ENEMY IN THE BLOOD: Malaria, Environment, and Development in Argentina.

Abstract

ENEMY IN THE BLOOD: Malaria, Environment, and Development in Argentina. By ERIC D. CARTER. XV and 283 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. $38.50 (cloth), ISBN 9780817317607; $38.50 (electronic), ISBN 9780817385958. Malaria is not a disease that springs to mind generally when thinking about Argentina. Perceived as one of the more advanced countries in Latin America, Argentina today is endowed with good health-care systems and is mostly free from the kinds of health challenges that afflict many countries in the region and beyond in Africa and Asia. Although a substantial portion of Argentina's territory is in temperate latitudes, the northeast and northwest of the country are subtropical. They have long faced health and environmental challenges because of social and economic conditions that have been exacerbated by geographical location and political inaction. The northwest region, encompassing the provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Tucuman, and the western parts of Formosa, Santiago del Estero, and Chaco, continues to suffer from underinvestment and poor socioeconomic conditions. In the nineteenth century particularly, the region struggled to break away from the shackles of feudal-like poverty, and it faced severe health obstacles from malaria and other diseases. In this thought-provoking new work on malaria in the Argentine northwest, Eric Carter brings to a conclusion research begun for his dissertation nearly a decade ago. His goal is to explain the rise and disappearance of malaria in the northwest within a broader context of regional development politics, social change, and national identities of modernization and progress. The book is divided into seven chapters--five detailed sections bookended by introductory and concluding chapters--followed by an epilogue, notes, glossary, and a rich and detailed bibliography. Chapter 1 contextualizes the rationale for malaria control in the Northwest against the backdrop of Argentina's national transformation during the Belle Epoque at the end of the nineteenth century. Although malaria in the Northwest did not have a particularly high mortality rate, it was widespread and thus viewed by national policymakers in the capital, Buenos Aires, as symbolic of the region's socioeconomic malaise. Carter points out that the philosophies of European rationalism and liberalism had a profound influence on Argentina's decision makers in the 188os and 189os as they sought to move the growing nation from barbarism to civilization. Hygiene and public health thus became synonymous with modernization, and efforts to eradicate malaria, along with other diseases, served as a powerful political and social symbol of Argentina's civilization. In this arena, the individuals who moved seamlessly between science and politics played a crucial role in reshaping the northwest region. They created a flexible network that had an important geographical element to it, something that Carter argues has been overlooked by scholars of the region. Chapter 2 offers a fascinating glimpse into the political, social, and spatial dynamics of the malaria-eradication campaign that followed a particularly severe outbreak in Santiago del Estero in 1900. Over the next twenty years, as Carter vividly portrays, the social power of the country's hygienists reached its peak, with the strong alliance between science and the political state used to further the ambitions of regional socioeconomic development. A key challenge for both the national Malaria Service and local experts, however, was the absence of any meaningful geographical knowledge about the Northwest. …