Argentina and the United States: An Alliance Contained

7. The Forging of a New Relationship, 1984–1999

7 The Forging of a New Relationship, 1984–1999 At 1:30 p.m. on 15 October 1988, a concert began at the Malvinas Argentinas Stadium in Mendoza, Argentina, that featured Peter Gabriel, Sting, Youssou N’Dour, and the Americans Tracy Chapman and Bruce Springsteen. There were twenty-seven thousand people in the stadium, and that night, at the El Monumental Stadium in Buenos Aires, sixty-two thousand more heard the five rock superstars. It was the end of a thirteen-nation pro–human rights concert tour organized by Amnesty International and underwritten by a $5 million infusion of cash from Reebok. “I consider myself a citizen of the world community ,” Tracy Chapman told the Argentine press, “and as such I feel I have a responsibility.” “Rock makes you feel free,” Bruce Springsteen told Argentine journalists, “and that’s what Amnesty International does as well. Also, I think music can change the way people think.”1 Argentine singers joined their foreign counterparts on stage. Springsteen grinned at the Argentine folksinger León Gieco as they played a traditional cueca together. In reference to victims of state-sponsored killings during the dictatorship, Tracy Chapman dedicated her performance to “those who aren’t here today.” The concert was the first occasion on which two American musicians with mass followings, at the height of their popularity, joined Argentine counterparts on stage. It also highlighted the singular importance of the Argentine dictatorship in how people around the world had come to imagine and understand the politics of human rights during the 1980s. 181 Democracy and the Flood of American Popular Culture After 1983, the attraction of American musicians for Argentina was sporadic. But with the end of the dictatorship and Argentina’s cultural opening of the 1980s and 1990s, the American cultural impact in Argentina was never greater. The Amnesty International concert in Mendoza and Buenos Aires was the country’s largest-drawing musical event in 1988. Also that year, the top-grossing movie in theaters was Fatal Attraction, while Miami Vice was the second most popular television program.2 In 1984, the La Urraca publishing house in Buenos Aires launched the magazine Fierro. The publication not only featured cuttingedge cartoon art from around the world but also provided a monthly forum for Max Cachimba, Carlos Nine, Kike Sanzol, and other Argentine cartoonists. Cartoons and story lines were deeply influenced by a range of American art forms including Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor ’s Tale (first serialized four years earlier in the American magazine Raw) and the science fiction of the film Blade Runner (1982).3 American television programming influenced the creation of dozens of new programs in Argentina, from the first aerobic exercise program starring María Amuchástegui in 1986 to Jerry Springer–like sexually explicit exposé programs to a series of reality shows produced after 1999 modeled after Survivor and other American creations. American television shows were all over the airwaves. They included current productions like the prime-time soap opera Dallas and the action drama The A-Team, which ranked second among the most watched television programs in Argentina in 1984 and 1985. But also shown were a variety of old reruns such as El Superagente ‘86 (Get Smart). Although this and other shows were period pieces in the United States—an early 1960s cold war spoof in the case of Get Smart—American programming entered Argentina as a wave. Much of it was entirely new to Argentine viewers. The Cable News Network (cnn) began broadcasting in October 1987. With the opening of Argentina to unfettered foreign investment in 1991, U.S. investors took control of major Argentine media corporations . This helped accelerate the increase of American content on 182 argentina and the united states Argentine television. In 1994, Citicorp Equity Investment made its first major play in the Argentine communications sector, spending ninetysix million dollars for a 30 percent share of Multicanal, one of Argentina ’s largest television networks. That same year the tci corporation bought 80 percent of Canalvision, Argentina’s most important cable television provider.4 Raúl Alfonsín, Dante Caputo, and the Sur-Sur Foreign Policy In the two decades after the dictatorship, as American cultural influences poured in, Argentine-U.S. relations changed substantially. After 1983, the new Argentine democratic government spoke critically of U.S. policies on nuclear arms production, counterinsurgency warfare in Central America, and the...