Argentine Government Research Articles

Civil-Military Affairs and Security Institutions in the Southern Cone: The Sources of Argentine-Brazilian Nuclear Cooperation

AbstractThis paper analyzes the conditions in which the governments of Argentina and Brazil founded security institutions in the early 1990s, while they were democratizing. It advances the hypothesis that international cooperation in the security field is often linked to the evolution of civil-military relations. Civilian leaders in both countries established institutions and sought international participation deliberately to achieve civilian control and gain leverage over the military establishment, which they sorely distrusted. The need to stabilize civil-military relations at home was therefore the prime motivating force behind the emergence of security institutions in the Southern Cone. Three mechanisms were at work: omnibalancing, policy handling, and managing uncertainty. These mechanisms are derived from three different schools of thought: realism, organizational-bureaucratic models, and theories of domestic political institutions. Besides explaining the sources of nuclear bilateral cooperation, this argument also serves as a critique of two prominent theories in international relations that attempt to explain cooperation and peaceful relations among democracies: neoliberal insti-tutionalism and democratic peace theory.

Civil-Military Affairs and Security Institutions in the Southern Cone: The Sources of Argentine-Brazilian Nuclear Cooperation

This paper analyzes the conditions in which the governments of Argentina and Brazil founded security institutions in the early 1990s, while they were democratizing. It advances the hypothesis that international cooperation in the security field is often linked to the evolution of civil-military relations. Civilian leaders in both countries established institutions and sought international participation deliberately to achieve civilian control and gain leverage over the military establishment, which they sorely distrusted. The need to stabilize civil-military relations at home was therefore the prime motivating force behind the emergence of security institutions in the Southern Cone. Three mechanisms were at work: omnibalancing, policy handling, and managing uncertainty. These mechanisms are derived from three different schools of thought: realism, organizational-bureaucratic models, and theories of domestic political institutions. Besides explaining the sources of nuclear bilateral cooperation, this argument also serves as a critique of two prominent theories in international relations that attempt to explain cooperation and peaceful relations among democracies: neoliberal insti-tutionalism and democratic peace theory.

Social Protection in a Crisis: Argentina's Plan Jefes y Jefas

This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled Social protection in a crisis : Argentina's plan Jefes y Jefas, conducted between 2002 and 2003 in Argentina. The study observed the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002 on the individual level. It is clear that the eligibility criteria were not enforced. Large shares of the recipients were women. The program reduced unemployment by about 2.5 percentage points. The work requirement represented a positive opportunity cost for participants. The program had a small effect on the poverty rate and a somewhat larger effect on the incidence of extreme poverty. Funding for the study derived from the Government of Argentina.

Raymundo (review)

The life, work, disappearance, persecution, and murder of Argentinean filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer (1941-1976?) provides the film Raymundo with the structural bone that branches out to a multiplicity of plots.1 In Ernesto Ardito and Virna Molina's Raymundo, fragments of Gleyzer's films of Argentina appear, unearthed footage of an epoch that would see him go underground and a wave of revolutionary Latin American film break out. Calls for a "Third Cinema," the Cine liberación collective, and the Cine de la Base group all came out of Latin American popular resistance movements (in Argentina in particular) and their need to define national identities. Raymundo Gleyzer's work is a legacy of revolutionary cinema for Mexico, Brazil, and Chile, as well as Argentina.2 Visual elements in the film include animation, newspaper clippings, maps, archival footage, segments of Gleyzer's censored films, footage revealing his field work techniques and his involvement with communities throughout Latin America, Gleyzer's diary and home movies, and a heavy use of titling. The sound design is essentially dialogical, narrated with voices of Gleyzer's surviving friends, colleagues, and family. The filmmakers look at Gleyzer's life in relation to an intricate chain of historical incidents in Argentina during the 1960s and 1970s. Among their findings are long-buried records of an Argentinean state on its way to military [End Page 119] dictatorship, censored footage from Gleyzer's films, newspaper clips, and documentation revealing divisions within the Peronist and Marxist parties. The film denounces the economic and political involvement of the United States with the Argentinean government and the institutionalization of an oppressive apparatus of disappearances, persecution, and torture. Ardito and Molina's film is a monumental work of revisionist history. They see the potential of cinema as a revolutionary tool. In Ardito's words: "We think of film as a bullet that ignites consciousness....We must serve as the stone that breaks silence, or the bullet that starts the battle. Poetry is not a goal in itself. Among us poetry is a tool to transform the world." In Raymundo there isn't a clear-cut rivalry between the first (mainstream), and second (auteur, neo-realist) cinema. Getino and Solanas defined alternative third cinema as that which the system couldn't assimilate, or as the cinema that fought the system directly.3 Cine de la Base, the radical production group of which Gleyzer was a leading member, and other forms of liberation cinema were born in very different contexts, so it should be expected that younger generations of filmmakers need to assert their national identity with new discourses and new ideological tools to confront the challenges of neoliberalism. Gleyzer's work evolves in a context in which third cinema is being defined in Latin America. An animated sequence in Raymundo shows the process of the building of an improvised movie theater in a particular community. Because regular theaters featured commercial interests and censorship was the order of the day, Gleyzer's idea was to bring the cinema to the people instead of bringing the people to the cinema. His mobile theaters were perhaps impractical, but successful in the sense that his message was delivered to many people. However, whenever Gleyzer confronts the mainstream distribution circuits, a great percentage of his works are censored and banned for years. We have to remember that the cinematic technological innovations brought over to Latin America were embedded with ideological as well as economic investments. What good is a film that people will not be able to see? For instance, in México, la Revolución Congelada (Mexico, the Frozen Revolution) (1971), Gleyzer examines Mexico's social structure from all sides, denouncing the government's corruption and exposing the struggle, exploitation, and poverty of the peasants. The film is banned in Mexico, and Raymundo Gleyzer is declared persona non grata. As a Mexican filmmaker today, I'm looking at Gleyzer's work in and about Mexico for the first time, and I see, within a minute...

La vigilanza sul sistema finanziario: obiettivi, assetti e approcci (Financial-Sector Regulation and Supervision: Targets, Frameworks and Approaches)

The scandals that have tarnished the reputation of Wall Street and in Italy have damaged those who have invested their savings in Parmalat or Cirio corporate bonds or in Argentinean Government securities justify revisiting the objectives to be achieved by regulation and supervision of the financial sector. Stability is still regarded as paramount for banking, to be secured through an appropriate capital cushion, extensive supervisory arrangements, and market discipline, as agreed by Basel 2. Other financial intermediaries need to conduct their business with great transparency, openness and respect of the rules. However, an ever expanding and innovative financial sector, the blurring of traditional segmentations and globalisation make the task of regulating and supervising the financial sector more difficult and challenging, thus requiring new frameworks, for instance a single agency, in various jurisdictions and more international co-ordination and co-operation among regulating and supervising agencies. Up to now, the approach followed by the latter has been microeconomic, but the growing financial instability and the greater relevance of systemic risk may ask for a macroeconomic management of prudential regulation and supervision, thus complementing monetary policy in securing financial stability. JEL Codes: E52, G18, G21, G28 Keywords: Banking; Regulation; Securities

What Can We Learn from the Current Crisis in Argentina?

AbstractCurrently, Argentina is experiencing what the government describes as a ‘great depression.’ Using the ‘Great Depressions’ methodology developed by Cole and Ohanian (1999) and Kehoe and Prescott (2002), we find that the primary determinants of both the boom in Argentina in the 1990s and the subsequent depression were changes in productivity, rather than changes in factor inputs. The timing of events links the boom to the currency‐board‐like Convertibility Plan and the crisis to its collapse. To gain credibility, the Argentine government took measures to make abandoning the plan more costly. Because the government was unable to enforce fiscal discipline, however, these increased costs failed to make the plan more credible and instead made the crisis far worse when it failed.

Do currency boards increase the credibility of exchange-rate pegs?

After massive attacks against the peso in January 2002 the Argentine government abandoned its currency board arrangement. The collapse of the Argentine exchange-rate system initiated a new discussion about the pros and cons of currency boards. Why did the Argentine currency board fail? What does its collapse reveal about the conditions that have to be fulfilled for a currency board to function smoothly? What consequences can be drawn from the Argentine case with regard to the currency boards of countries in central and eastern Europe?

Military Rule, State Autonomy, and Privatization in the Southern Cone

This article compares military regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay to show the political challenges military governments confront in implementing privatization policies. Using a case-study approach, it describes the effect of differences in long-standing characteristics of the armed forces, and in the military regime's governing institutions on the political survival strategies of military rulers. Analysis of the data on privatization under military rule in these countries suggests that consolidated one-man rule provides advantages over more collegial forms of military rule when it comes to selecting economic policy makers and directors of state-owned enterprises who will facilitate privatizing state enterprises. Furthermore, the findings reveal how rarely military regimes succeed in achieving their privatization goals.

Political justice under authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile

Political justice under authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile

Historia económica, política y social de la Argentina (1880–2000)

In Historia económica, política y social de la Argentina, Mario Rapoport, Eduardo Madrid, Andres Musacchio, Ricardo Vicente, and their team of additional professors and students not only provide a masterly summary of Argentina’s economic, political and social history, but also provide an unbiased and up-to-date presentation of the main lines of interpretation of this history by Argentine scholars, and scholars from other nations whose works have been translated into Spanish. The book is well-written and free of jargon. The book will serve specialists, historians in general, students, and the general public both as an outstanding reference work and as a presentation of plausible hypotheses by the authors. The scope of the book unfortunately prevents presenting all of these hypotheses in this review.The authors achieve their aim of establishing coherent time periods of analysis, which are: 1880–1914, 1914–30, 1930– 45, 1946–55, 1955–66, 1966–76, 1976– 83, and 1983–99. Although summaries of books and articles, and reproductions of tables, are presented for each period, the lack of a summary table for all of the periods, a list of tables, and an index reduces the usefulness of this excellent reference book, which is based on studies in traditional format. Technical econometric and other studies available from government and university Web sites are not mentioned, although they may have informed the interpretive books and articles cited.A more difficult problem is the fact that government statistics, as well as those from corporate sources, are often inaccurate. Scholars informally report that “informal” economic activities in Argentina probably rose from around one-third of gross domestic product in the early 1960s to at least one-half of gross domestic product by 2001. In these circumstances, it is difficult to make compelling arguments about the trend of economic activities. Nonetheless, the team’s commanding knowledge of Argentine history leads the authors to emphasize two major facts: (1) Argentine conditions at the beginning of the century were far less favorable than is commonly assumed. A limited resource base, small domestic market, and distance from the centers of trade limited its growth and leadership in Latin America. Moreover, (2) although Mexico could grow as a result of its proximity to the United States, Argentina’s nearest neighbor is Brazil, which only recently became capable of playing the same role for Argentina as a major source of trade and investment. The most recent example is the planned purchase of Argentina’s top energy company, Perez Companc, by Brazil’s state-owned Petrobras for about $1.1 billion. (New York Times, 4 July 2002, p. W1). The 1960s saying “Argentina is alive and well and in hiding somewhere in Brazil” may be about to come true! This is all the more fortunate, because, on Rapoport et al.’s evidence, Argentina has had the worst economic growth record of any major economy in Latin America during the twentieth century.What happened? Neither international markets nor government intervention provided the stable outlook and trust needed for long-term investment. International markets closed and trading partners shifted due to wars, depression, and trade agreements. National markets had neither security of property rights, varying at different times between favoring landlords and tenants, nor security of contracts; wage freezes, tax changes, new monetary regimes, changes in banking rules, and the inaccessibility of bank accounts made long-term investments imprudent. The Argentine government’s attempt to provide some stability by tying its currency to the dollar limited state funds, which then made up budget shortfalls by privatizing its firms, often under terms that may have benefited the brokers rather than the nation. When that income stream ended, and massive investment in Argentina or improved domestic tax collections did not replace it, the government could not sustain its currency rule, maintain an orderly banking system, or meet its international payments. Despite the fact that the Argentine and Brazilian economies are sometimes “out of phase” with each other (having different inflation-and growth rates in the short term that partially limit their integration) Rapoport et al. cite the Brazilian Ambassador Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães, who indicated that more than increased economic and political integration is needed. They state that the neoliberal reforms that both nations adopted have increased the two nations’ internal and external vulnerability. They believe that the continued increase of integration with Brazil, resulting from geopolitical forces, and Argentine participation in an enhanced Mercosur, will create of Mercosur a powerful international negotiating body, and the benefit the region within a multipolar world of unequal power among its members.

Bringing War Criminals to Justice: A Brief History

IWOULD like in this essay to sum up how we got to where we are now on the question of international justice. As Kenneth Roth indicates in his introduction, it has essentially been during the 1990s that we have tried to hold those responsible for war crimes actually accountable for their acts. Very little was done before that, subsequent to the international tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo. There were some earlier efforts, however, the most significant of which I believe are one in the mid-1970s and one in the mid-1980s. In the mid-1970s, after seven years of military rule by “the colonels,” Greece put a number of those responsible for various atrocities on trial, including two men who had served as president of Greece during that period. About a hundred were convicted, including the two former presidents, for various crimes committed during the colonels’ regime. Then, a decade or so later, in the mid-1980s, Argentina put on trial a number of the generals and the admirals responsible for many thousands of disappearances, torture, and summary executions during the seven years of military rule in Argentina. What happened in Argentina dealt a setback to the effort internationally to hold those responsible accountable, because when the effort was made to extend the trials to middle-level officers , they rebelled. There were several armed rebellions led by the mid-level officers, and they were put down by the Argentine government. But the lesson that a number of other countries derived from what happened in Argentina was that it was too danSOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Winter 2002) Bringing War Criminals to Justice: A Brief History BY ARYEH NEIER gerous to hold such trials, especially when abuses were committed by the military, because the military was capable of overthrowing civilian governments. Roth referred to the fact that in the southern cone of Latin America, the effort was made to deal with these issues through truth commissions. In Chile, for example, the decision was made to avoid trials, to honor an amnesty that the military government’s leader, General Augusto Pinochet, had issued for himself and for his military cohorts, and instead only to have a truth commission. There was also a truth commission in Argentina, but in Chile the commission decided even to avoid naming any names of the military officers who had committed abuses. You could tell from reading the report issued by the commission that Pinochet himself was responsible for a large number of the abuses, but no one else was identified in the three-volume document. In another country neighboring Argentina, Uruguay, there was actually a national referendum that decided to uphold an amnesty rather than risk the possibility of trials that might cause the military to overthrow a civilian government. So it looked, for a while, after the Argentine experience, that holding those who committed great crimes accountable in criminal trials was doomed. What changed all that was the war in Bosnia, which began 10 years ago. Bosnia was different, I believe, for three reasons. First, of course, the war took place in Europe, fairly close to the center of Europe, only an hour or an hour and a half away by plane from a number of the major capitals in Europe. What was going on in Bosnia had a degree of visibility that was not the case when comparable atrocities took place in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. A second factor in making Bosnia different was that most of the conflicts subsequent to World War II in which great atrocities took place were internal. They were civil wars. Bosnia was an international armed conflict, in the sense that three internationally recognized states were participants: Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Bosnia. As the law of war was understood at that time, it was thought that the concept of war crimes applied only in international armed 1092 SOCIAL RESEARCH conflicts, not in internal armed conflicts. The provisions of the Geneva Conventions that deal with grave breaches, or war crimes, appear in the sections of the conventions and protocols concerning international armed conflicts. (The law of war has developed significantly during the past decade, and that restricted view is...

Argentina's national telemedicine programme: reasons for a premature failure.

In July 1999, the Argentinean government decided to extend the national telemedicine network from eight to 108 hospitals and medical schools. In April 2000, a telemedicine workstation was donated to every hospital, although there was no training, no guidelines and no overall objectives. We have been leading this project since June 2000 as part of the National Information Society Programme, with an initial 50,000 US dollars budget for the first semester. Since then, we have raised funds, deployed a large cooperative network, and developed training, seminars and content. We have also proposed an overall action plan. Nevertheless, the programme in that time has twice suffered a change of government, the budget has changed five times and the priorities have changed three times. At present, the team finds itself with no contract and no political action plan in a national context which is not favourable to information and communications technology projects.

White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead: The Troubled Meeting of Sex, Gender, Public Health, and Progress in Latin America

The essays in White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead are the collected works of historian Donna J. Guy, chronicling her ideas and her impact on the field of gender and women’s history in Latin America from the 1980s to the present. As she states in her introduction, these wide-ranging essays share a “gendered connection to work, family, and the rise of increasingly interventionist nation-states in Latin America.” While readers familiar with the obra guyense may also appreciate a single volume of her previously published articles, the collection seems primarily intended for relative newcomers to the field of gender studies in Latin America, and it should serve such an audience well.Particularly suited to younger scholars is the autobiographical tone of the introduction and the first chapter. Moving back and forth between the tantalizing insights provided by theories devised for other regions and the discoveries made during long hours in the archives, Guy has felt her way into uncharted intellectual territory and made pioneering contributions to our knowledge of Latin American women and to the theoretical structure of gender studies.The next group of essays examine international topics. Perhaps best known for her work on white slavery and legalized prostitution, Guy uses international comparisons here to highlight the links between these issues and medical imperialism on the one hand, and nationality and citizenship for women on the other. Other chapters explore the hemispheric cooperation that evolved around the child rights movement and the Pan-American Child Congresses of the twentieth century.The Argentine-oriented section of the book begins with essays on nineteenth-century women that explore the impact of class and region on women’s livelihoods. Guy charts the efforts of the Argentine government to control women’s labor through definitions of criminality and through the medical supervision that brought nineteenth-century doctors into the family itself. These essays further examine legal and legislative issues, and the positioning of political parties and the Catholic Church. By considering parenthood—and patriarchy in particular—as a site of contention between the government and the family, Guy illustrates the complexities not only of mothering but of fathering, and the ways these practices have changed over time.In addition to many shared themes, these essays are linked by a certain methodological approach. Guy rarely studies women in isolation from men and the family; rarely explores the ramifications of gender without consideration of class, race, and sexuality; never studies ideological pronouncements without historical evidence of people’s actions; and always sets her analyses in the context of larger social and political processes—particularly those associated with state formation.It is impossible to argue with the strength of her work or the importance of Guy’s contributions to the field, but the preparation of this volume involved a couple of questionable editorial decisions. The first was to eliminate the endnotes that appear in the original publications. When used as a classroom text, most students will probably not mourn the absent scholarly apparatus, and a bibliographical essay is included. But those considering a more serious study of women’s or gender history may miss the attributions of mentioned secondary authorities and quoted primary authors. With this same concern for the aspiring, Guy might have asked someone else to write her introduction. As mentioned, its autobiographical aspects are interesting, but its tone is necessarily modest. A different author might have been more forthcoming about how these essays were received and could have lionized the author more enthusiastically as a means of inviting new recruits into the fray. As it is, however, the work is fully able to speak for itself.

Mercosur: The Dilemma Between Custom Union and Free Trade Area

In the first half of 2001, the government of Argentina undertook some changes in the import tariffs of some products, eroding the Common External Tariff (CET) of Mercosur. In particular, the tariff rates of capital goods were reduced to zero, an action with potential negative implications for the Brazilian industry of such goods. In this paper the authors address two problems. First, in the case of the maintenance of the custom union they examine the best structures for the CET, such that the different interests related to competitiveness and economic growth in the four member countries could be reconciled. If such agreement is not reached, the authors then consider the case of Mercosur being transformed into a free trade zone. This would probably reinforce the requisites of regional content in the products exchanged and the negative effects of trade diversion could be enhanced.

Strength and Commitment of the State: It Takes Two to Tango – A Case Study of Economic Reforms in Argentina in the 1990s

This paper tries to answer the question why radical institutional reforms became reality in Argentina, a country devastated by economic and political catastrophies hardly a decade ago. It uses a framework of both strength and commitment of the state as crucial determinants of the quality of economic institutions such as property and contract rights. In particular the personality and credibility of Carlos Menem as Argentine president due to his capabilities as political organizer while political opposition was weak, to the institutional dominance of the presidency over legislature and judiciary in Argentina’s political system, and to a fundamental restoration of the state, are all seen to be responsible for strengthening the central government in Argentina and thus allowed a radical top-down and quasi-authoritarian reform policy. The commitment of the state not to abide the institutions itself has been enhanced by the elimination of discretion over monetary policy (by way of establishing a currency board), by privatization as well as by improving transparency and information policy. However, the actual lack of commitment with regard to democratic control mechanisms represents a permanent threat of the economic reforms already realized so far.

Corporate Governance in Argentina: the outcome of economic freedom (1991–2000)

This paper develops and provides evidence for two statements: a) In Argentina, there has been a marked shift in ownership and control from big family‐owned domestic companies towards foreign groups and investment funds, and b) While coping with governance issues, Argentina has been following the common law countries tradition, fostering a capital‐market‐based financial system and swapping its corporate governance practices outright. To ground these statements on facts, I survey corporate governance issues in this country before 1991, the underlying legal framework, the new rules of the game in capital structure and ownership as from 1991, largely due to a wave of privatisations, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions that took place through the last decade.

¿Están subvencionados los aceites vegetales argentinos?

The Peruvian producer of vegetal cooking oil are trying to deter the entry of imports coming from Argentina, claiming that these products have a 10% subvention from the Argentinian Government and that this subsidy allows them to compete unfairly with the Peruvian producers. They are asking INDECOPI to apply a countervailing duty in order to outweigh the negative effects of this alleged subvention. This paper analyzes the validity of the arguments held by the plaintiffs and the convenience of fulfilling their requests.

Civil Society Participation in World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank Programs: The Case of Argentina

During the last few decades, the multilateral development banks (MDBs), together with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have influenced the most important macroeconomic changes in Latin America. In Argentina, structural adjustment, reforms, and public policies have been intimately intertwined with the agenda and goals of the MDBs since 1987, and particularly since 1989. The increasing importance of these institutions rests not only in their volume of lending, [1] but also in their capacity to direct and support the policies undertaken by the Argentine government and to lend legitimacy to those policies in the eyes of relevant economic actors. The MDBs initiated a series of reforms during the 1990s to make their operations more transparent and participatory and to increase accountability on all levels of implementation and management. Despite this new credo, however, loan negotiation in Argentina has become neither more transparent nor more participatory. The negotiations continue to be carried out exclusively by the executive branch. Furthermore, only some ministries within the executive are part of the decisionmaking process. Since the reform of Argentina's constitution in 1994, the head of the cabinet also participates in the process, but the ministry principally responsible for negotiating and approving loans remains the Ministry of Economy, which also decides whether or not other ministries should be included. The portfolios of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for Argentina grew steadily in the late 1990s, and the composition of their loan portfolios gradually changed. [2] Around 1993, these banks began to introduce second-generation reform loans that involve projects in areas such as health, labor, education, and transportation. These loans usually include components of adjustment and of compensation, the latter intended to soften the most negative effects of the reforms. In Argentina, the trend of simultaneous adjustment and compensation is most observable in the health and labor sectors, where reforms have had a great impact (which we explain in greater detail later). Although the changes in implementation mechanisms in loans are the result of new reforms within the MDBs toward transparency, participation, and accountability, systematic participation of civil society organizations in MDB-funded projects has not been achieved. The World Bank, for example, held a discussion in Argentina with some civil society organizations in an attempt to open its Country Assistance Strategy (CAS). The discussion was held after the strategy had already been approved, however, and fairly incomplete documents were distributed as the basis for the debate. This event seemed to reveal that the Bank's strategy aimed to satisfy certain actors in Washington, D.C., rather than the people actually affected by the loans; participants in the discussion included nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots organizations without much power but excluded Argentine political parties and labor unions. The principal discussion focused on the Bank's compensation plans. Most of the organizations present had wide experience in implementing MDB loans but were unfamiliar with the Bank's policies. The incomplete documents and the debate failed to provide thorough information on those World Bank loans related to the country's macroeconomic performance and to struct ural reforms. In an effort to foster participation, the World Bank held several open regional meetings in 1999 with representatives of civil society organizations. The process concluded in a national meeting on 13 March 2000 to discuss various aspects of the CAS (such as health, the environment, and judicial reform) to be implemented henceforth by the Bank. The outcome and effectiveness of this series of meetings will depend on the way in which the Bank and the government deal with the findings. The IDB has also taken up a reform agenda, but the agenda has not been accompanied by extensive action. …

Saving Mt. Aconcagua

Environmentally responsible tourism, especially on high mountains, will be improved if guidelines are available that help manage a tourism asset and suggest a certain behavior for the parties involved. Archival research concerning the Himalayas, the Antarctic and the Sub-Antarctic Islands and field observations served as the basis for Mt. Aconcagua's guidelines. Two of the co-authors climbed Mt. Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Andes. Guidelines were established for the Argentine government, tour operators and mountain guides, and for climbers.

Crisis and conservation at the end of the world: sheep ranching in Argentine Patagonia

Patagonia was one of the last regions in the Americas to be settled by Europeans. It was not until the mid-1880s that the Argentine government secured effective control over the region, after which settlement and economic development were based on sheep ranching. Virtually free of domesticated animals in 1885, by 1910 Patagonian rangelands supported some 12 million sheep. This growth was sustained until 1952, when the sheep population of the region peaked at approximately 22 million, but the number of sheep in Patagonia has since declined to about 13 million. Numerous factors have been implicated in the collapse of sheep ranching, one of great significance being the very poor state of Patagonian rangelands. Soil erosion is widespread, and the flora has been so heavily modified that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine what the composition and characteristics of Patagonia's pre-European vegetation were. This paper reviews the evolution of Patagonia's sheep industry and the nature and extent of environmental degradation caused by livestock. Although researchers have long called for a response to the environmental and socio-economic dimensions of the crisis, only in the past decade have initiatives to assess, monitor, and reverse degradation in Patagonia been launched. These initiatives often promote the diversification of land-use and alternative production strategies. Case study evidence from the upper Percey River watershed in western Chubut province indicates that ranchers may view alternative livelihoods with suspicion. It is suggested that measures to restore and protect Patagonian ecosystems would gain greater acceptance if local producers were seen as equals in the conservation and development process. This could be achieved by replacing more-traditional top-down models of policy design and implementation with measures based on genuine consultation and participatory, community-based approaches to natural resource management.