I have not found one mid-nineteenth century English map which awards Tierra del Fuego to either Argentina or Chile. It was Indian territory which from a European point of view would belong to whichever power occupied it convincingly. Both Argentina and Chile did, and this was a mutual expansion and success.


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orientated behaviour appears to have coexisted with a morally orientated ideology which made the said success-orientated behaviour inadmissible. This behaviour had thus to be morally disguised, and mourning a loss was the only way to do it. The perception of the loss became a deeply rooted conviction. Concomitantly, no one has dared revise the terms of the debate. To suggest even the possibility that one's country was not totally in the right is unthinkable and treasonable. Intellectually, the fact that no one has dared to revise the terms of the debate becomes more interesting than the substantive question as to which, if any, of the parties was right, which would be the object of such a revision. The omission in itself becomes a more relevant issue than the contents of the omission because it would appear to reveal a culture in which actual behaviour and ideology are sometimes so much at odds that an incapacity to accept reality is generated.13 On the other hand, these territorial loss perceptions have produced the territorial sensitivities which so greatly affected and damaged these countries very recently, generating needless arms races over grotesquely unimportant issues, preventing a much needed economic integration despite natural complementarities, and contributing to push Argentina into a ludicrous, unwinnable and criminal war in I982.

The colonial vs. the republican state

As was said at the beginning, in the case of Argentina the perception of territorial losses was enhanced by the unfortunate circumstance that Buenos Aires, the capital of the Argentine state, was formerly the capital of the colonial state of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate. This has made Argentines argue that their country was the rightful heir to the entire Viceroyalty and that all those countries that were once a part of the Viceroyality and which are now independent states - Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay- must be computed as territorial losses. This is a deeply entrenched perception in Argentine culture, which together with the Patagonian issue increases territorial sensitivities.

This perception is in my view as unwarranted as in the Patagonian case, basically for five reasons:

Firstly, the Viceroyalty was an artificial creation of the Spanish Crown, 13 In other realms the same cultural characteristics which appear to combine crudely

materialistic behaviour with a deeply rooted morally oriented ideology would seem to lead to the impossibility of legally executing a convict and to the concomitant state- inspired slaughter of thousands. This digression is warranted in so far as the existence of parallels suggests that the territorial-loss perceptions vis-a-vis the territorial-gain realities that we are analysing are part of a complex cultural Gestalt. Naturally, these ideas can be put forth only as tentative hypotheses.



with very definite strategic aims in mind vis-a-vis the Portuguese and the English. As such, the Viceroyalty had a structure which could not be maintained without the mediation of a superior authority and power: the Spanish empire. As Tulio Halperin Donghi points out in the context of a very different discussion, in order to provide the Viceroyalty with the financial resources it needed to function as such and carry out its objectives, the Crown decided to incorporate the silver-rich region of the Alto Peru (what is today Bolivia) into the River Plate. Moreover, a very significant percentage of Bolivian silver had to be sent to Buenos Aires, in what was a kind of outrageously high tax out of which Bolivia, whose natural commerce was at the time basically with Peru, got nothing at all. Thus, Bolivia became a subcolony of the River Plate by royal order.14 Such a structure could only be enforced through the Crown's power. It could never survive the Independence crisis, and as soon as the insurrection took place in Buenos Aires the Bolivian provinces sought the protection of the Viceroy of Peru, and were officially reincorporated into that Viceroyalty by the Spanish government.

Secondly, Paraguay was, together with Bolivia, the more developed and settled part of the Viceroyalty, and it was unlikely that Asunci6n would accept Buenos Aires' authority after the insurrection, particularly because, as in the case of Bolivia, there were divergent economic interests. Thirdly, Uruguay's first settlers had actually been Portuguese, not Spanish, and this province had switched from Portugese to Spanish hands several times, to the point that it must be considered a Spanish success that this country ended as a Spanish-speaking territory. Argentine nationalists argue rather naively that the fact that it should have thus changed hands only points to Portugese and Brazilian expansionism, which permitted the Portugese to advance considerably westwards of any of the meridians conceivably stemming from the Tordesillas treaty of 1493. In so doing they are blind to the fact that Spain did the same, occupying the Phillippines, which according to the treaty and the Papal bulls fell on the Portugese part of the globe, and to the fact that both the I75o Treaty of Madrid and the I777 Treaty of San Ildefonso declared the Tordesillas treaty 'null, as if it had never been signed'. In the case of Uruguay, Argentine-Brazilian territorial competition clearly ended in a stalemate.

Fourthly, as Col. R6mulo F. Menendez has pointed out, the idea that Argentina should be heir to the Viceroyalty is silly if only because the Viceroyalty was the first enemy of the subversive state born in Buenos 14 T. Halperin Donghi, Guerra y Finannas en los Orzgenes del Estado Argentino, I79I-I-fO

(Buenos Aires, I982), ch. i.


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Aires in I8Io. Indeed, the Spanish government transferred the capital to Montevideo and set up a new Viceroy there who waged war on Buenos Aires.15 Finally - and this is perhaps the most important reason - there is little continuity between the colonial state which existed before 810o and the Argentine state born in I86o.

Indeed, as Oscar Oszlak has pointed out in the context of a very different discussion, national institutions had completely disappeared by i820.16 In that year, as a consequence of the civil war, the old Intendencia de Buenos Aires, which had an imprecise and very large territorial jurisdiction, formally ceased to exist, and a new entity, the Province of Buenos Aires, with a much more limited territorial jurisdiction, came into being, and would thereafter interact with the other provinces basically as a peer. As was pointed out earlier, the provinces had their own armies and minted their own currencies. They constantly waged war against each other. Although Buenos Aires was theoretically in charge of foreign relations for a prolonged period of time, Corrientes would nevertheless sign a boundary treaty with Paraguay, and Entre Rios would later propose an anti-Buenos Aires alliance to that country. Surely such a situation does not conform to any current definition of the 'nation-state': Argentina was not a nation-state during the I82o-6o period. In contrast to such cases as Brazil and Chile, in Argentina colonial institutions survived only at the provincial and municipal level. The state that emerged in 86o was a new political entity. The 'nationwide' colonial state had not survived; after forty years of balkanisation a new state, comprising a different territorial jurisdiction from the old Viceroyalty, was born. This state was not the heir of the Viceroyalty, as the Argentines have always claimed: forty years of anarchy separated these two different historical formations, and Uruguay would have at least as good a claim to that title as Argentina. Obviously, this is not to say that there were no continuities of any kind. Cultural and economic continuities there were indeed. But between i820 and I86o, or at the very least between 820 and I852 (the date at which the amalgamation process begins, with Rosas's downfall and the establishment of the Confederaci6n Argentina, against which Buenos Aires was at war) one cannot properly speak of an Argentine nation-state, and therefore the 15 R. F. Menendez, Las Conquistas Territoriales Argentinas (Buenos Aires, 1982), intro-

duction. Colonel Menendez (who is not be be confused with other Argentine military men of the same surname) is a professional officer who dedicated himself to the study of history after retirement. In his book (which is a pioneer work) he presents a revision of Argentine history which is in direct contrast to the typical military and nationalist ideology. Paradoxically, it was published by Circulo Militar. 16 0. Oszlak, La Formacion del Estado Argentino (Buenos Aires, 1982), pp. 2I-5, 156.


Argentine Territorial Nationalism 15 5

state born in I86o inherited nothing that it did not de facto control. This does not mean that we cannot loosely speak of Argentina at the time. We can speak of Germany or Italy before their respective unifications, but we cannot speak of a German or Italian nation-state until the political unification was produced. The same holds for Argentina.

Hence, it is for several reasons that I think that it is very proper to say that the Argentine state is not (as the Argentine bibliography claims almost without exception) the heir of the Viceroyalty, but something altogether new, which was the product of what from the narrow perspective of the 'national' interest was a very fortunate set of circumstances which, of course, included the Paraguayan war. Indeed, the whole region might have been 'permanently' balkanised. Therefore, the perception that all of the territory formerly included in the Viceroyalty but not included in the Argentine state constitutes a net loss is, in my view, a gross misperception, which is somehow linked to the juridical obsession prevailing in Argentine culture and which is partly a product of the unfortunate coincidence that Buenos Aires has been the capital of both states. Indeed, although the Paraguayans might perceive that they lost Formosa (which they did) they do not feel that they lost Argentina. In contrast, the Argentines, who won Formosa and quite a bit more from Paraguay, feel that they have lost (what is left of) Paraguay. Hence, in my view, an objective appraisal cannot fail to recognise a very significant, if not huge, territorial expansion during the second half of the nineteenth century. As has been said, historical atlases published throughout non-Iberian Europe and the United States show this quite clearly. Yet the widespread Argentine perception stands in direct contrast to this fact, and this is a cultural phenomenon of great intellectual interest and political relevance.

In my opinion, the only very minor territorial loss which can be considered as such in objective historical terms is the Falkland Islands, because this is the only case in which a foreign power forcefully ousted Argentines from a territory which they were occupying and administering under the authority and power of one of the several states which made up the Argentine constellation, namely Buenos Aires. I consider this a territorial loss because there was an actual occupation of the islands by Argentina, and not because the Nootka Sound Convention of 1790 established that the English would not settle islands off the Patagonian coast - in the context of the diminishing power of Spain, such treaties were not taken very seriously if there was an interest in taking measures contrary to their terms; occupation was the only serious claim to sovereignty. Finally, what is more important, the rights of the Argentine


5 6 Carlos Escude

state to inherit Spanish territories which it did not defacto occupy can be very much subject to debate. The Falkland Islands were not res nullius basically because they were occupied by Buenos Aires forces. They were conquered by the English. If they had settled in Tierra del Fuego instead of conquering the Falklands this could not be argued truthfully, because Tierra del Fuego was for all practical intents and purposes res nullius, and much more so after Spain's abdication. Nevertheless, this territorial loss is very small when compared to Argentina's huge gains. The perception of territorial losses, however, unfortunately enhances the importance of this real but minor loss. Objectively, not only is the Argentine obsession with respect to the Falklands not warranted: in view of the genocidal Argentine conquest of Paraguayan territories more than thirty years after the English conquest of the Falklands, neither is Argentine self- righteousness with respect to this act of force justified. The misperception measured and portrayed Having made the previous points, we can now return from history to the contemporary problem, which, as I said, can be placed within the realm of the sociology of knowledge or of political psychology.

The perception of huge territorial losses makes the Argentines extremely sensitive to territorial disputes. Insignificant controversies, such as the recently solved one with respect to the Beagle Channel islands, acquire a disproportionate importance, and when very simple juridical and historical arguments are set forth to show that the Chileans were in the right, they are dismissed (outright) by the more nationalistic sectors on the grounds that they are irrelevant because the entire territory should have been Argentine anyway, and that the Chileans have already expanded too much at Argentina's expense. Though less intransigent sectors have been willing to come to terms with Chile with respect to these islands, they nonetheless share the overall perception of historic territorial losses.

The degree to which this perception is generalised in the population is measurable through public-opinion surveys. In March i985 the Gallup Institute of Argentina included, at my request, the question: 'Do you believe Argentina has won or lost territories throughout its history?'17 in one of its polls. As much as 73.6 % of the total sample was of the opinion 17 A probabilistic urban sample of I,ooo cases was used, which included the Greater

Buenos Aires area and seven provincial cities, representing 6o % of the country's urban population.


Argentine Territorial Nationalism 15 7

that Argentina had lost territories, while only 6.4% thought that Argentina had actually gained land. What is more striking is that the percentage of people who held the view that Argentina had lost territories rose steadily with the level of education: while only 61 % of those who had not finished primary school thought that Argentina had lost territories, as much as 86.1 % of those with a university degree were of that opinion. This is an interesting result because it confirmed my previous hypothesis that the myth of Argentine territorial losses is basically transmitted by the educational system (thus being more deeply rooted, and more frequently found, amongst people with a greater exposure to that system, and hence being a more acute problem with the leadership than with the general population).

These results should in turn be combined with those of another poll by Gallup in November 1984 with respect to the referendum which the Argentine government was about to hold to whether the peace treaty with Chile should or should not be signed and ratified. It is most interesting to note that 60 % of the sample were in favour of the treaty while I I % were against it, but that the percentage of people against the treaty rose steadily with the degree of education of the individuals polled, from only 6.6 % for those who had not finished primary school to as much as 17.2 % for those with a university education.18 Clearly, more-educated people tend to have greater territorial sensitivities. Nevertheless, although the educational system appears to have been successful in the dissemination of the myth of Argentine territorial losses, it has not been successful in depriving its 'victims' of common sense: although the percentage of people against the treaty was positively associated with education, it was still a minority (albeit a considerably greater minority) of those with a university degree who opposed the treaty.

The positive association with education is only to be expected. The specialised bibliography is nearly unanimous in the contention that Argentina suffered great territorial losses. Let us take a typical example from Academia, Isidoro Ruiz Moreno (Jr.). In the first chapter of one of his books he tells us:

The great nation which is the successor to the Viceroyalty of the River Plate is already mutilated: it is no longer the nation that measured northwards Belgrano's martial step; it is no longer the nation whose arms Alvear placed eastwards, and whose ships were taken southwards by the intrepid Brown; it is no longer the nation whose limits were drawn westwards by San Martin's fulgurant 18 Same type of sample as above (note I7).


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sword...One by one, we have seen torn off the branches of the corpulent Viceroyalty. Madness were it to try to recover them.19

On the other hand, Miguel Angel Scenna, a writer who published a great deal about the history of Argentina's foreign affairs, tells us that all too little emphasis is placed on international relations by the educational system, and that 'it is undoubtable that it is due to the mentality thus produced that Argentina's territory has been to such an extent reduced, and that having inherited the Viceroyalty of the River Plate, it allowed the secession of enormous territories without even having shown concern about it'.20

This idea is to such an extent taken for granted and considered common knowledge that mass journalism picks it up to colour its news items. Such was the case, for example, of an article published in Humor magazine, in which the journalist, who was not in the least trying to be humorous, complains that Brazil's Itaipui dam was built 'on territory that was once ours'. While a case can be made in Paraguay's favour, the Argentine claim is ludicrous: Argentina's nearby territories were actually wrested from Paraguay. But the journalist takes for granted that any half-educated reader will agree that the dam was built on 'territory that was once ours', and in this he is quite right.21

Argentine literature of foreign affairs is plagued with this perception. Analysts like Gustavo Ferrari and Juan Carlos Puig have made lists of the 'historical constants' of Argentine foreign policy. They have both included what they call a 'weak territorial policy' as an ever-present constant in the country's history. It is not surprising, of course, that when the enterprise of constructing such a list was taken up by an American historian, Joseph S. Tulchin (obviously not a part of the culture and unexposed to the indoctrination process most Argentines have suffered), he altogether omitted this alleged territorial weakness, without any comment, although he agreed with all the other constants in Puig's and Ferrari's separate but very similar lists.22 The perception of territorial losses is also, at times, graphically portrayed through maps which show

19 I. Ruiz Moreno (h), Historia de las Relaciones Exteriores Argentinas iSo-iz9r (Buenos Aires, 1960), pp. 5-i6.

20 M. A. Scenna, 'Argentina-Chile: el secular diferendo', part I, Todo es Historia, no. 43 (Nov. 1970), p. 10.

21 J. Emma, 'Nos Ilenaron la represa', Humor magazine, no. 95, p. 38. 22 G. Ferrari, Esquema de Pol/tica Exterior Argentina (Buenos Aires, 198i), pp. 18-28;

J. C. Puig, 'La Politica Exterior Argentina y sus tendencias profundas', Revista Argentina de Relaciones Internacionales, no. I; J. S. Tulchin, 'Una perspectiva hist6rica de la politica argentina frente al Brasil', Estudios Internacionales, no. 52.



the progressive dismemberment of the Viceroyalty (which in these maps includes the whole of the far south) and Chile's expansion southwards. Though not a military invention, such maps were intensively used through television in the indoctrination process previous to the war-that- almost-was, that against Chile in December 1978. The list of examples of the territorial-loss perception is endless and it would be idle to continue it. Pre-Falklands War examples are, of course, much more relevant than postwar ones, because they show the phenomenon to be endemic and not merely the product of the emotions aroused by the war.

Concomitantly to the perception of territorial losses there is a curious (though perhaps not uncommon) tendency towards the 'personification' of territory. In the introduction to one of his articles for example, Scenna tells us in reference to the first decades of the twentieth century that poor Patagonia 'continued being an empty and abandoned land, the eternally relegated member of the Argentine family'.23 In this frequently found language there is an interesting inversion of values which is relatively alien to the contemporary West. A certain policy is criticised, not because it allegedly did not make optimal use of Argentine resources (in this case, the Patagonian territory) to give the Argentine citizen the best possible (material and cultural) living standards, nor even because it allegedly did not apply those resources to maximise the nation's power. It is criticised because it has relegated Patagonia, which is rhetorically treated as a person endowed with rights. Although this cultural trait can be found elsewhere to varying degrees, it becomes more significant when combined with the territorial-loss perception. Obviously, it is extremely difficult to be pragmatic about territory when its 'personification' is a frequent mental operation among those concerned with it. During the Falkland Islands War a very tacky and sentimental song became popular. It was called Las Hermanitas Perdidas - 'the lost little sisters' - 'little sisters' of the 'Argentine family' which the Falkland Islands are perceived to be.

Fanaticism, of course, breeds more fanaticism, plus distorted mental processes to support it. The military regime's slogan went: 'The Falklands have been, are, and will be Argentina.' This is still written in many places throughout Argentina. Few people ask themselves what it is supposed to mean, because if they will be Argentine in the way in which they are presently Argentine, then the British can sit back and relax. It is not that by saying that they are Argentine it is meant that they should be

23 M. A. Scenna, 'Argentina-Chile; el secular diferendo', part III, Todo es Historia, 45 (Jan. I971), p. 89.


16o Carlos Escude

Argentine; it is rather that, due to historical title, they are Argentine in some metaphysical way.

In this process, as has been mentioned, past, present and prospective rulers are as much victims as the populace. A self-perpetuating process of indoctrination takes place through the educational system and the mass media. Rulers are victims in two ways: not only is their frame of mind with respect to these issues equally affected; they are also prisoners of public opinion and, it should be added, of their perceptions of public opinion. This self-perpetuating process is not limited to the well-known fact that the Argentines have been told for generations that the Falkland Islands should be Argentine. By force of law every map of Argentina, including elementary-school ones, must carry not only these islands but also the so-called Argentine Antarctic Sector, which overlaps with Chilean and British claims. In the unlikely event that an Argentine government should ever acquire effective sovereignty rights over a part of this territory (and it is quite impossible for it to acquire the whole of it, if only because the overlap with Chile, whose claim is about as reasonable as Argentina's, makes a compromise inevitable), this achievement will not be perceived as a gain - which it certainly would be - but instead as a loss, and worse than that, by many, a sellout. This is inevitably the case if children from age six onwards grow accustomed to seeing their country portrayed with a certain shape and after many years the shape changes by way of a reduction. This cartographic policy, which is decades old, breeds inevitable frustration and increased fanaticism. It has been maintained through the most diverse governments: military and constitutional; Radical, Peronist and Desarrollista.

Conclusions

Hence, several factors of very diverse nature make up this complex cultural phenomenon of Argentine territorial nationalism. There is the old competition for Patagonia, with its cultural sequels; there is also the fact that Buenos Aires has been the capital of both the Viceroyalty and of the Republic, and this enhances the perception that the Republic should be the territorial heir of the Viceroyalty; there are also institutional mechanisms through which these perceptions are perpetuated and accentuated. Th )erception of territorial losses is very old. Tracing it from the times . Quesada to the present is a sad experience precisely because of the lack of intellectual curiosity shown by those who were presumed to be intellectually interested in the problem. Quesada's


Argentine Territorial Nationalism 16i

arguments were, perhaps understandably, full of fallacies. Those who followed him - for example, C. Diaz Cisneros in the 1940s, A. Rizzo Romano and Ricardo Paz in recent years - are less sophisticated, despite the fact that the contest for Patagonia had already been (basically) won, was certainly over, and there was no longer a raison d'etat to justify Quesada's fallacies.

Although the perception of territorial losses is old, its political importance has increased greatly in recent years. Argentina waited I50 years to wage war for the Malvinas. This is not the product of our patience, as many nationalists have claimed, but of the fact that previous generations were far too pragmatic to engage in such folly. And three years before that war Argentina nearly went to war with Chile in what would have been a much more destructive and far-reaching conflict. One can do nothing but speculate on this point, but it would appear that the increasing national frustration, political chaos, and recurrent economic crises after World War II have increased the importance of the perception of territorial losses, bringing to the centre of the political arena what is an old but previously marginal political trait. A content analysis of the history texts and other bibliographical vehicles of the territorial-loss perception for the last hundred years would be of use in helping to clarify this phenomenon.

The territorial-loss perception is endowed with an enhanced destructive potential when combined with certain other characteristics of Argentine foreign policy and culture. One such characteristic is, for example, Argentina's traditional foreign-policy arrogance, which previous to World War II manifested itself basically vis-a-vis the United States. Furthermore, after World War II there appears to have been generated an increasing loss of touch with reality. The self-destructive potential of the combination of these traits with the newly augmented political importance of the old perception of territorial losses was clearly seen in I982. On the other hand, the traditional arrogance of her foreign policy is also a phenomenon which is rooted in Argentine culture: I am referring to a sort of national superiority complex. Indeed, IPSA (Risc) polls of 198I, 1982 and 1984 show that a majority of the population think: (i) that the world has a great deal to learn from Argentina; (2) that Argentina has nothing to learn from the world; (3) that Argentina is the most important country in Latin America; (4) that in no country do people live as well as in Argentina; (5) that Argentina deserves an important place in the world; and (6) that Argentina's scientists and professionals are the best in the

LAS 20


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world.24 Naturally, important differences are registered with respect to most of these perceptions when socio-demographic variables are taken into account: most university-trained people, for example, do not believe that in no country do people live as well as in Argentina. But adherence to the statements 'foreigners have a great deal to learn from us' and 'Argentina deserves an important place in the world'; is not associated with these variables: the majority in the first case and the very ample majority in the second support them no matter what socio-demographic segment is considered.

Both from the point of view of the 'national superiority complex' and from that of the contrast between the perception of great territorial losses and the objective fact of important territorial gains, the Argentine case is unique in Latin America. However, Argentine territorial nationalism as such is far from unique. As was said in the introduction, it is a widespread Hispanic American phenomenon. Thus, the relevance of the problem, measured in political and economic terms, can be generalised for the region. Indeed, it can properly be considered a major cultural obstacle to integration. It also feeds back into other types of nationalism. And as a generator of arms races, it can also be considered an obstacle to development, as well as one of the several factors conditioning Argentine and Brazilian nuclear development. On the other hand, while territorial nationalism produces an increase in military expenditure in several of the Latin American countries, this very fact makes the corporate interests of the military enhance territorial nationalism: the latter is concomitantly a part of and a thing apart from militarism, both feeding back into each other.

Although constitutional governments tend to encourage integration projects and downplay the territorial disputes which military governments often emphasise (a rule which is not without exceptions), they seldom dare to try to solve them, and thus the potential conflict is always at hand in case a government of the future should need to recur to it in a moment of crisis (generating a 'rally-round-the-flag' effect). Hence, educational curricula (which reinforce the population's identification with the nation- state emphasising the perversity of one's neighbours) seldom if ever change. The long-term educational action that would be the only way out of this situation becomes well nigh impossible if- as is shown by the Argentine data - the segments of the population which should take the

24 Probabilistic sample of 800 cases from the Greater Buenos Aires area for I98; for I982 and I984, I6oo cases from the Greater Buenos Aires area and three of the largest provincial cities. The Greater Buenos Aires area includes the Federal Capital and the I9 highly urbanised districts that surround it.



initiative in such action are even more prone to territorial nationalism than the general population. Even when disputes are solved diplomatically (a rare event), educational action is usually limited to short-term propaganda in favour of a government's policy, and does not tend to eliminate territorial nationalism and the myths that feed it.

The Argentine case is an eloquent illustration of this process. The democratic government sold the peace treaty with Chile to the population, but it did little to dispel the idea that although the treaty fortunately solved a substantively unimportant but potentially very dangerous problem, the country had nevertheless been unjustly deprived of a territory which through historic title and effective treaties was its rightful heredity ('objectively' a blatant falsehood). The government dealt with the treaty as the most convenient available solution to the problem and not as an eminently just instrument. It was very far from calling it what it really was - an instrument which gives Argentina more rights in the sea adjacent to the islands than she could rightfully claim (this being, of course, something which the government could not publicly assert, as it would have disauthorised its negotiations with the Chileans and possibly rendered Chile's ratification impossible).

The aforementioned is one of the rare cases in which the dispute is actually solved (the Vatican's intervention when war was about to break out was crucial to opening the way to a solution). The Falkland Islands case is even more revealing. War was made by the military regime. Although the constitutional government is as far removed from the previous regime, in terms of practices and ideology, as is conceivable in the Argentine context, it has either not dared, or not thought it equitable or worth while, to officially state that the war has ended (thus generating what from its point of view should be a counterproductive justification and encouragement of the more hawkish sectors within the British government). It has lagged far behind the British government in taking confidence-building measures such as the re-establishment of trade, the abolition of obstacles to the issue of visas, the abolition of control over the property of the former enemy's nationals, etc. - measures which are an absolute prerequisite if the Argentine demand to turn back the clock and once again negotiate on the islands' future is to be taken seriously in Britain. It is probably not too risky to state that Argentina's constitutional government is not and will not be willing to confront the political risks which 'solving' the problem (or advancing towards a solution) would entail (given the necessary concessions which any feasible solution would imply).

The case in point serves only to illustrate the more general Hispanic 6-2


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American phenomenon. What Bolivian government, be it constitutional or military, would be willing to accept a realistic solution to that country's dispute with Chile? What Ecuadorian government would risk such steps with Peru? Or what Venezuelan government would accept the facts of life vis-a-vis Guyana? None, to be sure. And what doubts can there be that finding some sort of solution to these problems would objectively be highly beneficial to all the national parties concerned, in terms both of the opening of opportunities for economic co-operation and integration and of the saving of vast sums of arms-money? Governments are caught in a perverse cultural and political trap in which public opinion, elite opinion, military interests and the potential manipulation of public opinion by the opposition are all intervening variables. Although mass-media indoctrination campaigns can be switched on and off according to circumstances, educational curricula are not touched, and irredentism becomes a firmly rooted dimension of the political culture to which rulers and ruled alike are subject.

The only important exception to this rule appears to be the case in which a state has historically lost territories to an overwhelmingly more powerful neighbour. This, which can be considered a rule in itself, applies to Paraguay, which lost great territories to both Argentina and Brazil, and to Mexico, which lost vast tracts of land to the United States. Paraguay does not have significant territorial disputes pending with Argentina or Brazil, nor does Mexico have relevant problems of this type pending with the United States. Obviously, the overwhelming disparity of forces between immediate neighbours appears to account for these behavioural differences vis-a-vis the typical Hispanic American case of irredentism.

There can be little doubt that the sort of process described above is an important explicatory factor in the frustration of projects for regional co- operation and integration - not the only one, to be sure, but a relevant variable to be considered. Chauvinistic nationalism, with a clear identification of a majority of the population with the state, prevails even in the tiny Central American countries, where, partly because of disputes engendered by this phenomenon, the Central American Market turned into a fiasco.

As I have already said, according at least to the Argentine data, the problem of an unpragmatic obsession with territory, which greatly affects most of Hispanic America, seems to be more serious within the better- educated segments of the population. In this respect, the educational system and the mass media would appear to operate in a way which is counterproductive for regional co-operation. Nevertheless, albeit with


Argentine Territorial Nationalism I65

distorted information ('the Beagle Channel islands should be Argentine'; 'the Esequibo region should be Venezuelan', etc.), common sense tends to prevail ('peace is more important than the Beagle Channel islands; I support the treaty').

But pragmatic attitudes are not often intense or militant, whereas, on the contrary, chauvinistic attitudes often are, and the latter attitudes converge with the corporate interests of the military, who are anxious to justify big budgets. Thus, a sort of equilibrium is generated by which (a) territorial disputes seldom get out of control (Argentina 'waited' a century and a half before waging war on the United Kingdom); (b) territorial disputes are seldom solved or die out; and (c) territorial disputes always cost money and inhibit regional co-operation and integration. Furthermore, in so far as there is a natural convergence of interests between the local military establishments and the international arms trade which clearly inhibits development, Hispanic American territorial nationalism can be conceptualised as one of the many mechanisms through which dependencia operates. In Argentina the case is somewhat more complex because territorial nationalism comes combined with a foreign-policy arrogance which, with fluctuations, has lasted for nearly a century, and which suggests a strange dialectic between underdevelopment, dependencia, and certain types of Third World nationalism. This, however, should be the subject of another paper.

Argentine territorial nationalism presents some unique characteristics (although the same might possibly be said of each and every case mentioned above). Nevertheless, as was repeatedly stated, this is a generalised Hispanic American phenomenon: as any reader of Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa knows well, in La Ciudady los Perros one can find two instances in which the cadets of a military school gleefully imagine they are stepping over the heads of Chilean or Ecuadorian soldiers, plus another instance in which officers paranoidally talk about Ecuadorian and Colombian ambitions with respect to Peruvian territory. Though useful and interesting, it is not necessary to resort to public opinion polls to have a valid perception of the extent of this phenomenon.


Article Contentsp.139p.140p.141p.142p.143p.144p.145p.146p.147p.148p.149p.150p.151p.152p.153p.154p.155p.156p.157p.158p.159p.160p.161p.162p.163p.164p.165

Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (May, 1988), pp. 1-276+i-viiiFront MatterEconomic Stabilisation in Argentina: The Austral Plan [pp.1-26]Liberal Patriotism and the Mexican Reforma [pp.27-48]Financial Leadership and the Formation of Peruvian Elite Groups, 1884-1930 [pp.49-81]Bolivia and the International Tin Cartel, 1931-1941 [pp.83-110]Argentina 1976-1982: Labour Leadership and Military Government [pp.111-138]Argentine Territorial Nationalism [pp.139-165]Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War: Some Reflections on the 1945-8 Conjuncture [pp.167-189]Reviewsuntitled [pp.191-193]untitled [pp.193-195]untitled [pp.195-196]untitled [pp.197-200]untitled [pp.200-201]untitled [pp.202-204]untitled [pp.204-206]untitled [pp.206-208]untitled [pp.208-210]untitled [pp.210-212]untitled [pp.212-214]untitled [pp.214-216]untitled [pp.216-218]untitled [pp.218-220]untitled [pp.220-222]untitled [pp.222-224]untitled [pp.224-226]untitled [pp.226-228]untitled [pp.228-230]untitled [pp.230-231]untitled [pp.231-233]untitled [pp.233-237]untitled [pp.237-239]untitled [pp.239-241]untitled [pp.241-242]untitled [pp.242-244]untitled [pp.245-246]untitled [pp.246-249]untitled [pp.249-251]untitled [pp.251-253]

Shorter Noticesuntitled [pp.255-256]untitled [pp.256-257]untitled [pp.257-258]untitled [pp.258-259]untitled [pp.259-260]untitled [pp.260-261]untitled [p.262]untitled [pp.262-263]untitled [p.263]untitled [pp.264-265]untitled [pp.265-266]untitled [pp.266-267]untitled [pp.267-268]untitled [pp.268-269]

Other Books Received [pp.271-275]Back Matter [pp.i-viii]

Argentine Territorialism Escude

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