From the Neoliberal State to a Neo-National Development in Northwestern Argentina

Toward a Post-neoliberal Model in Argentina?

In the past decade, many Latin American nations have reoriented their politics and policies toward a recovery of the nation-state and turned their backs on those that granted the market, supported by large international finance organizations, a decisive and determinative role. As various countries experienced crises, especially at the end of the 1990s, it became evident that the neoliberal model had reached certain limits, not only economic but political and social. Goldman (2005: 16) observes that “after more than a decade of Washington Consensus ideological dominance, the post–Washington Consensus crowd concluded that the [World] Bank’s and the IMF’s [International Monetary Fund’s] neoliberal orthodoxy had created a series of colossal disasters around the world.”

Is it possible to talk about a post-neoliberal era in Latin America? Is it possible to talk about post-neoliberalism in Argentina? Many writers have proposed, and I agree, that the “post-” prefix might be understood not as signifying the complete end of the prior phase and the starting of a new one but as part of an ongoing process. In this regard, Macdonald and Ruckert (2009: 8) argue that the alternative political models now contain remnants of the prior neoliberal phase. For them, post-neoliberalism is not an “after” period but “the search for more progressive policy alternatives.” Along these lines, others argue that after more than a decade of market-oriented policies based on technocratic consensus, it is far too early to claim that Latin America has entered a post-neoliberal era of development. Finally, Rovira (2011: 234) says that “the debate on post-neoliberalism is an interesting academic exercise, but it should not give the impression that neoliberalism and the right are obsolete.” In this article I locate my perspective within these proposals, assuming that though there are evident changes in the directions taken in the region, neoliberal development policies persist. While many current governments have returned to the practices of the historically well-developed welfare state model, they are also taking advantage of the preceding privatized neoliberal structures (Weinberg, 2013).

The Argentine Case

The new political phase that some scholars have called post-neoliberalism has been distinguished in terms of the emergence of progressive, anti-neoliberal governments that have formed a political bloc challenging the Washington Consensus and opposing the liberal democracy that has been the foundation for economic reforms oriented toward strengthening the market (Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts, 2009). After the 2001 crisis and the two subsequent years of political and social turmoil culminating in the recognition of five presidents in 10 days, Néstor Kirchner took office in May 2003. With this electoral change in consonance with a regional political and ideological shift, the state again became a political actor, developing and launching policies, projects, and programs, reinforcing its national and local presence, and opening up the political arena to social sectors that had been left behind in the preceding neoliberal era. If Néstor Kirchner initiated a new political cycle, generating structural changes, it can be said that Cristina Férnández de Kirchner, his wife, who assumed the presidency in 2007, expanded the same political model.

Carlos M. Vilas (2004) asserts that in recent years it has been commonplace to talk about “the return to the state” as part of the recovery from the country’s deep economic and social crisis. He points out that this expression addresses only one aspect of the state, the one related to economic regulatory mechanisms and international negotiations, and goes on to argue that it is not quite correct to say that the state “is back” when it was never really gone. What was considered the “absence” of the state during the neoliberal era was in reality the result of changing political strategies and the effect of redefinitions of management, objectives, and modalities. Keeping these remarks in mind, I analyze two state models, the more orthodox neoliberal and the current one, focusing on how they operated in the regional context.

During the first neoliberal period, private assets (mostly international) were welcomed through the privatization of public services, which gave power to these economic sectors in the political policies developed by then, mostly favoring their own business to the detriment of the population. In contrast, in the current period the state has developed many strategies to strengthen the general population, such as the creation of universal programs that reach massive sectors and more specific programs oriented toward defined groups (small farmers, for example).

The most comprehensive program has been the Asignación Universal por Hijo (Universal Child Allowance), carried out by the Ministry of Social Development. Since its establishment in November 2009 it has benefited the children of the unemployed, of those employed in the informal economy, and of those who earn less than the minimum wage. It consists of a monthly payment of 460 pesos per child under 18 years of age and 1,500 pesos per disabled child regardless of age. Its principal objective is to ensure that children and adolescents attend school, have periodic medical checkups, and comply with the required vaccination schedule. Today, more than 3,500,000 children and adolescents are beneficiaries of this assistance (http://www.anses.gob.ar/destacados/asignaciln-universal-por-hijo-1).

This shift away from the market-oriented policies of the 1990s has been accompanied, however, by the persistence of foreign agribusiness and of investment that is destroying immense natural areas, many of which indigenous groups have traditionally occupied. Soybean production, logging, gas extraction, and mining have been generating considerable profits for international companies and for local entrepreneurs. The impossibility of covering the losses and the incalculable social, economic, and environmental damage has provoked substantial debate among various sectors of society.

During the past decade, indigenous peoples and other historically marginal sectors have been the targets of national- and state-driven local policies. Since 2005, agencies have been reinforced or newly created to support them, among them the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fishing, the National Institute of Agricultural Technology, and the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development.

Twenty years after the 1994 national constitutional amendment that opened new paths for collective indigenous rights in Argentina, however, indigenous communities have not entirely benefited from these rights. The adoption of neoliberal multicultural citizenship and expansion of international development interventions during the 1990s left a deep mark on indigenous peoples’ lives as well as those of the rest of the nation (de la Cadena, 2006; Hale, 2004; Lenton and Lorenzetti, 2005; Postero, 2007). The constitutional reform created a kind of civic integration, but it was far from achieving social inclusion, much less ethnic integration. Some indigenous organizations have adopted the neoliberal multicultural discourse by developing political strategies that have transformed the liberal notion of diversity tolerated by the model. Despite their having achieved recognition, Argentine society has not discussed their deeper claims. Time has revealed the constitutional reforms to have been useful but insufficient for more profound changes in politics.

During the 1990s, indigenous movements mainly demanded ethnic and cultural recognition, and they became one of the chosen targets for international development initiatives. In the current context, some communities have accepted state interventions, some have even become part of the new state administration, and some have become radicalized politically and organized themselves at the supracommunity level—which is not to say that they are choosing to stay outside of the state or the political scene but rather that they are negotiating how to become part of it.

Charles Hale (2004) has suggested the notion of the indio permitido (acceptable Indian) to describe the transformations introduced under neoliberal regimes. The construction of this indigenous social actor during the 1990s granted indigenous peoples “neoliberal multicultural citizenship.” However, it closed off deeper political debates related to autonomy, pluri-nationality, self-determination, and even class struggle. I take this concept and stretch it temporarily to see how it might fit the current situation and to draw attention to what it does not include. The current situation has new permissions and many strategies for inclusion, mainly based on universal social policies, but unresolved issues have generated disagreements, confrontations, and even violence against indigenous communities (Weinberg, 2013). While recognizing the many novel state-oriented approaches, it is plausible to say that in Argentina the “indigenous question” is still unanswered.

The Political Context

Northwestern Argentina and the Northeast constitute the poorest region in the country, with the highest rates of substandard living conditions, malnutrition, illiteracy, and unemployment. The region is also home to many politically active indigenous populations. The Kolla ethnic group is one of the largest in the country. In the past 20 years, Kolla have formed numerous councils at the local level and supra-community organizations such as the Coordinadora de Organizaciones Kollas Autónomas de Salta (Organizing Committee of Autonomous Kolla Organizations of Salta). In recent decades, transnational corporations have aggressively targeted northwestern Argentina’s forest and mineral resources for exploitation. This situation has exposed major historical and ongoing conflicts related to indigenous land tenure and has once again put on the table the debate over the role of the state as a guarantor of national interests.

During the 1990s, most of Latin America fully complied with neoliberal policies. At the same time, it was revisiting its most traditional and deeply rooted legal structures. Many countries promoted the constitutional inclusion of certain segments of society while instituting radical changes that diminished historically centralized power and excluded these same sectors from the sociopolitical and economic arenas. Far from being contradictory, from the perspective of this article this “plasticity” has been one of the most powerful and terrifying features of the neoliberal model.

After two decades of fully developed neoliberal measures and after traversing a deep crisis, many countries have changed their political and economic courses. Market-oriented policies welcoming privatization and the continuous influx of international capital have been reoriented toward a welfare state in the light of the diminishing presence of the international financing agencies that had been dictating the region’s path. Although the reach of the fundamental structural logics underlying the new “anti-neoliberal” or “post-neoliberal” governments is still under examination, they have changed in discursive terms.

During the 1990s, indigenous peoples struggled for and received a comprehensive package of communitarian rights and recognition. In the new context and complemented by the development of international laws and the constitutional reforms previously mentioned, the reemergence of indigenous movements has disrupted the region’s political scene and created a pronounced ethnic/cultural cleavage, sparking the so-called multicultural shift. At the same time, more politically radical demands rapidly dissolved. In the neoliberal phase, there were deep changes in the national economy with the opening and deregulation of the world market. Argentina accepted agreements and conditions coming from the IMF, which became the main source of financing, increasing the massive debt of the public sector. These transformations occurred in a context that legitimized the absorption of some of the functions of the state in favor of transnational mechanisms and the beginning of decentralization and privatization at the local level. Loans coming from international financing institutions (the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the IMF) began dictating the orientation of the country.

In 1995 a majority of the population, after amending the constitution, reelected Carlos S. Menem, the candidate of the populist Partido Justicialista (Peronist Party). With the economy in shambles and the ability of the state to run businesses in doubt, many saw privatization as a solution. The IMF, aided by local allies, mainly technocrats responsible for changing national economic policies, encouraged the adoption of a free-market economy. Stabilization policies and structural adjustments provoked the dismantling of the remains of social or interventionist states in the region. The neoliberal model guided governmental policies throughout the 1990s, and the state as guarantor of the social welfare of the population disappeared. Nevertheless, the administration facilitated and even encouraged the intervention of international financial institutions in areas abandoned by the state.

Although it is a commonplace that Argentina experienced a total absence of the state during this period, the truth is that the state was present as a political manager rather than just as a provider. In this regard, Oscar Oszlak (1997: 11, my translation) asserted that “a state is what it does; its nature can be inferred from its actions.” Building on this proposal, the Argentine neoliberal state, far from being completely absent, had very specific administrative goals. It accepted and favored the entrance of foreign capital and passed regulations that enabled this investment, guaranteeing the successful implementation of the conditions required by the banks.

The beginning of the neoliberal period was marked by the dismantling of most functions of the social welfare state and by the incorporation of many new actors, such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and multilateral agencies. Simultaneously, social funds sponsored primarily by multilateral finance agencies were created that “aimed to reduce or balance the adverse economic effects on the poor and vulnerable during these processes” (Rodríguez, 2005: 246, my translation). The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank initiated an unprecedented number of social programs and development projects that sponsored and “empowered” (in their own jargon) excluded social sectors. While these projects were being carried out through direct engagement with local communities, state social programs with international financing were also set in motion. However, although state-run offices were carrying out these projects, they were operating in accordance with external impositions. These programs had the objective of helping medium-sized and small farmers (Benencia and Flood, 2005), and many communities in northwestern Argentina were incorporated into them. I shall examine both neoliberal and “post-neoliberal” state programs in Salta and Jujuy as exemplified by the Programa Social Agropecuario (Social Agricultural Program—PSA) and the Proyecto Integral de Desarrollo de Pequeños Productores Agropecuarios (Integral Development Project for Small Farmers—PROINDER), which represent the 1990s trend, and the Secretaría de Agricultura Familiar (Secretariat of Family Agriculture—SAF), established in 2006, which gives a hint of the political changes.

The PSA: Between Social Policy and Microcredit

The PSA was established by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fisheries and the Ministry of the Economy in 1993 as an instrument of social policy. It was oriented toward the small agricultural producer, and its principal objective was to respond to a sector that, though always numerically important, had never been the focus of state consideration. To some extent, for the first draft and the first hiring of technicians, the PSA took advantage of the existence of NGOs and small producers’ associations already working in this area. Some of these organizations were faith-based, such as the Equipo Nacional de Pastoral Aborigen (National Indigenous Pastoral Team), the Fundación para el Desarrollo en Justicia y Paz (Foundation for Development in Justice and Peace), the Instituto de Cultura Popular (Institute of Popular Culture), and Obra Claretiana para el Desarrollo (Claretian Development Work), and some independent, such as the Asociación para la Promoción Integral (Association for Integral Promotion), supported by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit-GIZ, local producers’ organizations, community centers, community assemblies, and the Red Puna (Puna Network). Most of these groups had started their activities right after the return to democracy in 1983.

The PSA provided the active rural population financial and technical assistance and training for the development of projects aimed at food production for local consumption. Most of the indigenous and peasant communities of the 1990s lacked titles to their land, but they were considered not renters but “occupants” of that land. Almost a decade later, some of them would enjoy the restitution of their lands, supported by official titles, but most of the communities in both Salta and Jujuy are still fighting for this legal recognition.

By guaranteeing the satisfaction of the nutritional needs of each family, the PSA aimed to improve the financial returns of the family unit, reducing the need to purchase food and possibly allowing the production of surpluses that could be sold or used like currency in trade (PSA, 2001). It began to promote productive activities through micro-credit loans to groups of up to six families; after a specified time agreed-upon at the disbursement of the loan, the beneficiaries would repay the local community in products. Two work areas were identified: fostering subsistence and fostering associative productive enterprises. The loans were premised on the assumption that funds received as credit would be administered and used more carefully than subsidies. Thus the PSA tried, from the start, to distance itself from the assistance-based approaches of the 1990s and promote the independence of this small-producers’ sector. In addition, the main logic behind these strategies, like that of the world-renowned Grameen Bank, was “peer control,” in which trust had a fundamental role (Koberwein, 2012). As Lorenzo, a field expert with the program, told me, it also pushed a liberal logic that involved “development” through market integration and the production of surpluses. For provinces with a significant indigenous presence like Salta and Jujuy, the PSA established ad hoc groups to look at ethnic “particularities” (Marta, interview, Tilcara, January 8, 2011). By the beginning of the 1990s indigenous communities were just starting to be seen as such. All the policies that the PSA developed, for instance, were pretty much the same whether applied to peasant groups or to indigenous communities.

Development for Small Agricultural Producers: World Bank Subsidies

In 1998 the PSA participated in the formulation and approval of the PROINDER, and because the PROINDER targeted small agricultural producers throughout the country and aimed to implement “mechanisms that guarantee the incorporation of vulnerable groups (indigenous peoples, women, and youth)” it became one of the principal sources of funding for the PSA in Salta and Jujuy. The target population was defined on the basis of the 1991 census and focused on heads of household in localities that had fewer than 200 inhabitants and lacked basic necessities. From the start, the World Bank financed the PROINDER up to 75 percent of the total, with the remainder coming from the Argentine government. For the first phase of the project (PROINDER I) 100 million pesos were designated, of which 75 million were supplied by the Bank. PROINDER II, the second phase, began in 2008 after successful completion of the first.

The principal aims of this project were improving the living conditions of 40,000 poor small farmers by raising their income in a sustainable way, enforcing their organization and community participation, and strengthening the institutional capacity to implement and follow up policies designed for this sector (PSA, 2001: 33). The PSA had not identified the indigenous population among its beneficiaries, mostly because it did not have any specific policy toward this sector and neither did the country. The PROINDER began developing strictly productive projects and, as it advanced, discovered structural needs. Each nuclear family could receive up to US$2,000 in nonrefundable subsidies for projects focused on one of three areas: field, habitat, and community.

The PSA mostly authorized credits and the PROINDER subsidies. While the two programs and their funding sources appear different, the same people were in charge of carrying out both programs on the ground. José, a university professor and an expert in rural development with the Salta branch of the PSA since its creation, explained to me that the PROINDER “had an operating manual with forms, modalities, guides on handling money, etc.,” whereas the PSA “made everything a little schizophrenic” (interview, Iruya, February 16, 2011, my translation). It was the same office, with the same team working with the same strategies, managing projects and handling accounts but doing it differently for the monies that came from the PSA budget and those that came from the PROINDER-World Bank.

In the midst of the neoliberal readjustments, the possibilities for work and subsistence in urban centers collapsed, and these programs helped to prevent the migration of marginalized rural populations to the cities. While the World Bank financed the PROINDER and the budget for the PSA came from the Ministry of the Economy, in their execution they both at least initially adhered to the World Bank’s logic of project management. In José’s words, the big problem in the PSA was accountability: “To whom do I report how I spend? They ask for money in the name of communities and later can’t show that they received it, much less that they spent it.” It was a neoliberal point of view: the state had a regulatory function, the banks put up part of the money, and the NGOs and technicians on the ground managed the money and were solely responsible for it.

Without departing from the neoliberal line in the 1990s, the PSA ended up promoting an entrepreneurial discourse, incorporating the logic of micro-credits and seeking support for market integration via improved commercialization. As DeHart (2010) has shown for many cases in Latin America, all of these projects settled in rural northwestern Argentina an indigenous entrepreneur as part of a finance group with individual responsibilities. Local actors did not necessarily embrace this new position in the economic structure, but to some extent its creation reinforced their political power many years later. They had been given many tools for organizing, designing, and developing local projects and negotiating with external actors (banks, NGOs, and the state).

Once the legal frameworks for recognizing indigenous communities had advanced in the mid-1990s, communities began receiving titles to their territories. In contrast to the World Bank’s community-based strategies, the PSA never required such titles. This was an enormous advantage, as it allowed the program to work in more places. In Salta it began to work with what one field expert called a “hidden agenda.” Together with the infrastructure and productive projects that characterized the program, themes like territory, indigenous rights, and food security came to be part of the internal discussions in the province, although at the national level the PSA did not advance them.

Over time, it became more and more evident that situations existed in certain regions of the country that challenged the model. The existence of indigenous communities was evident, but their lack of legal recognition until 1994 and the ongoing conflict for land tenure made the “indigenous question” uncertain. Furthermore, some indigenous groups in Salta, for example, did not correspond to the category “small agricultural producers,” being fishers, gatherers, or seminomadic pastoralists, and this made the PSA’s national guidelines difficult to apply or even irrelevant. During the 1990s, the state considered indigenous groups either as ethnically or culturally specific (simply “cultural subjects”) or as small farmers (simply “economic subjects”). It took some time and the attention of regional offices such as Salta and Jujuy to pull the complexities together and understand the entire historical process.

Both the PSA and the PROINDER served as programs of poverty alleviation (Grassi, 2003), providing immediate solutions to the most pressing problems without resolving their structural causes. Without moving too far from the neoliberal guidelines of the 1990s, they ended up including the strategies, the methodologies, the vocabulary, and even the logic of neoliberalism.

Family Agriculture and/or Indigeneity: Toward Socio-Territorial Development

In 2006 public rural development strategies were reoriented toward a “socio-territorial” approach. The SAF formally replaced the PSA, introducing both a new way of working and a new way of understanding the development of northwestern Argentina. The fundamental premise of this new approach was the unit of work, the unit of development, as a space of social and political construction resulting from historical processes. In other words, instead of asking field experts and technicians to design standardized productive projects in different regions with different characteristics and focusing on decontextualized subjects, the socio-territorial approach was based on local particularities (social, historic, economic, and political) and aimed at strengthening the existing grassroots organizations (Tutuy et al., 2012).

The central notion of a “socio-territory” was taken from the Brazilian geographer Bernardo Mançano Fernandes (2005), and it called into question the hegemonic notion of “territory” as simply a geopolitical division and proposed to approach it as contested area, a product of historical power relations. Rethinking territory in these terms added elements offered by the indigenous peoples to reflect on the traditional notions of territory and development. The foundational document of the SAF, El enfoque socioterritorial (2007), described a territory as a multidimensional space including education, production, health, housing, access to water, and all the components and conditions necessary for human dignity. It criticized actions carried out “from above,” asserting that the socio-territorial focus aimed to construct “a better idea of the conditions of life in which scientific knowledge and the knowledge of campesino and indigenous communities dialogue on equal footing, strengthening horizontality, enabling the deployment of agency and the knowledge of actors. Thus, it entails the construction of the foundation of life that amplifies the cohesion of civil society in the service of collective interests” (SAF, 2007: 15, my translation). The first coordinator of the SAF, supported by an interdisciplinary working group (made up of agronomists, sociologists, veterinarians, and leaders from indigenous and peasant communities, cooperatives, and grassroots organizations), proposed this new orientation on behalf of the Movimiento Nacional Campesino Indígena (National Indigenous Campesino Movement). This political choice was fairly well received by the social organizations, although many damaging structural agreements with large business groups (national and international), which continued to develop mega-mining, transgenic soy production, and the clearing of lands, were maintained.

While the state’s retaking the reins of development may have been novel, recovery and valorization of local knowledge were already part of the development modalities pushed by the World Bank in the 1990s. What was really new was the SAF’s orientation toward family agriculture and its territorial focus. The socio-territorial model allowed direct financing for the organizations, which could then choose their own field experts. In addition, the defenders of this new design, both state field technicians and indigenous representatives, considered the incorporation of local representatives and skilled community members (idóneos) in the design of field interventions fundamental. Consequently, these community representatives were incorporated into the design and intervention structure as active agents.

Another novelty generated by the new paradigm was related to power and decision making. Although for years the structure had included articulations with social movements in northwestern Argentina, the new project was much more ambitious. While during the first neoliberal era development projects had achieved high levels of local community participation, they had mainly involved focalized strategies oriented toward isolated communities or particular sectors, which had always generated difficulties with those who had been excluded from them. Similarly, the recipients had not participated in all of the stages of intervention (design, execution, evaluation, and determination of the recipients of the projects); rather, projects had been brought in already settled. With the shift to a socio-territorial approach with strong participation of grassroots organizations, these organizations would decide not only who would carry out the projects but also who would design and evaluate them and who would be their beneficiaries.

Some limitations on the achievements of the SAF were related to a larger debate that went beyond it, one related to the model of food production that had been hegemonic in the country and had been accentuated during the 1990s. The Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fisheries, within which the SAF is located, has ongoing policies for strengthening agribusiness sectors that have experienced the greatest economic growth, lowering the cost of foodstuffs to levels that are competitive only if they are produced on a very large scale (soybeans, wheat, sunflowers, etc.).

With respect to the incorporation of indigenous issues into the SAF, there was a change in the logic of development that was mainly the result of incorporating indigenous people into the universe of the family agriculturalists, a broader and more complex category. The last years of the 1990s saw the establishment of a huge World Bank project known as the Indigenous Development Project, the most important project in its coverage and in the amount invested in northwestern Argentina. Because of the scarcity of policies for indigenous communities, some interviewees considered this project a possible precursor of some of the work developed by the PSA and later taken up by the SAF. Currently, the SAF offers legal advice on indigenous land claims and follow-up on court cases with specialized lawyers. In Salta and Jujuy the local SAF branches have developed very interesting and engaging agendas promoting cultural diversity, intercultural discussions, and identity construction. The incorporation of idóneos into the field teams was fundamental not just for reaching communities but for accommodating a new institutional logic. It appeared to be an attempt to include not just the individuals but the organizations they represented. During the 1990s, local and indigenous practices and expertise became a real political power, capable of producing a reservoir of alternatives to development, defending sovereignty, negotiating specific strategies, and elaborating particular representations (Edelman and Haugerud, 2007). However, some academic works point out that this position essentializes and romanticizes local knowledge and that the incorporation of notions such as community empowerment has reinforced mainstream philosophies on how progress can be achieved (Woost, 1997). One of the main goals for the past two decades has been the direct involvement of the beneficiaries at some stage of a developmental project. In this sense, “participation” has functioned as a politically attractive slogan and one that is economically appealing to investors. Although it tends “to be perceived as a free exercise” (Rahnema, 1992: 116), some critics say that in reality there are many ways of manipulating it (Rew, 1997; White, 1996).

According to many interviewees (mostly field experts), the SAF could start discussing more fundamental issues, such as food sovereignty, indigenous peoples’ autonomy, and the restoration of ancestral territories in a more definitive way. The agro-export model that incorporates Argentina into the global market, they say, has hardly changed. Expressing the continuities, Olga, an indigenous community member from the highland region of Iruya, declared, “The World Bank’s Indigenous Development Project gave us a few patches and now the Secretary gives us a little more, but you know what? We have to keep fighting. It’s never enough” (interview, Iruya, March 25, 2011, my translation).

Conclusions

My analysis of change and persistence between two political periods, focusing on state-run agencies and public policies that involved indigenous Kolla populations, particularly in the northwestern Argentine provinces of Salta and Jujuy, shows that things have undoubtedly changed. The more recent period that I have studied has been a laboratory of ideas and procedures whose very positive results have led to new strategies. They have also, however, had damaging consequences for the state itself and/or for the different organizations that are accompanying the changes. Marcelo, from Jujuy (interview, Tilcara, September 17, 2011), expressed some ideas that correspond to my own conclusions. After 2003, he said, the state got involved in the public realm not only through fiscal support but also by recovering its role as an actor. Adopting a very different approach from the one that accepted all the World Bank’s strategies during the 1990s, the state has affected huge sectors with its universal policies. Strategies have shifted from helping the poor to the inclusion of societal actors (indigenous people and campesinos) in the planning and implementation of projects. Many of these strategies are only palliatives, however, and the type of development or intervention needed remains to be discussed:

It is undeniable that income distribution is much better, in part because of the access to public policies, but a deeper debate is still lacking. The extraction-based model matrix for food production is out of the discussion. We cannot keep following the neoliberal path of access to the market. What is a sustainable project? What is development? What is it to have better living conditions? What is it to strengthen relationships among communities? What is it to grow economically? This is the discussion we’re not having now.

From this case study it is apparent that a recovery of state functions is under way. The kind of state that is “back” is “new” in the sense that it has created a novel fusion of prior strategies. While political discourse and actions have seen very deep modifications, mainly bringing back social sectors excluded during the prior neoliberal period and developing strategies for improving income distribution, a privatized market still holds excessive power. While I have called one of the phases analyzed “post-neoliberal,” I have observed continuities from the more orthodox neoliberal era.

One of the main differences between the two periods is that indigenous people have been incorporated through policies that treat them as citizens and principally family farmers. During the 1990s there were just a few mostly focalized pilot strategies supported by the international banks, and they emphasized cultural and ethnic particularities. As Rolo, from the Kolla community in Salta (interview, Iruya, September 17, 2012, my translation), put it, “Now there is this universalized citizenship construction in which we are all the same. However, unfortunately that is not true. We are not equal. At best, we have the same rights, but in reality we still don’t see it.” On the one hand, indigenous groups have gained in coverage, but, on the other, some claims have been subsumed under a more inclusive social sector and indigenous organizations have become directly involved in state-run agencies and programs. Strategies targeting indigenous populations as a whole throughout the country using universalistic approaches (as family farmers) have been useful for reversing the devastating effects of the 1990s, but they may now generate a new disarticulation in a political sense. The incorporation of indigenous peoples into major social sectors has risked, to some extent, the loss of their political and historical particularities.

In the past decade the political scenario changed, and macro policies of wealth redistribution guaranteed, to some extent, an income for the poorest sectors of the population. Many social policies were implemented. However, the economic basis for these changes remained the exploitation of natural resources. Sociopolitical measures have been subordinated to a macro-economic policy that undermines the nation’s sovereignty and sustainability. While there has been a change in the political horizon and a challenge to the political order, some patterns of exploitation and violence remain hegemonic.

Postscript

Since this article was written, a recent political shift in the country has raised two main concerns with regard to the issues explored in it. First, we are witnessing the dismantling of the state institutions built over more than two decades in relation to rural populations. Layoffs and the abandonment of policies oriented toward family agriculture demonstrate a new lack of interest in the sector. For example, more than a third of the SAF’s field experts have been already removed from the Jujuy branch, and the rest of the more than 1,500 workers around the county have been notified that their contracts will be ended by March 2016. Secondly, most of the new political strategies demonstrate the government’s intention to destroy processes of social construction, the promotion of individual actions and discourses over collective ones, and the targeting of social movements as enemies.

Since Mauricio Macri assumed the presidency in December 2015, all of the strategies aimed at small producers, campesinos, and indigenous communities have been under the threat of being eliminated. Recent actions such as the reduction of taxes on agricultural earnings have favored the large landowners and groups that retain economic power in agroindustry even more than before. The Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fishing has been renamed the Ministry of Agroindustry, and former CEOs have been appointed to most public offices. The new government has strengthened the security forces, conducted massive layoffs, and increased the price of utilities, fueling inflation that has mainly affected the middle and lower classes. It seems clear that Argentina is entering a very different political and economic cycle with very authoritarian features. There is a movement toward liberal-conservative strategies, with a reopening to international capital and loans, although the discourse of the relevance of the state persists. The country is again experiencing a right turn.

What we are witnessing is the creation of a refounding discourse that the PRO (Propuesta Republicana [Republican Proposal]), Macri’s party, has named the Happiness Revolution—a strengthening of the individual over the social. In his inaugural speech on November 23, 2015, President Macri (a businessman from one of the most economically powerful families of the country) described his job as helping individuals to find the path to personal development and the development of their families.

For more than a decade many Latin American countries have been experiencing significant transformations in their political and economic orientations. The first optimistic expectations have not, however, materialized, and some analysts have considered radical change, especially at the macro-economic level, impossible (Goodale and Postero, 2013). Hale (2011: 462) has argued that “the political project of neoliberalism is highly adaptable” and asked, “Can we be so sure that making space for these small islands of de-colonial practice lies definitively outside the neoliberal repertoire?” Following him, I observe all these processes not as a contradiction but rather as a structural feature of neoliberalism: the coexistence of legal opening, legal inclusion, and recognition of diversity with the destruction of the social fabric (Weinberg, 2013).

The incorporation of social movements (campesino and indigenous groups) into state structures has also been a preferred strategy in recent years. In the new scenario under Macri, we will have to observe the impact of this change on negotiations with the new government and on the ways in which possible new policies and strategies are developed for this sector. One of the main problems we have observed in these years has been the negative impact of institutional fragility on the development of medium- and long-term policy, with the constant creation and disappearance of state structures that we are witnessing nowadays. While remaining hopeful and supporting political activism, we might keep in mind the thousands of faces of neoliberalism. It seems that we are witnessing new arrangements and combinations of old structures. We will have to try to move outside these schemes to analyze politics, design new strategies, create more inclusive projects, and think about these new processes and possible paths from a different standpoint.