Why Argentina is a Third World Country

I just got finished with an epic lunch with my host mom, Mónica. We started eating at 2:30 and ended up talking for the next two hours. We discussed American and Argentine politics, mostly. Mónica explained to me why Argentina grows so much soy (answer — it's like the corn of the US; there are lot of subsidies and the economy depends on it even though no one actually eats it or even really uses it for anything). I tried and failed to explain to her why the US impeached Bill Clinton for lying about a blow job but hasn't so much as slapped Bush on the wrist for lying about Iraq.

More than anything specific we talked about, the conversation was fascinating because it helped me understand why Argentina is a third world country, and how that makes it different from the US. It's easy to forget while I'm eating a a veggie tort with squash in a four-bedroom apartment that has wireless internet and three cable TVs that I'm not only not in the US, but that I'm technically not in the developed world. What exactly does developed mean if not home to a comfortable middle class and able to provide its citizens with basic amenities like education and (ahem) health care? Argentina has all that. Of course, it also has people living in abject poverty in shantytowns, but that tends to be pretty insulated from city life.

And yet certain things Mónica says remind me that not everything is as clean and functional as it seems, even in the city of Buenos Aires. As an American, I tend to take things at face value. If airplane is supposed to take off at 3:45, it will take off at 3:45. If the president says the economy is improving, the economy is improving. The money in my bank account will be there until I spend it.

Argentines, on the other hand, approach life with the assumption that the bus will break down, that the government is lying, and that the money they have in the bank could be gone when they wake up tomorrow. This pessimism — or realism, depending on how you look at it — is the real difference between Argentina and the US. Because the fact is that the buses here are old, the government's figures understate inflation by some 20%, and once every ten years or so, there's an economic crisis, a rush on the banks, and the money that had been safe in an account the day before just no longer exists.

Life here has a sense of precariousness that doesn't exist in the US. People expect to be inconvenienced, delayed, lied to and cheated, and it comes out in the details. For example, when I took a bus to Uruguay, it was delayed for three hours. The only reason I knew it was delayed was because it wasn't at the station, and I wasn't even sure of that because the bus company didn't know yet where the bus would stop — only the general area. They also didn't know how delayed the bus was, or when it would come, or whether it would come at all, and were both mystified and annoyed when I went to ask. How should they know?

Somehow, Argentines don't end up bitter from all this uncertainty, just resigned. But it makes me realize (and I know this is totally cliché) how lucky we have it.