Tucuman Sugar Politics and the Generation of Eighty

Abstract

One of the major obstacles preventing Argentine national unificacation in the 1870s was the hostility of the poor interior provinces, victims of the ravages of civil wars and economic stagnation, toward the richer and more powerful coastal area dominated by export-oriented merchants and cattlemen. From 1874 until the first decade of the twentieth century, a major attempt was made to resolve longstanding grievances. A definitive political compromise and program of economic integration emerged in 1880 when a group of politicians, representing both the interior and the littoral, joined together and made their slogan a reality: Peace and administration. This group, known as the Generation of Eighty, brought a national capital and a modicum of peace to Argentina in 1880. Eventually they helped create a new Argentina linked by networks of transportation, communication, banking facilities and other trappings of modernity. They courted regional industries with protective tariffs and political favors in hopes of providing an economic stimulus to the interior which would complement rapid growth in the littoral. But even though Buenos Aires and surrounding areas flourished, by the turn of the century most interior provinces remained as destitute as they had been thirty years earlier.