El espacio interior de America del Sur: Geografia, historia, politica, cultura (review)

In 1996 the ADLAF (German Association of Research on Latin America) hosted an interdisciplinary conference concerning the interior of South America—Paraguay, Bolivia, and adjoining areas of Argentina and Brazil. Some 25 scholars—mainly German, but with other European, Argentine, and Paraguayan contributors—presented papers on the history, politics, regional economic integration, ecology, and identities of the peoples of this vast area. The preponderance of studies dealt with Paraguay, but a number touched upon the Argentine Chaco, the Brazilian Mato Grosso, and Bolivia.

In the mid-1990s, interest and optimism was high in MERCOSUR, the economic trade-pact association of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay that was founded in 1991 with the initial purpose of lowering tariffs between these nations. Even so, several of the contributors who dealt with the projected impact of MERCOSUR voiced reservations, most cogently stated in an article by Juan Carlos Herken Krauer. In a well-reasoned study concerned with the possible impact of the trade organization on Paraguay, he concluded that that nation's fragile economy, poor record of job creation, and burgeoning population would more than negate any advantages that MERCOSUR might bring. He emphasized that the continual outflow of young men seeking employment would continue. Few economists would have predicted the collapse of the Argentine economy—the destination of many job-seeking Paraguayans for the last 60 years—and the resultant lack of a foreign safety valve. Moreover, the current economic state of Paraguay is even worse than Herken Krauer's foreboding. Other authors in this volume voiced some optimism about the impact of MERCOSUR upon regional economic integration and as a vehicle for penetration of world markets, but even they were properly cautious.

A strong section is that dealing with the exploitation of natural resources and the socioeconomic state of the interior. Jan Kleinpennig presents a well-reasoned and well-researched study of the impact of German immigration to Paraguay since 1870. He forcefully concludes that this group and their descendants have been a motor for economic development at the local level. Rasso Rupert, in a coldly realistic analysis of the economic and political impact of coca production in Bolivia, argues that no Bolivian government will move severely against the production of this narcotic for fear of economic dislocation and resultant social and political unrest. Martin Coy and Martin Rempiss offered an interesting study of the rise of Cuiabá through the "boom and bust" cycles of the Mato Grosso, while Carlos Reboratti analyzes the regional peasant economy of northwestern Argentina and southern Bolivia. Reboratti concludes that the economic integration of the region during the late colonial era gradually disintegrated through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the impact of modernity and national-era economic policies. Other studies dealing with Brazilian agricultural immigration to Paraguay's eastern region, the economic potential of the Chaco, and Paraguay's economic future are well worth considering by specialists in these areas.

In the reviewer's eyes, the most interesting portion was that of identities (or mentalidades) of peoples of the interior. The Argentine novelist Mempo Giardinelli pays an impassioned and powerfully penned homage to his home province of the Chaco. His love and understanding of this harsh land, as well as its impact upon its people, is evident in every sentence. Barbara Potthast surveys the early mestizaje of Paraguay and how that process affected Paraguayan nationalism, while Sonja Steckbauer discusses the state of the Guaraní language in Paraguay in the 1990s, finding it yet a strong and defining characteristic of that nation. The jewel of the entire collection is Wolf Lustig's discussion of popular nationalism as seen through patriotic songs in Guaraní, with special attention to the motif of Paraguayan sacrifice and courage during the Chaco War. No one...