Like Canada, the Argentine in the postwar period sorely missed the historic UK market for its farm exports. That had disappeared with the United Kingdom’s exchange reserves in WWII. And once again through Britain’s entry into the European market. Canada’s response – like that of Australia – was to let its currency decline. But it was precisely against Canada, Australia, and indeed the United States itself that the Argentine had to compete in selling its wheat and beef. In addition the over-muscular peso invited the flight of capital abroad. Inevitably, the Argentine depended more and more on financing by the IMF. Its economic policies became determined by that body.

Let The Wall Street Journal (20/12, "Self-Reliance Helps Argentines Endure Economic Chaos" by Matt Moffett) pick up the thread:

"During much of the 1990s the [Argentine] was hailed in Washington as a model for free-market reform. US banks and companies loaned or invested tens of billions of dollars here, and now find themselves trying to salvage their losses. Moreover, with globalization, the contagion of ailments has grown in several Latin American economies.

"Argentina’s resilience hasn’t resulted from any grand strategy. Neither the government nor the Bush administration has offered significant ideas to revive Latin America’s third-largest economy."

On the contrary the IMF, to which Washington is the largest contributor in money and advice, pretty well washed its hands of the Argentine. The then Secretary of the Treasury met its devastating crises in which depositors suddenly found themselves cut off from their savings, with the observation that Washington had nothing further to contribute: "the Argentine had made its choice."

Unwittingly, a double message was conveyed in that remark: (1) Deregulation and Globalization had struck out; (2) The Washington Consensus, always more Washington than Consensus, had nowhere to go.

The very finality of that response imposed the need to seek alternative solutions.

"Argentina has been saved for now, by the resourcefulness of hundreds of grass-roots leaders in schools, factories and neighborhood associations. Educators have improvised a safety net so effective at providing food, social services and jobs that classrooms in much of the country are being kept open as summer comes to the Southern hemisphere. Operating on their own initiative, scores of [local] leaders have launched emergency relief efforts.

"With both foreign and national investors skittish about maintaining operations here, workers have often had to take the initiative for keeping plants open. In more than 100 factories undergoing bankruptcy liquidation, workers seized control and kept them operating, saving 13,000 jobs, according to the National Movement of Recovered Businesses, an umbrella group of the employee-led firms.

"It’s like someone kicked up an ant-hill,’ says Jose Abelli, a leader of the Cooperativa Travi poultry plant that was revived out of bankruptcy by workers. ‘It looked like there was disorder, but all the ants were building something new.’

"When the liquidation agent from bankruptcy court arrived at the gates of Cristaleria San Justo glass factory in July, 200 workers and family members blocked his way. To make sure that the factory assets weren’t removed and sold, workers maintained a round-the-clock vigil in a pup tent in front of the factory for 10 weeks. Finally the workers won a court battle for control of the plant. Using the same expropriation statute that allows the seizure of houses blocking highway construction, they argued that their action served the public interest. The worker-run plants have to make up the most fundamental rules as they go along. After plant workers and administrators of Tractores Zanello, a big tractor maker in Cordoba, took control of the insolvent firm, they faced a dilemma: How would customers pay for tractors, when cash was so tight? The answer: along with pesos, the plant also accepts three different varieties of the bonds or script that a number of provinces issue as legal tender, and even soya beans. The plant will sell 240 tractors this year, ten times the number sold last year."

There you have, under duress, those endless discussions about what money might be about, translated into life-saving reality.

"The jury-rigged recovery is still extremely precarious. This year’s crisis has exacerbated long-standing poverty problems in the provinces, where numerous children have died of malnutrition. Moreover, political infighting ahead of presidential elections in April may trigger renewed economic instability.

"But for now, there is stoic resolve. ‘The crisis has brought out two qualities in Argentines overlooked during better times: solidarity and creativity,’ says Jorge Selser, a surgeon at the Argerich Hospital. When he isn’t helping run a soup kitchen that feeds 60 people, Dr. Selser designs medical equipment that can replace imports that are now too expensive. He has come up with a $1,000 locally made bone screw that works just as well as the $4,000 imported model."

Other Argentines are turning back to the land for sustenance. ‘We’re rediscovering the survival tactics that our grandparents learned after the great wars in Europe,’ says Angela Bianculli, an organic food expert. This year, she estimates that tens of thousands of hard-pressed Argentines have seen her presentations of growing your own food and cooking meals that are both inexpensive and nourishing.

"Perhaps no group better represents the Argentine knack for improvisation than the cartoneros, the trash recyclers. Pushing their two-wheeled carts, they have become as commonplace on boulevards as yuppies in Italian suits were during past boom times. The number of those who earn their living scavenging trash has doubled in the past two years, to an estimated 40,000 of the 13,000,000 of greater Buenos Aires. Before the devaluation Argentine imported $100 millions of paper a year from Brazil. Now it exports recycled cardboard.

"Other initiatives have faltered, partly because the Peronistas are preoccupied with internal power struggles ahead of next year’s presidential election. The government has counted on swiftly reaching an agreement with the International Monetary Fund to bring cash and credibility. But the IMF and Buenos Aires have been publicly sparring over details all year. Argentina has failed to comply with several earlier agreements, and the IMF says it’s reluctant to be burned again.

"Argentines assert that the IMF is withholding assistance to make an example of the Argentine and discourage other debtor nations from defaulting. Argentines also complain that the US is too preoccupied with the war against terrorism to press for aid for Argentina.

"‘You could die waiting for the IMF and the government to solve Argentina’s problems,’ says Walter Blas, an activities coordinator at School 502 in the Buenos Aires suburb of Ezeiza.

"Typical of how educators have served as a line of defence against the crisis, Mr. Blas developed his own assistance program at School 502. The school radio, which can be heard for miles around, airs aid requests from residents in urgent needs. When one family couldn’t afford medicine for an epileptic daughter, the station got the medicine the same day. It has sponsored rock concerts to build up the school’s food bank.

"Every bit makes a difference. Several students have fainted in class this year because they were not eating well. With cash and jobs scarce, the teachers and parents set up a market that allowed neighborhood families to barter goods and services and use tickets issued by the school to make purchases. Participants could come to the school and buy a loaf of bread for two tickets or get a car tuned for 20 tickets.

"With the barter market running out of steam in May because of counterfeit ticket and other problems, the neighborhood launched a recycling cooperative. A local businessman donated bricks to build an oven that will produce enough bread for the school’s needs and for a surplus to sell for cash.

"The principal says any earnings will supplement the budget for the school cafeteria which will stay open during the summer."

The crisis on the Plata has in fact brought to light a forgotten heritage of self-help and communal solidarity that had been buried under the avalanche of free-market hype. The countless schemes of alternate currencies and barter throughout the world, the recycling concerns of environmentalists, the study-groups on alternate life styles, volunteerism rather than maximizing one’s personal take as a goal in life, study groups on heterodox economic theories, and much else more than just "off the wall" oddities have now been disclosed in the Argentine as exercises that preserve survival habits menaced by greed at the throttle. The United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere has proved far more competent at smashing societies than at putting them together again. The world may still be beholden to the Argentine for ways to cope with menacing disaster.

— from Economic Reform, February 2003