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Introduction: A Sickness in the Land
- The University of Alabama Press
- Chapter
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Introduction A sickness in the land in 1937, Alfredo Palacios, one of Argentina’s most recognizable politicians, went on a fact-finding mission to the country’s impoverished northwestern provinces.1 Although he represented the city of Buenos Aires in the national senate, Palacios specialized in exposing the conditions of the poorest of the poor,a mission that necessarily took him to the provinces.through the windows of his touring car, at every turn Palacios witnessed astonishing “portraits of misery.” filthy, overcrowded shantytowns festered around provincial capitals. families starved in spite of the gifts of a lush, fertile subtropical environment, often substituting bitter yerba maté tea for meals. most poignantly , children toiled, barefoot and bent, in sugarcane fields. stepping out of his car, the dandyish Palacios—with distinctive handlebar mustache, and dressed in a three-piece suit,bow tie,flowing scarf,and white hat—stood out among crowds of barefoot children. on the outskirts of tucumán, northwest Argentina’s major city, he recorded the appalling living conditions in one of these miserable slums. he testified later on the floor of the national senate: made of wattle-and-daub, straw, adobe, and canvas, these dilapidated dwellings measure, generally, three by four meters. the floor is made of dirt; inside, [there are] dirty, battered cots, or blankets thrown on the floor,and a bunch of crates instead of chairs.there,promiscuously, live men and women, of all ages. . . . that is where children grow up, crowded together, without knowing the most elementary notions of hygiene; malnourished, atrophied, the majority with physical defects, malarial,or with the degenerative stigmas of syphilis and alcohol.many do not go to school, according to their own parents, because they are needed for work, especially in the time of the harvest or the preparations for the planting of sugar cane.2 2 / introduction Photographs accompanying his report,entitled El dolor argentino (Argentina’s sorrow), reinforced his poignant accounts: one picture after another of disheveled families, standing in front of their decrepit shanties, humbly averting their eyes from the merciless gaze of the camera. Building on decades of critique by public health doctors,social reformers, journalists, and politicians, Palacios viewed the northwest as a land apart from the rest of Argentina, weighed down by manifold, mutually reinforcing problems. distance from markets, primitive infrastructure, reliance on monoculture, and irrational exploitation of resources curtailed the region’s economic growth. Wealth and income were spread unevenly, with paltry wages for agricultural workers and the persistence of latifundia that created virtual serfdoms in some areas. Agricultural migrants drifted from place to place,carrying their unstable and vice-ridden ways with them,undermining the moral roots of society.illiteracy was rampant;children went hungry.the lower classes ended up devastated and abandoned. Everywhere, Palacios saw misery, immorality, indifference, and injustice. Palacios also observed that sickness,disease,and degeneration had reduced the region’s neediest to prisoners of their physical state.Aided by advice from prominent local public health doctors,such as salvador mazza and Carlos Alvarado , Palacios recited a litany of diseases and conditions—some familiar, some strange—that afflicted the region, such as malnutrition, tuberculosis, syphilis, and Chagas disease. But one disease in particular, seemingly inescapable and entrenched, controlled the prospects of the region:malaria.this parasitic, mosquito-borne illness was both cause and effect of the region’s misery. malaria thrived in the region’s hot, humid, subtropical environment but also flourished opportunistically in bodies worn down by alcoholism, malnutrition,overwork,and material deprivation.Echoing many of his contemporaries ,Palacios feared that malaria would “in a short time lead to a fatal degeneration of the race.”3 the sorry state of the northwest was,to Palacios, an indictment of a nation on the wrong path: “We can never be a great, responsible , and progressive people if we lack citizens who are physically and morally sound, who are capable of exploiting our enormous riches and of governing and defending the patrimony of our cultural inheritance.”4 As a socialist and muckraker, Palacios was often a dissident, or at least a thorn in the side of the powerful.5 yet,in his racial anxiety,nationalist fervor, and preoccupation with disease’s ravaging effects on society, Palacios articulated a durable discourse that knew no political boundaries. starting around the 1890s, solving the northwest’s malaria problem captured the imagination of generations of conservative aristocrats, progressive sanitarians, state public health agents, entomologists, epidemiologists, engineers, physicians, labor rights activists, educational reformers, newspaper editorialists, and po- [34...