Constitution Square Burns

Hector Sandler

[24 December, 2010]

We are getting close to the end of 2010, the year of the Bicentennial of the May Revolution. Contrasting the few, gray and insubstantial festivities that celebrated the double anniversary of the birth of a "new and glorious nation", we arrived to 2011 threshold amid blazing events occurred just on the eves of Christmas.

Thanks our system of positive law -- our Civil Code that establishes the access to land and more than a hundred of taxation laws that punish work and investment -- we secured the whisking away of the ideals stated in the National Constitution (1853) and the ruin the country. It's clearly seen.

As a result of both legal systems, eighty five per cent of our population lives on less than one per cent of our territory. Ninety per cent of the most bountiful lands of the world are still -- almost -- as unpopulated as in the years following the May Revolution.

As centuries run, both laws have frustrated the May Revolucion ideology and canceled rights and warranties granted by the Constitution. In 2010 Argentina is no longer the promised land "for all men around the world who may want to dwell in it" as our Constitution states. Not even for those that do dwell in it.

Television newsreels and reports and photos in all the newspapers seemed to display an internal social war. Assault and murder are side-effects. This time the process of social upheaval started on Wednesday, December 9th, along with massive land usurpation and squatting. Thousands of families squatted on a public park called "American Indian," located in the neighbourhood of "Villa Soldati". From that day on different groups of people forcibly occupied other lands. In Buenos Aires City, in the highly populated belt surrounding Buenos Aires and in some other cities. This ocurred until yesterday, the eve of the most Christian holidays, that hell broke loose in Constitucion Square. These series of nefarious events are aggravated by another circumstance: the behaviour of local and national officials blaming each other, as if what happened was a devious maneuver planned by the opposite side of national politics. This lowly treatment shows pathetic political behaviour and reveals ignorance about the source of the problem: the utterly bad distribution of population on Argentinian territory.

The cause of overcrowding and social emergency of legions of landless people, in a geographically empty country, arises from its legal body of law: Civil Code and taxation laws.

To have a precise understanding of what is said, do this simple calculation: If Argentina were populated with a density similar to that of the most prosperous countries in Europe (about 100 inhabitants per km2), our current population should reach 280,000,000 people! Almost equivalent to the U.S. population. Similar geography in both countries clearly states that this is not a fantastic assumption. It's proof of Argentinian frustration.

This should be our population if the "flow of immigrants" that occurred between 1860 and 1910 would have remained constant. The recent Bicentennial population census (2010) shows we are barely 40 million people. This stoppage of immigration - in a world in constant movement of people -- should be the first issue to be explained by economists and academic leaders. They should do it under the light of those laws: Civil Code and taxation laws.

Evidently, the end of the immigration wave was not due to natural laws or "lack of land". The wall that prevents the concretion of the motto "To govern is to populate" -- uttered by the father of our Constitution - is not one of mortar and stone. It is legal. Our Civil Code, equals land to merchandises. This perilous equation gave birth to present social disarray when in 1932 taxation laws were sanctioned. This taxation corpus is based on the principle: "Anyone who produces, saves and consumes shall be punished. Anyone who speculates on land shall be rewarded."

Is it any wonder then the ghastly city overcrowding? Can we be surprised if daily new poor people "concentration camps" arise in the manner of shantytowns? How can we be indifferent confronted with the fact that a family can't afford a reasonable rent, payable with the fruit of their labours? How would we explain the incessant bankruptcy of Argentinian companies that don't enjoy "privileges" and "monopolies"? It's useless and detrimental to continue looking for sources of our national disarray in national idiosyncrasies and such feeble notions.

Argentinian intelligentzia, either outside or within the political arena, can't go on disregarding this fundamental problem of Argentinian political and economical order. The ongoing eruption of shanties built from rags, tin and cardboard by the railroad tracks, by roads and by vacant lots is not a "housing issue". It is a problem generated by the legal order. An order that ruins society and all its members.

There is no need to have great insight to understand this basic point. In one of television newscasts a simple, probably illiterate woman, with eyes wet with tears, who was standing at the doorway of her miserable shack built next to the wall of Club Albarinos, said: "We don't want subsidies, we don't want welfare plans, all we want is a piece of land where we can take care of our children!" I have never heard the problem so clearly expressed. Martin Fierro is right when saying: "knowing good things is better than knowing much."

May the Christmas light illuminate the minds, sensitize the hearts and encourage the willingness of leaders to correct this "legal disorder" and make effective the right we need to attain social peace.