ARGENTINA: To Benefit the People

Economic Czar Miguel Miranda’s mammoth Institute Argentino de Promoción del Intercambio had at last published a financial statement. Anyhow, that is what Miranda called it.

Though IAPI (pronounced “yappy”) is the world’s biggest state trading agency outside Russia, the report was less than a page long. It was unsigned, apparently unaudited. There was no statement of goods on hand. Though European soft-currency countries owe IAPI $732 million for food and other products bought on tick, the only reference to this was a $52 million item called “operations with foreign governments.” Finally, without offering any proof, IAPI claimed a thumping 1947 profit of $259 million. “It makes no sense to me,” said one Buenos Aires bank manager last week. “It looks as if the figures were plucked from the air.”

A Long Shadow. The 30-line statement barely hinted at what a colossus IAPI has become. Founded in 1946 to promote foreign trade, IAPI now handles every principal Argentine export except wool. It makes all purchases abroad for the billion-dollar five-year plan; it is the importing agency for private industries. Through its system of subsidies, it regulates domestic food prices.

When the British-owned railways were bought, IAPI paid for them. When Franco touched Argentina for $125 million, it was IAPI that gave him the money. Every private enterprise in Argentina, the maker of alpargatas (sandals) as well as the foreign meat packer, lives under the long shadow of IAPI.

Under Miranda’s tough-trading direction, IAPI in the postwar years rolled up huge profits buying wheat and other foodstuffs cheap from Argentine farmers and selling abroad for all the traffic would bear. Lately Miranda’s all-the-traffic-will-bear policy has backfired. Because he jacked the price of linseed oil skyhigh, U.S. farmers took up flax-growing. Result: the U.S. this year produced its first exportable surplus of linseed oil in history. Argentina has lost its U.S. and British markets, and IAPI is stuck with 325,000 tons of the stuff.

A Lot of Junk. At war’s end, IAPI agents buzzed all over the U.S. buying trucks, bulldozers and other war surplus. Often they were more interested in lining their own pockets than in quality goods. Example: in 1947 a Philadelphia outfit called the Empire Tractor Co. sold 7,000 tractors, actually jeep engines on light metal frames, to an eager IAPI agent. Priced originally at a bargain $1,150, the machines wound up costing $1,400 apiece. The Argentines took only 4,500, claimed that the tractors couldn’t even pull a plow. Only four Empire tractors have ever been sold in Argentina, and the current plan is to junk the lot for scrap. Meanwhile, Empire Tractor talks about suing IAPI.

This kind of free-style spending quickly drained Argentina’s postwar hoard of $1.2 billion, and IAPI got the blame for the country’s financial trouble. But guilty though IAPI is of high-handed, nearsighted policies, of waste and corruption and corner-grocery bookkeeping, Perón can rightly claim that it has done much to lift Argentina from its old colonial economic status. Foreigners no longer own the railroads or the telephones. Foreign “exploiters” operate only under great handicaps. It is in terms of this sort of economic emancipation that the Peronistas defend IAPI and its works.

In his fighting speech at Santa Fé last week, President Perón said: “In order to cut off the international monopolies at the frontiers I created IAPI. Before, foreign trade was done by trusts. Today the government is doing it, with the difference that then it was done for the trusts’ sole benefit, and today the government is doing it for the benefit of the people. This year IAPI made $418 million [a total hard to accept in the light of lAPI’s declining sales]. Before the trusts made it. They are not content, but the people should be.”