THE SOUTH AMERICAN WAY^327Each industry had its particular health hazards. In the textile, metal,
match and glass factories, the air was always full of a fine dust that irritated
the lungs. In leather factories, the curing process required the use of sul
furic, nitric, and muriatic acids as well as arsenic and ammonia, all of which
gave off harmful vapors that filled the building. In the packinghouses,
workers trod upon floors that were slippery with coagulated blood, entrails,
and animal excrement. The stench was overwhelming. The men who car
ried meat to the freezers had to wrap their hands and faces in rags or old
newspapers, being careful not to have any fresh blood on their clothes lest
it freeze to their bodies. Rheumatism was a common ailment, and few
packinghouse workers lasted more than five years.Argentine industry, then, was not a driver but a passenger of growth.
When a time of troubles returned after World War II, it left the vehi
cle. Labor, whether in industry or agriculture, was not happy and took
to those ideological nostrums—anarchism before World War I,
Perônism after World War II—that are the revenge of the powerless.
The economist Paul Samuelson attributed this alienation to the dis
crepancy between economic backwardness and social indifference on
the one hand, political precocity on the other.^31 The people wanted
what neither economy nor state could give.
Today, Argentina is painfully finding its way back from political op
pression and brutality, military adventurism, and economic depression.
In particular, the tactic of "disappearing" suspected radicals, to say
nothing of personal enemies, often by flying prisoners out over the
ocean and pushing them out of the plane—with jailers and assassins
kidnapping and "adopting" the children of the victims (a specially
gruesome touch going back to Inquisition days)—all this has left a
legacy of evil and horror. But also, paradoxically, sloganeering pop
ulisms have nurtured the beginnings of a national identity, witness the
phenomenal success of Evita.
The failure of Latin American development, all the worse by contrast
with North America, has been attributed by local scholars and outside
sympathizers to the misdeeds of stronger, richer nations. This vulner
ability has been labeled "dependency," implying a state of inferiority
where one does not control one's fate; one does as others dictate.
Needless to say, these others exploit their superiority to transfer prod
uct from the dependent economies, much as the earlier colonial rulers
did. The pump of empire becomes the pump of capitalist imperialism.
Yet to co-opt independent, sovereign nations requires lending and