Argentina: New Breed on the Pampas

As men measure their landed wealth in Latin America, no class ever exhibited such fabled riches as Argentina’s cattle barons. On the grassy pampas stretching south, west and north from Buenos Aires, the more affluent estanciero could once gallop for days without finding the end of his land. His animals numbered in the tens of thousands, and people across the world wistfully spoke of being “as rich as an Argentine.”

All that is changing now. The great baronial manor houses are still standing and there are still one or two spreads that make Texas’ King Ranch look like a truck garden.* But the vast green bulk of the pampas is being crosshatched by fences and boundary roads into smaller and smaller holdings. So, too, is the Midas-rich patrón of yesteryear giving way to hundreds of relatively small farmers and cattlemen who count themselves lucky to make a middle-class living. In the late 1930s, one-fifth of Argentina, or 139 million acres, belonged to just 2,000 families. Today, says Gustavo Pueyrredón, vice president of Argentina’s stockbreeders’ society, “the average farmholding in Buenos Aires province scarcely exceeds 2,000 acres.”

Pots of Silver. Land reform, that ever-popular rallying cry, was not responsible for the estancieros’ downfall. They were victims of history and their own excesses. The original estancias were carved from the wilderness in the early 19th century by an adventurous breed of Spanish, British, Italian and Irish immigrants. Their sons and grandsons made their own legends by squandering the wealth. Argentines knew them as ninos bien, the wellborn children.

Some lived in Spanish castles and French cháteaux so opulently furnished that even the chamber pots were made of silver. Nearly every tree on the pampas was laboriously planted by man. The ultimate status symbol was a eucalyptus-tree drive leading up to the manse, and some of them ran straight as a string for seven miles.

The peones and gauchos did the ranching, while the gentry cut a swath through Europe. Returning from a trip in the 1920s, the four sons of one family brought home a complete French brothel plus a year’s supply of champagne and páté de foie gras—and in case that palled, they also brought 100 Ibs. of opium. Another turn-of-the-century estanciero in Patagonia got his kicks by staging Indian hunts with his chums; well-buttressed by booze, they rode out in parties of a dozen or so to slaughter the nomadic tribesmen who shared their pampas, and once had a grand day massacring an entire tribe they cornered in a seaside cove.

At War with Perón. The estancieros’ undoing began in 1944 with the rise of Dictator Juan Perón, who promised his lower-class descamisados (shirtless ones) steak on every plate and decreed meat prices as low as 6¢ a Ib. When the landowners opposed him, Per¶n ordered prohibitive land taxes, forcing the breakup of many ranches, decreed 60% wage boosts for workers, lured away cow hands by promising still higher wages in newly established industries. The most far-reaching legislation of all was an inheritance law that provided that each heir must get an equal share of the land, thus assuring the eventual breakdown of the huge estancias.

By the time Perón was deposed in 1955, the landowners were reeling; with far less land and fewer gauchos, they had to become ranchers again. Strange terms like fertilizers, crop rotation, weed killers and permanent pastures crept into the pampas vocabulary.

Today’s working landowner rarely hits the European or Buenos Aires hot spots. He rises at 6 a.m., puts in a 17-hour day fixing his own fences, keeping his own books, and tending to the innumerable details of his spread. He wears blue jeans or big floppy bombachas instead of fancy riding habits, generally sees his family for one meal a day—supper—and often spends his evenings driving to a nearby town to hear a lecture on modern farming methods. There may be a TV set on the place, but the gauchos are the ones who watch it. Says one estanciero, “TV is the difference between keeping your best men and losing them to the big city.”

Few Regrets. The new attitudes are paying off. Despite a gritty drought in 1961-62, there are now some 40 million cattle on Argentina’s pampas—and even that is not enough to fill both domestic and foreign demand. Instead of just livestock, the land is producing vast amounts of wheat and other crops; in the next few years a $50 million irrigation project will transform the arid pampa seca southwest of Buenos Aires into a 200,000-acre region that will eventually produce $60 million worth of fodder, fruit and vegetables annually. There are few regrets for the pampas of old.

Diego Carabassa, 35, whose family once owned 1,500,000 acres, now runs two ranches totaling 7,200 acres near Buenos Aires. At 22, he quit a dry economics course at the University of Buenos Aires and began plowing through the latest U.S. studies in genetics, animal husbandry and soil conservation. Over the past nine years, Carabassa has won 21 championships at Argentina’s famed Palermo Show. “These are competitive times,” he says. “It is not enough to sit back in Buenos Aires and open checks. They don’t come unless you go out and earn them.”

*The Guanizuil Ranch in western Argentina covers 2,470,000 acres v. 865,000 acres for the King Ranch.