Life on the Edge
Argentina’s disappearing middle class
Daring to predict the future, she says the country’s current leadership is wasting time and should stage elections immediately to legitimize new leadership. ”The men here don‘t accept reality,“ is her diagnosis. ”The longer they hang on, the more chaotic and dangerous the eventual solution.“
”But it all has to happen,“ she continues with remarkable optimism. ”It’s important, and it‘s good. We Argentines will be humbler and simpler people as a result.“
Whether Carrio’s inspiring vision is right or not, maybe the current crisis really does offer all of us on this continent an encouraging possibility; perhaps a real renovation of the Argentine polity and its people‘s historical view of themselves can point us in a useful, new direction in this age of creeping doubts about the universal benevolence of standardized, globalized, one-size-fits-all market economies. Perhaps if Argentina can stop pretending to be France, and the rest of Latin America can stop gazing wistfully at the United States, we can have a more earnest, substantive debate about what really can work in countries that, dammit, simply are not like the developed world, countries where half of the citizens are poor, where the remnants of feudalism have not been erased, and where complacent elites have no real interest in changing a social and economic system that provides them with servants, vast privileges and unbridled power. Argentines now are too desperate to be sold on policy tinkering and more of the same. These dangerous times may be a signal that one country, at least, is beginning to emerge from the illusions and sterile formulas of the past
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