- Enemy in the Blood: Malaria, Environment, and Development in Argentina by Eric D. Carter
This is a superb account of the almost total eradication of malaria from the northwest region of Argentina, a region that had for long been perceived as one of the back-waters of the Argentine state. The author embeds this dramatic public health program within the broader context of the politics [End Page 264] of regional development, the tensions arising over issues of national identity, the modernization process, and the role of international agencies that greatly assisted several technological aspects of the program. While Buenos Aires (the “Paris of the south”) enjoyed the benefits of rapid socio-economic and technological change in the final decades of the nineteenth-century, other regions of the country were still suffering in highly marginal conditions: poor services provision, endemic diseases, limited transportation linkages, under-developed infrastructure, and political dissension—the list was long.
As had occurred in industrializing Europe and the USA, hygiene and health conditions were seen as highly significant symbols of “civilization”; how could one allow one’s citizens to live in filth and be infected by lice, insects and the like—as reported by the ever-increasing number of foreign travelers who passed through the Argentine interior? The key mechanism that attended to at least the most deadly disease hazard in the northwest was the involvement of individuals who were able to shift, and not without resistance, from the science of the malady to political action. This is a process revealed for the first time in this comprehensive study.
Having set the national scene, the author continues in Chapter 2 to monitor and analyze the complexities of the malaria eradication campaign, triggered as it was by the very severe outbreak in Santiago de Estero at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet the attempts by the country’s leading hygienists to confront this challenge were met by an almost total lack of knowledge—and especially geographical—of the region. Properties (especially housing units) and administrative boundaries that were to become key elements in the distribution of the anti-malaria brigades and ground “troops” in the battle against the disease vectors, were found to be imprecise, as were the dubious data on the existing topographic maps.
The story next moves to the roles played by key political and socio-technical personalities: Carlos Alvarado, the anti-malarial campaign director, and no less a person than President Juan Perón. With presidential support the campaign became a prominent arm of national action; it was to demonstrate what political power could accomplish: the people’s health was of paramount importance. Of equal significance was the involvement of the foreign experts brought in by the Rockefeller Foundation after 1941. As chapter 5 cogently argues it was the combination of the extension of the reach of national administration, especially the decentralization of operations of the malarial campaign, together with the advent of a much greater number of vehicles to move the operators around, and not least, the impact of the application of DDT as the mosquito killer. House-spraying, as developed in Italy’s northern region, and successfully experimented with in Panama and Venezuela, became the new and highly successful tactic. Yet it was the Peronist strategy of using national pride and quasi-fascist propaganda to initiate not just the anti-malarial campaign but others against trachoma, tuberculosis and rat eradication in the capital. The state, its army, its landowners who needed laborers—all became patriots in the fight against the enemy: disease. Since we currently are “at war” against terror we may better understand the military metaphors frequently used in Argentina of the 1940s. Post-second-world-war trucks were available to move the troops around; cartoon character “Sergeant DDT” symbolized the continual “arrest” of the anopheles mosquitos, and spraying a house became analogous to “sniper-fire”. People in the northwest could literally see the state in action as each of...