Untitled Document

THE CASE OF ARGENTINA^[a]

By Carlos Escudé

Introduction

The present paper is an attempt to:

1. Summarize the findings of a multi-stage research project on the nationalistic, authoritarian and militaristic contents of Argentina's educational system, and

2. Link the said findings to Argentina's foreign policy traditions, in terms not of direct causality but of cultural factors that have contributed to determine the menu of policy choices that Argentine decision-makers perceived to have before them.

This effort can be properly placed in the framework of the theoretical questions posed by Herbert A. Simon in a 1985 article in which he stressed that:

"To understand political choices, we need to understand where the frame of reference for the actors' thinking comes from (...). An important component of the frame of reference is the set of alternatives that are given consideration in the choice process. We need to understand not only how people reason about alternatives, but where the alternatives come from in the first place. The process whereby alternatives are generated has been somewhat ignored as an object of research. (...) The theory of the generation of alternatives deserves, and requires, a treatment that is just as definitive and thorough as the treatment we give to the theory of choice among specified alternatives."^[1]

Both the history of Argentina's foreign policy and the history of the ideological contents of Argentina's educational system have led me to the conclusion that there has been a significant connection between political culture and foreign policy decision-making in Argentina, and that it is impossible to attain a satisfactory understanding of some of the more extreme foreign policies of Argentina's history, without recurring to a cultural factor as a causal variable in a multivariate explanatory model.

The most salient case in which the intervention of a cultural variable in the decision-making process is self-evident is that of the invasion of the Falkland/Malvinas islands of April 1982. The military government then in charge invaded the islands in order to gain (to some extent, regain) popular support, and they were indeed successful in the attainment of this objective until their inevitable defeat at war. Although the direct cause of the invasion was this political gambit, the fact that invading the islands was a plausible way of generating support is in itself indicative that, due to the operation of a cultural variable, the menu of policy choices available to the Argentine government was very different from, for example, the menu available to the Canadian government at the time. Indeed, no Canadian government could ever gain popularity by invading the French islands of St. Pierre et Miquelon, which are far closer to Canada than the Falklands are to Argentina, and which have no better reasons for being French than the Falklands have for being British. It was due to a cultural factor that the invasion of the Falkland Islands was a policy alternative open to the Argentine government in 1982. It is due to a cultural factor that the invasion of St. Pierre et Miquelon is not a policy alternative open to the Canadian government.

Also, the fact that going to war over the Falkland/Malvinas islands in 1982 was a plausible policy option for the Argentine military government is underlined by the fact that this conflict was preceded, in 1978, by an aborted mobilization against Chile due to a territorial dispute over the tiny Beagle Channel islands, which --as in the case of the Falklands conflict-- was accompanied by a bellicose indoctrination that was only an intensification of the traditional anti-Chilean contents of the Argentine educational curriculum. This episode, which put the country only hours away from a war against Chile that was averted by the Vatican's intervention, shows not only how war-prone was that Argentine military government, but also how much room for such policies there was in Argentina's culture: civilian support for such an adventure ran high, a testimony of which is the massive amount of anti-Chilean literature produced then and afterwards.^[2]

Likewise, the fact that Argentina has neither signed the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) nor ratified the Tlatelolco treaty for the prohibition of nuclear weapons in Latin America (it being the only country in the region in this position with the exception of Cuba), and the fact that Argentina has pursued this policy under governments of every kind, military and democratic, and under both major political parties, also underscores the plausibility of including a cultural variable in any explanatory model of these policy outcomes. Until very recently there has been a relatively generalized consensus that ratifying Tlatelolco or signing the NPT was contrary to the "national interest", regardless of the direct and indirect costs of maintaining a nuclear arms option open. Argentina set out to enrich uranium despite the fact that its nuclear reactors run on natural uranium, and the vast majority of Argentines have felt proud about their country's achievements in this field. This does not explain any individual Argentine government's nuclear policy, but it does help to understand why this policy option was an attractive item of the menu for one Argentine government after the other.

Invading the Falkland Islands and keeping a nuclear arms option open were extremely costly policies for Argentina, which in addition to their high direct costs subjected her to all sorts of discriminations in her relations with the industrialized world. The 1982 war in the South Atlantic lasted only a few weeks, but Argentina did not reestablish diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom until 1990, thus damaging her vital economic relations with the EEC.

In the case of Latin American Studies, the absence of a political scientific approach to the study of the mechanisms for the making of citizens was particularly impoverishing, due to the enhanced role that the state has played in this region in the process of nation-building. In Latin America, national distinctions are often artificial, perhaps to a greater extent than in Europe, where (for example) some sort of German or Italian culture had arisen before the consolidation of these respective nation-states. Indeed, if we restrain ourselves to Hispanic America, it could well be said that what the countries that compose it have in common would define a nationality in Europe. In Hispanic America, the distinction between citizens of neighboring states are often almost exclusively the product of the efforts of the state, which to a very considerable extent is previous to the nationality (this being, of course, always a question of degree). Uruguayans and the inhabitants of the Province of Buenos Aires not only speak the same language and share a common, largely southern European stock; they also have practically the same accent. Yet there are great differences between the two, in terms of a political culture which was to a great extent generated by the state. And indeed, there is a concomitant great difference between the political evolution of the two countries, Argentina being more prone to authoritarianism, and Uruguay more democratic. Moreover, while Argentina made the Falkland/Malvinas war in 1982, Uruguay never even made a feeble attempt to claim the islands, despite the fact that the historical title of Montevideo to them can compete with that of Buenos Aires. If we do not study the mechanisms used for the making of citizens and their specific ideological contents, we will be excluding a variable which (together with a number of other factors) may be crucial to the understanding of the political and policy-making process.

This is more the case in Latin America than in some other areas of the world insofar as the states' role in the forging of citizens was greater and more intense: local leaderships felt that they had to achieve in very few decades what in Europe had been achieved in centuries through a complex historical process that included state intervention but was by no means limited to it. In Hispanic America, commonality (language, religion, historical origin, etc.) was a barrier to the development of a national identity limited to the artificial boundaries of the state. Thus the state had to step in to rapidly compensate for this lack of a "natural" identity, improvising myths and, more importantly, generating negative images of their immediate neighbors. This effort was undertaken in addition to the more universal state task of attempting to eliminate heterogeneity within the state itself. Thus, the study of the mechanisms used for the making of citizens is more important in Latin America than in some other regions, a fact that is even further enhanced by the traditional authoritarian political trends of the region, that has tended to increase the role of the state in everyday life.

Needless to say, any attempt to study the mechanisms used for the making of citizens in Latin America and, more specifically, their ideological contents, even if undertaken with the relatively narrow objective of contributing to the understanding of the foreign policy menu of choices, will plunge us into the wider field of the origins of the region's traditional authoritarian trends. Indeed, the fact that a coup d'état is not an equally likely policy choice for the military in every society, and that its being in the menu of their policy choices is largely a function of a political culture that can make it more or less tolerable for the wider public, should be rather obvious. That such studies should not have been undertaken for every country in the region is regretable and surprising.

Argentine territorial nationalism

To a very modest extent, this vacuum in the political scientific literature on Latin America was filled, in the Argentine case, by my own work which to the present has consisted of four successive stages that I will summarize in this paper. I began with a preliminary survey of 20th Century Argentine history school-texts that showed that, independently of the type of regime or government in power, one message that is permanently present in Argentine education is that the country has been deprived of huge continental territories during the 19th Century by the cunning of expansionist neighbors and/or by the secessions of ungrateful brethren. In the Argentine texts, the loss of the Falkland Islands is added to the loss of great territories allegedly forfeited to Chile and Brazil, and to the loss of Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay in their entirety: these countries supposedly should have been "inherited" by Argentina from Spain. In contrast, the historical atlases that are published in Western Europe and North America unanimously award mid-19th Century Argentina a territory that is scarcely more than half its present-day area (see, for example, the historical atlases published by Hammond, Penguin and Anchor). In other words, while the Argentine textbooks reflect a self-perception as a country that suffered severe territorial amputations during the 19th Century, victimized by neighbors and secessionists, the vast majority of the material published on the subject outside Argentina depicts the country as successfully expansionist during that very same century.

This phenomenon --interesting both from a sociology of knowledge and from an anthropological perspective-- led me to:

1. A study of the historical origins of the myth of Argentine territorial losses, in which I come to the conclusion that the perception that describes the Argentine state as successfully expansionist during the 19th Century is more objective and realistic than its counterpart^[6].

2. To the hypotheses that the myth of territorial losses:

a. Feeds the irredentism that made possible the massive popular support to the military takeover of the Falkland Islands in 1982 (despite the fact that it was performed by a --by then-- very unpopular dictatorship, and notwithstanding the near-certainty of defeat)

b. Is functional to the corporate interests of armed forces which are in need of what in Argentina are called "conflict hypotheses", in order to justify budget increases and arms purchases.

c. Was functional to the interests of a state that historically needed to generate adherence and loyalties, artificially differentiating an incipient nation from neighboring states in which the same language was spoken, the same majority-religion was professed and, to some extent, other common denominators, both ethnical and cultural, prevailed. This functionality would be hypothetically enhanced in a case such as the Argentine, where the federal state needed to unite regions which were affected by a relative heterogeneity in ethnical and cultural terms. In this context, it should be remembered that, in Argentina, the population of Buenos Aires has much more in common with the population of Uruguay (a separate state) than with the population of Corrientes; that the population of Corrientes has much more in common with the population of Paraguay (again, a separate state) than with the population of Jujuy; that the population of Jujuy has much more in common with the population of Bolivia (yet again, a separate state) than with the population of Mendoza, and that the population of Mendoza has much more in common with the inhabitants of the Chilean capital than with those of Buenos Aires. The extensive Andean region of the country is akin to Bolivia; the also extensive Guaraní region is akin to Paraguay; the no less extensive Cuyo region is akin to central Chile; the economically and politically central Rio de la Plata region is akin to Uruguay. The internal heterogeneity is thus more relevant in the context of the relative kinship with neighboring states which share many cultural and ethnic traits with the country as a whole, and vis-a-vis which the existing frontiers are wholly artificial. The need for cohesion in an internally heterogenous state which concomitantly is not too different from its neighbors would hypothetically have generated perceptions, in the ruling elites, as to the suitability of generating --indeed, inventing-- unifying and differentiating myths, intentionally propagated by the state.

3. To the measurement of the dissemination of the myth of territorial losses. To this end, the Gallup Institute of Argentina was asked to include the following question in one of its polls: "Do you think that, throughout its history, Argentina has won or lost territories?" A probabilistic sample representing the five most important urban centers of the country was polled, 76% of which answered that Argentina had lost territories. What is more interesting, however, is that when the sample was disaggregated according to educational levels, there was a perfect progression, in such a way that while only 61% of the population which had not completed primary school thought that Argentina had lost territories, as much as 86% of the population with a university education thought this to be the case. Thus, it could be conjectured that the tendency towards territorial irredentism would increase with the educational level, insofar as a greater exposure to texts with an irredentist contents led to a greater percentage of opinions adhering to the myths disseminated by these texts. This hypothesis was strengthened by the results of Gallup polls that focused on whether Argentina should sign a new boundary (and peace) treaty with Chile, that had already been negotiated and initialized by both parties, and that put an end to the dispute (over three tiny southern islands and adjacent waters) that had almost led to war in 1978. Although (thanks to the government's intensive propaganda campaign) the majority of the sample was in favor of the 1984 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, the percentage that was against it grew progressively and significantly with the educational level. Thus, in Argentina, the educational level appears to be inversely correlated with attitudes functional for international cooperation.^[c]

Geography texts between 1879 and 1986

In turn, these data led me to a systematic survey of the nationalistic contents of the primary and secondary school geography texts used in Argentina from 1879 to 1986^[7]. I chose geography as a strategic subject matter for these ends because in Argentina the irredentist contents of education comes out more clearly there than in any other school course. I worked with a sample of 77 texts that included all of the more widely used authors and all of the publishing houses with a massive distribution throughout the more than ten decades comprised by the period studied. This survey not only confirmed the dissemination of the myth of territorial losses, but also revealed how new territories were incorporated into the alleged reach of "Argentina's national sovereignty" throughout the 1920-1950 period: I refer to what I call Argentina's "imaginary territory", i.e., the "Argentine Antarctic Sector", the South Georgia Islands, the South Sandwich Islands and the South Orkney Islands. These are territories that Argentina began to claim but over which it has never exercised any measure of real control, notwithstanding which they are presented in the texts as if they were simply one more province, undisputed and long since a part of Argentina.

In Argentina, the discussion about the educational policy to adopt in view of the massiveness of immigration had begun in the last decade of the XIX Century, and an opinion favorable to a strong nationalist indoctrination slowly gained momentum. It should not be thought, however, that before the educational reforms of 1908 Argentina's primary curriculum was completely lacking in a "nationalizing" contents. Already towards 1900 a number of patriotic songs and marches were obligatory, and the national holidays were celebrated regularly in the educational establishments. An 1888 decree established that in first and second grade six weekly hours had to be devoted to Argentine history, and an 1899 decree established that Argentine history and geography could only be taught by Argentine citizens, and that Spanish could only be taught by a native speaker of the language. A 1902 decree established that all of the schools had the obligation to exhibit the national flag and coat of arms^[15]. It cannot be said, thus, that Argentine primary education lacked all nationalizing contents in the years during which the elite's cultural paranoia was developing. For the moderates, the existing nationalist contents was reasonable and sufficient. But for the more xenophobic sectors, what there existed was far from enough. Towards 1908, the influence of the latter was already decisive and overwhelming. That year, a new administration took charge of the Consejo. And that administration, presided by José María Ramos Mejía, launched the extremist reforms the known as "patriotic education".

Ramos Mejía's "patriotic" project

The 1908 orders to teachers are interesting in order to convey the true meaning of this "patriotic education":

"Reading and writing - In the inferior grades, words and phrases of a patriotic character (...) must be read and written with frequency (...)."

"Castillian - It is well known that the perfect knowledge of the tongue spoken by a people can be in itself a road towards the development of love of country (...). Having said this, let us look for special means for the development of love of country (...). In conversation, in all grades, issues of a patriotic character must be frequently included: the flag, the coat of arms, the monuments, the national anthem, the national heroes. The same must be done with the oral reproduction exercises of texts and phrases, as well as with the recitation, from memory, of selected paragraphs (...). Essays are especially suitable (...) for a great range of exercises related to patriotic education (...). Scrap books of a patriotic character should be made by all children."

"Natural science and hygiene - In natural science we shall illustrate the lessons preferably with examples drawn from Argentine animal life, vegetable life and geology; we shall emphasize how rich our country is in all of these dimensions and how even its poorest inhabitants are thus provided with foodstuffs, comforts and pleasures which innumerable peoples of the Earth are deprived of. We shall establish comparisons to show the superiority of our production in comparison to that of the principal countries of the world, in agriculture and cattle grazing (...). Even hygiene lends itself for observations of a patriotic character. When referring, for example, to the running water and sewage systems of Buenos Aires, we should emphasize that thanks to them our capital city ranks among the first in the world."^[16]

Similar instructions were given for "geography and history", "moral, civic instruction and social economy", "drawing", "music" and even "arithmetic". The special orders given out for the May 1909 festivities, for example, read under the subtitle "computations and arithmetic":

"Problems related to the years in which San Martín, Belgrano, Rivadavia, Moreno, etc., lived. Find the date of birth of these heroes and determine how old they were in 1810. Measure the exact time that lapsed from May 25, 1810 to the principal actions of the Revolutionary War. Specific problems relating to the dates of battles, the number of patriots before and after combat, the birth and death of this or that hero, the dates in which the different assemblies met, and the resources, the income, the trade, etc., of those times in comparison to the present."^[17]

Clearly thus, the patriotic education reforms were a positivist project of cultural engineering that sought to create an artificial nation through a state that was a historical and a political accident. It was also an extremist project that rationally sought to generate irrationality, exacerbating fanatical emotions through education. The idea of a development-oriented education, as Sarmiento had conceived it four decades before, had completely lapsed by 1908. In its place stood an indoctrination-oriented education that was dogmatic, authoritarian and militaristic, essentially subordinating the individual to the state, which became an end-in-itself. One major contradiction that affected this society (of which the authors of this cultural engineering project seemed to be totally unaware of) was that between this unliberal culture intentionally encouraged, and the theory underlying Argentina's liberal institutions. On the other hand, a centralized educational system that was in permanent expansion through the budgetary resources of an increasingly wealthy state (those were the golden days of Argentina's economic expansion) was attempting to generate a dogmatic and narrow-minded national culture that was quite the opposite of the modernity required in order to endow the country with a self-sustained development: this was the second contradiction that affected the system. According to my hypothesis, Argentine political stability would be negatively affected by a contradiction between culture (thus generated) and institutions (created in a previous and very different ideological climate). In turn --also hypothetically-- the nationalist objectives of patriotic education would be frustrated by the contradiction between a chauvinistic and dogmatic culture that was plagued with improvised and exaggerated myths, and the functional requirements for the development of power in the 20th Century, that demand the encouragement of a systematic doubt in order to make possible the prevalence of a method of scientific thought. Finally, it is not surprising that twenty two years after the launching of these reforms, the army should have usurped the government in Argentina with practically no civic resistance. More than two decades of indoctrination in the idea that "there is nothing more respectable than the army and navy of a people" do not go by in vain. At least in part, the militarism of Argentine politics appears to have been a consequence of a militaristic culture, and the militarism of that culture seems in turn to have been (at least partly) a consequence of the educational contents, from the patriotic education reforms onwards.

Comparatively, these educational contents and indoctrinating intention appear to have been somewhat less extreme than those then prevailing in Germany and Japan, although they were also more artificial (insofar as German and Japanese traditionalism was based on millenary traditions, while in the Argentine case the traditions were improvised and the myths very recently invented). My hypothesis is that this artificiality would have grave negative consequences for the development of a serious intellectual ethos, a systematic doubt and a method of scientific thought, insofar as the fragility of the national dogmas and myths made doubting both more pertinent and of more dangerous consequences to the ideology on which the state attempted to build the nation. No matter how primitive it may be, a millenary tradition is always worthy of study and can always be perceived from a perspective that makes it worthy of local love and respect, but the same is not true regarding a pseudo-tradition invented by a contemporary, as was the case in 1910 Argentina with the myth of the gaucho and the cult of San Martín: if scorn is to be prevented, questioning is to be considered taboo. According to my hypothesis, these negative qualities made these pseudo-traditions and mythologies less functional for self-sustained, long-term material progress than analogous traditions and myths in some other countries such as Japan and Germany, whose education during this period shared some common characteristics with Argentina's in terms of traditionalism, authoritarianism and militarism. In this respect, it is important to point out that in Japan from 1880 onwards the elite was aware that it desired to produce citizens who were obedient and even submissive, but who were concomitantly functional for the development of a modern and vigorous capitalism^[24].

With respect to France, the Argentine case appears to have been more extreme, insofar as the republican tradition, which was vigorously contractualist, has always to a considerable extent neutralized the ideology of the French extreme right (which was not very different from that which inspired Argentine primary education, although during the period under study it never got to dominate French public primary education). Notice that while the idea of a religion of patriotism was originally French and Jacobin, the patrie and the nation were, in the case of the Revolution that gave birth to this idea, the product of a theoretical social contract, i.e., originally at least a free choice, and not of an imposition. The notion of a social contract --that by the late 19th Century had evolved in France to Renan's democratic formulation: "the existence of a nation is a permanent plebiscite"-- was never present in the concept of patria and nation conveyed by the Argentine educational system. On the contrary, typical of the Argentine concept were the definitions of Joaquín V. González (minister of the Interior, minister of Public Education and member of the Board of the Consejo), published in his text Patria (which during the first decade of the century was used in Argentine primary education). In these definitions the authoritarian, militaristic, anthropomorphic and even metaphysical dimensions of the concept clearly emerge: the patria is a "person", a "perpetual and individual organism", an "invisible soul", a "natural and unavoidable law that chains a man to the land in which he was born", and it is "above and beyond all doctrines, superior to every interest and more powerful than any will", an "eternal generator of individual and collective heroism and the only inextinguishable source of true glory". As can be seen, this is the German concept of Volksgeist in its purest and most authoritarian form, and the very antithesis of French or Anglo-American contractualism and individualism.^[25]

With respect to the United States, aside from the already mentioned greater centralization of the Argentine case, there were key differences linked to US individualism that makes the US case much less extreme than the Argentine one^[26]. As was already stated, in terms of the ideological contents of public primary education the Australian and Canadian cases are in the other extreme of a liberal-authoritarian and individualist-collectivist continuum. Of all known cases, only the German and Japanese ones were more extreme than Argentina's before World War I, with the important difference --already pointed out-- that the solid roots of the traditions celebrated by German and Japanese nationalism endowed these cases with greater intellectual seriousness which is essential to the quality of the educational system (although it does not necessarily diminishes its authoritarianism). In Argentina it was necessary to lie grossly in order to intentionally invent myths whose questioning in the classroom could not be tolerated: it was the only way in which a new nation could acquire a culture based on the Volksgeist model, which though always authoritarian, can only make sense for old nations (Germany being, in terms of these concepts, a new state but a culture differentiated of old from the neighboring non-German cultures and hence, at least in some ways and to some extent, an old nation).

The 1914-1930 period

With the death of Ramos Mejía --which coincided approximately with the outbreak of World War I-- the Monitor (the Consejo's official journal) adopted a more moderate and technical attitude, but there was no real change of substance in the ideological contents with which Argentine children were indoctrinated. To begin with, the syllabi introduced in 1909 and officially approved in 1910 did not change until 1939: this is the first evidence I shall present to argue that the governments of the (moderate and middle class) Radical Party, that administered the country from 1916 to 1930, adopted the ideology officialized by positivist Conservatives in 1908. During the period that went from 1914 to 1930, nationalist and militarist contents were not added to education, but neither did they decrease.^[e]

The second element that I will bring forth as proof that nothing substantial changed is linked to the teaching of music in public primary schools during this period. The following table, that presents the percentage of obligatory songs with a "patriotic" or "nationalizing" contents in 1920, is a good illustration of the prevailing attitude:

This last idea of Iriondo is a precise description of what this positivitic project of cultural engineering was all about: besides engendering fanaticisms, it sought to de-Europeanize Argentina, i.e., to replace the "European atmosphere" for a vaguely defined indigenous ethos, whose potential for the creation or recreation of a dynamic civilization capable of competing in the world of the XX Century was absolutely uncertain. As has already been stated, the "original" civilization that these men sought to create was lacking in all content, and the indoctrination therefore concentrated in hypnotizing children with national symbols and military marches, sowing authoritarianism and militarism, exacerbating emotionalism, disseminating myths of recent creation that could not withstand any real questioning, discouraging true thought and thus indirectly discouraging a serious intellectual attitude and contributing to deprive the local culture of creativity. The citizens produced by this process would certainly not have European mentalities. In that sense (and in my opinion) the project would be successful, insofar as it would engender something "different" (towards the 1930s it was already taking form), but that something would be, from almost every point of view, inferior to the European culture that it was partially replacing: it would be less dynamic, less creative and more corrupt. To make it worse, the need to differentiate a "national character" from the rest of Latin America gave a racist tone to Argentine culture. In what was only apparently a contradiction with the "Argentinizing" obsession, the country would define itself (in textbooks and elsewhere) as "overwhelmingly white and European" (a myth that ignored the massive contingents of mestizos of the northern provinces). Thus, despite the "Argentinizing" drive, the external forms of European culture would be maintained, and this cultural trait would be accentuated and exacerbated, to the point that, in their outward appearance, the Argentines got to be more European than the Europeans. It was, again in my opinion, an empty shell, form without contents and a mortal trap. Argentine culture would be successfully de-Europeanized insofar as the mentalities engendered, the thought processes, the myth-ridden civic culture and the lack of a science and technology-oriented culture would be very different (when taken in totum) from those of any mainstream European society, while concomitantly the Argentines would become increasingly obsessed with identifying themselves as a European community differentiated from the other European nations: almost as if Argentina shared a border with France. And that majority of Argentines that descends from immigrants would end up being an ethnically European group without an European mentality, notwithstanding which their social codes, habits, manners and attire would be a servile imitation of what was quintessentially European (and preferably aristocratic). Yankees and Australians would be looked down upon with some contempt: rude frontier societies, they were not sufficiently European to be up to par.

Some of these trends were successively accentuated in 1943 and 1946. This is probably most notorious regarding the authoritarianism that was being bred since 1908. The military government inaugurated in 1943 fired 32 teachers for "activities contrary to the nationality" and another 22 for "immorality", out of a total of 115 fired for a wide range of similar causes^[39]. In turn, the first interventor (an appointee who in times of crisis replaced the president) of the Consejo during the Peronist government pontificated in late 1946:

"(...) The school is not a partisan forum nor an Athenaeum for speeches and shallow lectures... It is a temple of the Fatherland, and in its altars the only cult worshipped must be that of labor, the national heros and the children. Whoever seeks other ends (...) must abandon the classrooms and look for another context for his preaching, should he find it, far from the sacred walls of the school. In this determination --that the teachers be worthy of their high and responsibility-laden mission-- we shall extreme our care. We certainly value the learned, but we prefer the virtuous man, because the primary school has no need of erudites, but requires instead those who carry with them the true feeling of Argentineness and conform to the strict norms of behavior imposed by that feeling. (...) And we demand loyalty, because he who treacherously accepts the benefits of a position prestiged by the state in order to combat it in its own home cannot be worthy and upright."^[40]

Simultaneously with authoritarianism, the lack of intellectual rigor of the educational contents was also accentuated. As has been mentioned, this had begun long before, when Carlos Octavio Bunge established the appropriateness of using "poetical fictions" to make up for the lack of deeply rooted legends in this new country. The idolizing of San Martín and the transformation of the image of the gaucho from a bum and a thief to a noble superhero were a couple of the sequels of this doctrine, to which were added the territorial myths treated at the beginning of this monograph (including the attribution of Antarctica to Spain in Colonial times and the leap in the territory attributed to Argentina from 2.8 to 4 million square kilometers). In Argentine education it has apparently always been possible to invent pseudo-facts, so long as the pseudo-fact is perceived to be functional to the naive nationalism that prevails, in which case it is not questioned and there is no control nor accountability. It would be impractical to document here the many dimensions of this phenomenon that amounts to the devaluation of all criteria of objectivity, truth and intellectual authenticity; it acquired many forms and colors. During Perón's government the story that thanks to the marvelous exploits of Dr. Richter, a Nazi scientist imported by Perón, Argentina had managed to control the thermonuclear reaction (that would make it possible to transform the abundant hydrogen found in water into electric energy, and implied as well that Argentina had the H bomb) became official news^[j]. And in the field of education this type of attitude can be illustrated by the words addressed to the teachers by Perón himself on September 19, 1947, and by the (intended) consequences of these words:

"We have launched a new plan that will probably lead to the development of new teaching methods in Argentina. I ask you to devote yourselves to the creation of these new pedagogical methods, because the Argentines must be taught with Argentine methods. There is no need to recur to Pestalozzi nor to any of the other great pedagogues."^[43]

This is more than just another manifestation of a naive cultural nationalism. In this way, the General set the bases for that indigenous revolution in Argentine teaching methods that would replace the phonetically convenient phrase Mamá me ama ("mother loves me") as a point of departure in reading instruction, for the politically significant phrase Evita me ama ("Evita loves me"). The great indoctrination machine that had been invented by the Conservatives in 1908 was intact and could incorporate any contents that was compatible with its original authoritarianism. Furthermore, the dogmatic and authoritarian culture that had at least partly been generated by this machine was entirely compatible with these innovations. But there was a further turn of the screw in this stage of the process, linked to the disrespect for intellectual rigor mentioned above, and here obsequiousness --which is a formidable functional complement of authoritarianism-- accentuated the process, operating so as to generate immediate reactions to this demand of Perón. On December 9, 1947, a resolution passed by the Consejo established that the inspectors and visitadores of the provinces, and the inspectors of the federal capital, had to meet in order to receive orders that they would later have to transmit to the teachers throughout the country, regarding the application to education of Perón's Five Year Plan. The first subject to be treated in these meetings was:

"The four great principles of the President of the Argentine Republic General Juan Domingo Perón for the organization of education are: I Objectivity; II Simplicity; III Perfectivity; IV Stability. Application of these principles to the primary school. The objectives of primary education. The forging of the Argentine man. Preparedness and Instruction, and Configuration or Unfolding."^[44]

Thus, in keeping with the curious intellectual ethos that was being developed (that was perhaps the culmination of the process of de-Europeanizing Argentina in terms of mentalities and thought processes), the officials rapidly picked up Perón's suggestion and anointed him as the great Argentine pedagogue, who was replacing Pestalozzi. It was yet another step towards the blurring of all criteria for truth and objectivity.

NOTES

^[a]. I am indebted to Alejandro Corbacho, Matteo Goretti and Lars Schoultz for their comments on the manuscript of this paper.

^[b]. This idea might appear particularly unlikely for an American audience, due precisely to cultural reasons that make it difficult to understand a different attitude towards cost. Nonetheless, it is only necessary to be slightly acquainted with Argentina's political life to come across slogans such as "cueste lo que cueste y caiga quien caiga" ("cost what it may, and whoever may fall"), or "la patria dejará de ser colonia o la bandera flameará sobre sus ruinas" ("the fatherland will cease to be a colony or the flag will flutter above its ruins"), that illustrate well what I mean. And although these slogans may represent extreme attitudes that do not prevail in everyday life, it is necessary only to visit the state television station (ATC, Channel 7) to realize that such gigantic and underutilized facilities were never built with an eye to making up for the investment, not to say making a profit. Cases like the former are the rule, not the exception, among Argentine public investments.

^[c]. Data included in my article cited in endnote 1. This finding is of some modest theoretical relevance insofar as it shows the insufficiency of correlations such as those made by Almond and Verba. These data (which are also quantitative) show that the contents of education cannot be left aside in a study of the political effects of education.

^[d]. One can only conjecture with respect to the consequences for the country's culture of this style of indoctrination, which misrepresents history, international law and the very logic of intellectual discourse; which discourages free speech, criticism, the exercise of a systematic doubt and the‑development of independent criteria in the individual; and which breeds dogmatism and its necessary corollary, authoritarianism, not to speak of irredentism and fanaticism.

^[e]. This is precisely the reason why I take the year 1914 (the year of the death of Ramos Mejía and of the beginning of the War) as a breaking point in my periodization, and not 1916 (the year in which the Radical administration was inaugurated and which conventional wisdom would normally choose as a landmark for periodizations): although the effect on education of the death of the old president of the Consejo and of the outbreak of the European war was only superficial, it was actually greater than the effect of the change of government, at least in terms of ideological contents. See my Fracaso..., Chapter 3.

^[f]. The Argentine case contrasts sharply with the Mexican case, where the political ruptures generated qualitative changes in the ideological contents of primary and secondary education. See J.Z. Vázquez, Nacionalismo y Educación en México, El Colegio de México 1975.

^[g]. Paradoxically also, this statement runs against Argentine conventional wisdom, insofar as the sectors who have appropriated for themselves the term "nationalists" would find it difficult to acknowledge that it was the Conservatives who first established cultural nationalism as an official pedagogical ideology, and that after 1908 one major cultural aim of the Conservatives (who have always been accused of promoting an "European" Argentina) was to de-Europeanize Argentina.

^[h]. Carlos Octavio Bunge was one of the principal ideologues who inspired this educational reform that was also a project of cultural engineering. His numerous articles in the Monitor were frequently quoted afterwards by other such ideologues. See especially his "La enseñanza de la tradición y la leyenda" (February 28, 1911), "La educación patriótica ante la sociología" (August 31, 1908), "La poesía popular argentina" (December 30, 1909), "Teoría de un libro de lectura escolar" (December 31, 1910), and "La enseñanza de la historia" (January 31, 1911). Paradigmatic of Bunge's attitude regarding the invention of traditions and legends was his assertion in the first of the articles cited: "Though a fervent admirer of scientific positivism (...) I am the most sincere supporter of poetical fiction in the education of the child".

^[i]. The tango may be the only collective Argentine product that had a strong impact upon other cultures and that in some measure was internationalized. It may be symptomatic that it lost practically all creative momentum several decades ago (leaving aside very few personal exceptions). And it is certainly interesting to remember that Manuel Gálvez, one of the founding fathers of Argentine nationalism, should have thought that one of the most convincing proofs that Argentina was suffering a serious process of "denationalization" that needed be checked was the dissemination of that new and "alien" dance. See M. Gálvez, El Diario de Gabriel Quiroga: Opiniones Sobre la Vida Argentina (Arnoldo Moen y Hno., Buenos Aires 1910, page 129; cf. C. Solberg, op.cit., page 141). That what later became the very symbol of the Argentine nationality should have been considered denationalizing in 1910 is an illustration of the static character that these men wanted to impose upon the nationality they sought to create.

^[j]. Many years later, in the 1980s, the news spread that a team of medical investigators of the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) had developed a miraculous antidote to cancer, called crotoxina, that was based on cobra poison. When the issue became a scandal and the team was incriminated, a significant segment of the public became convinced that the miraculous potential of crotoxina was being frustrated due to a conspiracy of the big multinational pharmaceutical firms, that could not withstand the losses that would accrue as a consequence of the development of this inexpensive drug that, to top it all, was an Argentine invention (which was allegedly intolerable). To such a point have the criteria for (scientific or historical) truth and objectivity been blurred, that a great confusion prevails in the population whereby everything is possible and nothing is believable.

^[k]. The reader should bear in mind that these people were actively, consciously and very rationally seeking to generate irrationality (i.e., "frenzies", among other terms they themselves used).

^[l]. The doctrine that establishes that a man should work not for himself but for his "Fatherland" is documented throughout the five decades studied in C. Escudé, op.cit. 1990. This idea can be traced to conferences given by Fichte during the early XIX Century (while French soldiers patrolled the streets of Berlin) and probably had its origin in German idealism, although there are similar doctrines in the Catholic tradition.

^[m]. It is obvious that the continuum "elitism-social democracy" is different from the continuum "authoritarianism-political democracy". The Argentine armed forces, for example, have been cruelly authoritarian, despite the fact that its officer corps have been fed, to a large degree, with men who came from the lower middle class and for whom a military career was a channel for upward mobility.

^[n]. This explanation does not pretend to incur in any sort of reductionism. The variable that is being analyzed would be only one of several that hypothetically had an influence upon the degree of "success".

^[o]. In 1989, president Menem adopted a wholly countercultural foreign policy, breaking with just about every Argentine foreign policy tradition, and he was able to get away with it. In my opinion, this was the case not only because of the aforesaid freedom of manoeuvre available to decision-makers, but also because political culture is not static but rather is subject to a flux, and there are events that teach. Principal among these in the case of recent Argentine foreign policy events is the Falkland/Malvinas war, which had a great impact neutralizing classroom indoctrination and teaching the Argentine public what the foreign policy of Argentina should not be. A parallel in the realm of economics was the hyperinflationary experience of 1989: it taught people what they did not want for themselves and their country, despite decades of learning how to live with inflation through financial speculation.

[1] . H. A. Simon, "Human nature in politics: the dialogue of psychology with political science", American Political Science Review, Vol. 79, 1985, p. 302-303. I am indebted to Alejandro Corbacho for having brought this article to my attention.

[2] . In 1984, I was formally accused of treason because of my public support of the boundary treaty then signed with Chile, that awarded the islands to that country. The treaty itself was unacceptable to hawks, but to claim that the islands in dispute were rightfully Chilean --as I did-- was criminal in their perception.

[3] . After the war, a lot has been said about the possibility that the result might have been different if Argentina would have been "luckier" in her military operations, sinking more British ships with bombs that hit their targets but never exploded. Such conjectures are very unconvincing for the simple reason that war is not a sport played on the gentlemanly defined limits of the playing grounds. If Argentina had, for example, sunk one of the British aircraft carriers, escalation would have been inevitable, with the remaining one attacking the Argentine mainland and most probably wrecking the Patagonian oil and hydroelectric industry. This would have had a devastating long term effect upon Argentina's economy, and an immediate and equally disastrous effect on political support for the war, as Buenos Aires would have been left without energy. As it was, war never got to Argentina, and the country can be considered extremely fortunate for that.

[4] . Op.cit., p. 301.

[5] . In the mid 1920s, one of the pioneers of American political science, Charles Edward Merriam, set out to coordinate a series of studies on the instruments used to elicit civic participation and loyalty, and on the totality of societal circumstances in which such processes took place, for a sum total of eight countries (plus one volume on earlier civilizations). These included Soviet Russia, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, France, the United States and the states which emerged from the former Austrian Hungarian empire. These volumes, whose authors were familiar with the countries concerned through residence and knowledge of the language and local conditions, were crowned by Merriam's concluding and synoptic volume, The Making of Citizens, published in 1931. Although affected by some inconsistencies and unevenness, a series of great value was produced. Each volume was a study unto its own, and although they have now become obsolete, few have been repeated. The individual studies included mechanisms for eliciting civic participation and loyalty such as the educational system, the army and navy, the churches, the press, the radio and cinema, symbols and ceremonies, etc. Merriam himself undertook the final, comparative investigation of political education in school and society, which is basically a typology of citizen-training techniques.

In his day, Merriam scored an important scholarly and editorial success. Nonetheless, the political scientific field which he pioneered was relatively abandoned until the early 1960s, when Almond and Verba wrote their classic The Civic Culture, largely inspired by Merriam's effort, but striving to apply the new social scientific techniques then in vogue. Merriam's study, however praised, was said to be "merely qualitative", while the Almond and Verba piece sought "to continue the qualitative search and introduce quantitative analysis". To some extent, this new inroad proved to be a dead end. The new approach led to the need to use quantitative categories, such as "educational level", which are rather gross. Almond and Verba could make generalizations such as "the more educated person is more aware of the impact of government on the individual than is the person of less education" (Chapter 3), "the more educated individual is more likely to engage in political discussion" (Chapter 4), or "the more educated individual is more likely to consider himself capable of influencing the government" (Chapter 7). Yet (for example) they were further than ever from the study of the relationship between differences in educational contents and differences in a society's democratic and authoritarian trends, in its approach to its foreign relations, and in the views of the world prevailing among its citizens. Works included in Merriam's series, such as Herbert W. Schneider's Making Fascists, or Carlton J.H. Hayes' France: a Nation of Patriots, were actually closer to this substantive albeit "qualitative" problem. On the other hand, critics of the Almond and Verba piece argued that, very frequently, the concept of political culture was a construction devoid of empirical contents which was used to conceal our ignorance of the political process: what could not otherwise be explained was attributed, without further ado, to the political culture. Reactions to the Almond and Verba piece ranged from B. Berry's critique in terms of circular causality (does the political culture generate the political system, or is it the other way around?) to structuralist critiques that considered the concept of political culture useless and stressed the importance of the economy, the international market and other such variables to explain political outcomes. The sterility of Almond and Verba's quantitative approach led to a general critique of the concept of political culture which tended to preclude further qualitative research as well, and political scientific studies on educational and other mechanisms for the "making of citizens" were very seldom produced from there on. Important theoretical efforts with powerful insights for future research, such as Karl Deutsch's Nationalism and Social Communication (1953), were practically cast aside and did not bear the fruits expected by their authors and the political scientific community of the time.

[6] . See my "Argentine Territorial Nationalism", Journal of Latin American Studies, May 1988 (Vol. 20, Part 1). This piece, which attempts both to describe the phenomenon of the clashing perceptions and to evaluate the claim that Argentina lost territories, was previously published in Spanish, as the third essay of my book La Argentina vs. las Grandes Potencias: El Precio del Desafío, Editorial de Belgrano, Buenos Aires 1986, and as a contribution to R. Perina and R. Russell (eds.), Argentina en el Mundo 1973-1987, GEL, Buenos Aires 1988.

[7] . Three slightly different editions of this study were published in Spanish. First, as the fourth essay of my book Patología del Nacionalismo: el Caso Argentino, Ed. Tesis/Instituto Di Tella, Buenos Aires 1987; then as a paper entitled "Contenido nacionalista de la enseñanza de la geografía en la República Argentina, 1879-1986", published in Ideas en Ciencias Sociales, No. 9, 1988, and finally as a contribution to A. Borón and J. Faúndez, Malvinas Hoy: Herencia de un Conflicto, Ed. Puntosur, Buenos Aires 1988.

[8] . The 1984 texts mentioned are F.A. Daus, Geografía de la Argentina, and Galmarino and Ciro, Geografía de la Argentina y América.

[9] . Page 126.

[10] . Polls conducted by IPSA, RISC project. Stratified probabilistic samples representing 80% of the country's urban population.

[11] . This phase of this line of research was published in my book El Fracaso del Proyecto Argentino: Educación e Ideología, Ed. Tesis/Instituto Di Tella, Buenos Aires 1990.

[12] . See C. Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism in Argentina and Chile, 1890-1914, University of Texas Press, Austin 1970, chapter 6; H.S. Spalding, "Education in Argentina, 1890-1914: the limits to oligarchic reform", Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. III, No.1, Summer 1972; and M.B. Plotkin, "Política, educación y nacionalismo en el Centenario", Todo es Historia, September 1985.

[13] . G. Correa, "Orientación nacionalista en la escuela primaria, media y superior", lecture given at the Instituto Popular de Conferencias, vol. XIV of the Instituto's publication, 1928, page 51.

[14] . For the Australian case, see T. Findlay Mackenzie, Nationalism and Education in Australia, P.S. King & Son, London 1935. For the Canadian case, see G. Laloux-Jain, Les Manuels d'Histoire du Canada (au Québec et en Ontario de 1867 à 1914), Université Laval, Quebec 1974; G. Milburn and J. Herbert (eds.), National Consciousness and the Curriculum: the Canadian Case, Ontario Institute for Studies in education, Ontario 1974; A. Chaiton and N. McDonald, Canadian Schools and Canadian Identity, Gage Educational Publishing 1977, and A. Luke, Literacy, Textbooks and Ideology, The Falmer Press 1988.

[15] . See Chapter 1 of my El Fracaso (...).

[16] . Monitor de la Educación Común (from here on, Monitor), June 30, 1908, pages 341-351. The underlining is in the original. If the orders regarding the natural sciences and geography are compared with the results of my survey of geography texts, the measure in which the patriotic education reforms left an indelible mark on Argentine teaching will be perceived. The method of singing praises to the country and to compare it favorably "with the other peoples of the Earth", for example, is typical of the contents of the geography texts I surveyed. See my already quoted paper on the subject.

[17] . Monitor, May 30, 1909.

[18] . Consejo Nacional de Educación, La Educación Común en la República Argentina, Buenos Aires 1913, page 328.

[19] . M.B. Plotkin, op.cit., page 72.

[20] . Monitor, July 31, 1911, page 128.

[21] . E. Bavio, "La historia en las escuelas argentinas", Part I, Monitor, March 31, 1910, pages 712-713.

[22] . Part II of the article quoted above, Monitor, April 30, 1910, pages 69-72.

[23] . Monitor, June 30, 1910.

[24] . For the analysis of the Japanese case, see P.A. Narasimha Murthy, The Rise of Modern Nationalism in Japan (A Historical Study of the Role of Education in the Making of Modern Japan), Ashajanak Publications, New Delhi 1973. For the German case, see E.H. Reisner, Nationalism and Education since 1789: A Social and Political History of Modern Education, Macmillan, New York 1922, and P. Kosok, Modern Germany: A Study of Conflicting Loyalties, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1933. Reisner's book, a classic of the field, treats the French, English, Prussian and US cases.

[25] . J.V. González, Patria, Buenos Aires, 3rd. edition, 1908 (the first edition is of 1900), pages 16-18, 20, 26, 32 and 42. Regarding the French case, see E.H. Reisner, op.cit., and C.J.H. Hayes, France, A Nation of Patriots, Octogon Books, New York 1974 (first edition 1930). Renan's definition comes from his celebrated essay "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?"

[26] . For the US case, see E.H. Reisner, op.cit., and F. FitzGerald, America Revisited (History Textbooks in the Twentieth Century), Atlantic Monthly Press, Little, Brown and Co., Toronto 1979. For the special case of perceptions of Latin America in US textbooks, see Latin America in School and College Teaching Materials, American Council on Education, Washington D.C. 1944, and R.A. Pastor and J.G. Castañeda, Limits to Friendship (The United States and Mexico), Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1988. The latter work also carries a chapter on perceptions of the United States carried by Mexican textbooks.

[27] . This table was elaborated by the author on the basis of the list of songs published in the Monitor of December 31, 1920, pages 161-165. The "second grade" of this table corresponds to what in Argentina was known as primer grado inferior (actually a second grade). Thus, the "seventh grade" of this table was known in Argentina as "sixth grade", despite the fact that it was actually the seventh year of primary school.

[28] . "Voto Profesional", article of the Sección Oficial of the Monitor, September 30, 1920, pages 34-35. My emphasis.

[29] . R. Rojas, book cited in the text, prologue titled "Breve historia de este libro" dated January 1, 1922, Peña Lillo edition, Buenos Aires, page 23. My emphasis.

[30] . "La orientación moral de la escuela argentina", Monitor, September-December 1930.

[31] . Address by general Justo on occasion of the assumption of Ramón J. Cárcano as president of the Consejo, Monitor, May 1932.

[32] . Orders of F. Julio Picarel, Monitor, May 1932, pages 128-129.

[33] . Propaganda classes for the Patriotic Loan, Monitor, June 1932, pages 203-208.

[34] . In his comments to the manuscript of this paper, Lars Schoultz said that this title doesn't make any sense in English. It doesn't make any sense in Spanish either, unless the reader is a party to the culture that bred it. It means simply that children should be educated so that they can live their lives exacerbating their emotions. The original in Spanish says "La Escuela Argentina Para la Vida Exacerbando el Sentimiento" (with capital letters).

[35] . For a complete description of this indoctrination method, see J.E. Gutiérrez, "Escuela Rural Argentina", lectures delivered on November 10 and December 14, 1936, Monitor, pages 47-50. The method's picturesque name, in Spanish, was "La Escuela Argentina Para la Vida Exaltando el Sentimiento".

[36] . J.A. Astolfi, "Los maestros y el nacionalismo", Monitor, June 1940, pages 117-123.

[37] . Address by Pico on the occasion of his assumption as president of the Consejo, Monitor, November 1932.

[38] . Address by Manuel M. de Iriondo on the occasion of his appointment as minister of Public Education, Monitor, November 1932.

[39] . Monitor, March-April 1945.

[40] . Monitor, September-October 1946, pages 3-7.

[41] . 735.00/3-2250, RG 59, Department of State, National Archives of Washington D.C.

[42] . Boletín de Comunicaciones del Ministerio de Educación, No. 108. This bulletin partially replaced the Monitor, whose publication was interrupted in 1949.

[43] . Monitor, September-December 1947.

[44] . Ibid.

[45] . The first precedent that I am aware of regarding the later systematized control of school maps by the Argentine army, comes from a presidential decree of September 18, 1937. Monitor, September 1937.

[46] . All of the quotations in this paragraph correspond to the instructions of intervenor Musachio, Monitor, May-August 1947, pages 54-65.

[47] . The author of this paper was formally accused of "treason to the Fatherland" in 1984.

[48] . See J.C. Puig, "La política exterior argentina y sus tendencias profundas", Revista Argentina de Relaciones Internacionales, No. 1, and G. Ferrari, Esquema de Política Exterior Argentina, Eudeba, Buenos Aires 1981, pages 18-28. Both are cases of uncritical adherence to the dogma. There were no exceptions to this trend until the author of this paper published his La Argentina, ¿Paria Internacional? in 1984. The interrogation signs in the latter title were imposed by the publisher: a lack of ambiguity was considered too strong.

[49] . E. Banchs, "Las canciones escolares", Monitor, July 31, 1909, pages 29-35.

[50] . E. de Vedia, "La Escuela", Monitor, October 31, 1910, p. 21-30.

[51] . E. de Gandía, "La enseñanza elemental de la historia argentina", Monitor, July 1932, p. 26-30.

[52] . Among other authors, I refer to C.H. Waisman, Reversal of Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and their Structural Consequences, Princeton University Press 1987, and "Argentina: autarkic industrialization and illegitimacy", in L. Diamond, J.J. Linz and S.M. Lipset (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries: Vol. 4, Latin America, Lynne Rienner, Boulder, 1989. Waisman acknowledges the role of cultural factors in these phenomena, but due to the lack of a historical perspective about the evolution of indoctrination in Argentina, his treatment of this variable tends to be understated and lacking in empirical substance.

[53] . See M.A. Cárcano, La Política Internacional en la Historia Argentina, EUDEBA, Buenos Aires 1972, Vol. I, Introduction and Chapter 1, and the quotation from the flap of Vol. III and IV.

[54] . Cited in F.J. Antczak, Thought and Character: The Rhetoric of Democratic Education, Iowa State University Press, Ames 1985, p. 5.

[55] . The reader should think in terms of Max Weber's concepts, "rationality of means" and "rationality of ends", as well as in terms of Simon's "radical irrationality".

[56] . Historical maps with boundaries similar to those that I describe in the text, that are the bases for the myths of territorial losses, can be found in numerous South American school texts throughout the XX Century. See, for example, Emiliano Gómez Ríos, El Paraguay y su Historia, 1963; Armando Paiva, Geografía de la República del Paraguay, 1976; Atilio Sivirichi, Historia del Perú, 1939; José Antonio del Busto Duthurburu, Historia del Perú, 1964; Gustavo Pons Muzzo, Las Fronteras del Perú, several editions (including very recent ones); Luis Aníbal Mendoza García, Derecho Territorial Ecuatoriano, c. 1982; Pedro Cunhil Grau, Geografía de Chile, 1977; Alfredo Ayala Z., Geografía Política de Bolivia, 1941; Florean Sanabria G., El Mar Boliviano, 1988; Levi Marrero, Venezuela y sus Recursos, 1963; Mauricio Schurmann Pacheco, Historia del Uruguay en los Siglos XIX y XX, 1977, etc. Not always is there consistency in the way that the different texts of a given country depict the alleged historical boundaries of their formerly grand territories. Nevertheless, give or take some thousands of square kilometers, all of the countries mentioned convey myths of territorial losses through their school texts, and despite the variations between texts, the alleged former boundaries of Perú, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia always configure huge territories, much greater than in present times, while those of Uruguay and Venezuela depict more modest losses. Obviously, the myth of territorial losses is the other side of the coin of the teachings about the neighbor's malevolence (which is always present), if not of bellicist indoctrination (which is often present as well). Colombia presents a curious exception in terms of myths of territorial losses, which are completely absent from its school texts, despite the real loss of Panama, and despite the fact that Colombia was the center of Bolivar's short-lived Gran Colombia, and that is the typical historical basis of South American territorial loss mythologies.

[57] . See J.S. Tulchin, Argentina and the United States: a Conflicted Relationship, Twayne Historical Series, Boston 1990; C. Escudé, Gran Bretaña, Estados Unidos y la Declinación Argentina 1942-1949, Ed. de Belgrano, Buenos Aires 1983; and C. Escudé, Realismo Periférico: Fundamentos para la Nueva Política Exterior Argentina, Planeta, Buenos Aires, expected April 1992.

[58] . Ibid., Introduction.

[59] . A. Maizels, Industrial Growth and World Trade, Cambridge 1963.

[60] . C. Escudé, El Fracaso....

[61] . "Comments on our relations with Argentina", from Chargé d'Affaires Guy W. Ray to the Secretary of State; 711.35/1-548, RG 59, DOS, NA.

[62] . "Proposed Country Policy Statement on Argentina", Miller to Dearborn, 661.35/4-3051, RG 59, Department of State (DOS), National Archives (NA).

[63] . Discussion Meeting Report, "Argentina Today", Council on Foreign Relations, third meeting, January 2, 1951; discussion leader, the Honorable Edward G. Miller, Jr.; 611.35/3-151, RG 59, DOS, NA.

[64] . "US Policy towards Argentina", 611.35/6-2352, RG 59, DOS, NA.