After a promising start as a prosperous and liberal democratic
nation at the end of the nineteenth century, Argentina descended
into instability and crisis. This stark reversal, in a country rich
in natural resources and seemingly bursting with progress and
energy, has puzzled many historians. In
Civilizing
Argentina, Julia Rodriguez takes a sharply contrary view,
demonstrating that Argentina's turn of fortune is not a mystery but
rather the ironic consequence of schemes to "civilize" the nation
in the name of progressivism, health, science, and public
order.
With new medical and scientific information arriving from Europe at
the turn of the century, a powerful alliance developed among
medical, scientific, and state authorities in Argentina. These
elite forces promulgated a political culture based on a medical
model that defined social problems such as poverty, vagrancy,
crime, and street violence as illnesses to be treated through
programs of social hygiene. They instituted programs to fingerprint
immigrants, measure the bodies of prisoners, place wives who
disobeyed their husbands in "houses of deposit," and exclude or
expel people deemed socially undesirable, including groups such as
labor organizers and prostitutes. Such policies, Rodriguez argues,
led to the destruction of the nation's liberal ideals and opened
the way to the antidemocratic, authoritarian governments that came
later in the twentieth century.