2023-05-03 22:55:40
Argentina needs “good visible examples”, thought the political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell. And perhaps, in that phrase said in passing resides the knot of our misfortunes. Because what shines today are the counterexamples, associated with our decadence. Gildo Insfrán and the Moyano corporation are perhaps the most iconic counterexamples of a country that has multiplied its poverty by 10 in the last 30 years.
For 35 years, Insfrán has controlled the destinies of one of the poorest and most backward fiefdoms of Argentina. Declared an enemy of the idea of progress, he was highlighted as the best governor in the country by the President. VIP vaccinated, Hugo Moyano, a serial boycotter of non-Peronist democratic governments, was also awarded by Fernández, who, even in full strict quarantine, organized a barbecue in his honor and that of his family, in the Quinta de Olivos . Any connection to the film The Irishman is purely coincidental.
Insfrán was the protagonist of one of the most brutal phrases of the week against the Buenos Aires “sons of their mother”, who are always “looking at Europe”. Months ago, always honoring democratic dialogue, he had called them “drones.” But the truth is that neither the Buenos Aires nor the Argentines who innovate and produce, scattered throughout the country, are thinking of Europe. Where they are looking is to the other side of the river, to Uruguay, and there they settle. Because?
This is the subject that María Eugenia Estenssoro and Silvia Naishtat address in their latest book: Uruguay Laboratory, the small giant that surprises in Latin America. They are two proactive authors dedicated to investigating the glass half full. That is, the good visible examples and the countries that work.
Already in 2017 Estenssoro and Naishtat had written Innovative Argentina. There they had focused on the golden generation, those young entrepreneurs who created technological multinationals, in the post-crisis of 2001. Some of these explorations were the cases of Marcos Galperín, owner of Mercado Libre; Martín Migoya, from Globant; Roberto Souviron, one of the creators of Despegar; OLX, by Alejandro Oxenford, and, most recently, Satelogic, by Emiliano Kargieman.
However, over time, and the advent of the fourth Kirchner government, all of them and their companies ended up emigrating. The majority, to Uruguay.
But why to Uruguay? The authors began to pull from that thread. “We had the Messi of technology and we expelled them, why?” Was the trigger raised by Estenssoro. The Satelogic case is very illustrative. Founded in 2010, the company, which makes kitchen-sized satellites, was hatched at Invap, a Bariloche-based state company that makes nuclear reactors, though designs them abroad.
What happened to Kargieman, a mathematician trained at the UBA? 75% of its inputs depend on imports and ran into Cristina’s stocks. In addition, it needed to export because the satellites are launched from the United States, Guyana, China. Finally, he needed the signature of five ministers so that his company could continue to exist. He decided to move it to the free zone of Montevideo.
Estenssoro and Naishtat come up with a disturbing thesis. Although Argentines have suffered several exiles throughout history, such as that of the impoverished middle class in 2001 or the political one, during the dictatorship, what had never occurred is this other phenomenon: the flight of economic elites, as had already happened in Venezuela.
The reasons? The anti-business discourse, feeling persecuted and “outraged” –as in the case of Pablo Moyano with Galperín–, the tax pressure that borders on the confiscatory, the survival of their companies, the lack of a vision of the future, the political context. As the Uruguayan political scientist Gerardo Caetano affirms: neither Peronism nor messianic leadership could ever have taken place in Uruguay because, from its foundation, its matrix was republican, liberal and secular. The result, according to The Economist, is that the small giant ranks in 11th place among the fullest democracies in the world.
“The golden generation of Argentina left us,” says Naishtat– and this reminds us of the brain drain that occurred during the Onganía dictatorship, when (César) Milstein and (Manuel) Sadovsky were expelled”. A brain drain that ended up blocking the development of Argentina. Also with the excuse of ideology, although in the 1960s they were expelled because those scientists were supposedly from the left and these entrepreneurs are supposedly from the right. Or, to sum it up in presidential language: from the “cursed right”.
The exile of the Argentine elites It takes place at a time when two old enemies, Julio María Sanguinetti and Pepe Mujica, decided to discuss together in a book, as current adversaries, in which they demonstrate that the left and the right can coexist healthily, within the framework of a system that does not demonize the other for thinking differently.
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