Capitals Dominate : Provincial Isolation: A Latin Woe

Life spins at its own individualistic pace here on Argentina’s lovely northwest frontier. The people chew coca and spend money-that-isn’t. They love their country, but they sue their central government.

Salta province boasts borders with Bolivia, Chile and Paraguay and, in heritage, life style, and outlook, it has more in common with all three of them than with Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital 1,200 miles away.

An economically stagnant tobacco- and grain-growing region of 738,000, Salta is a microcosm of the distress and frustration that is a hallmark of provincial life in Latin America today. From Mexico to Chile, when capitals sneeze, provinces catch pneumonia.

Second-Class Citizens

It is a bittersweet refrain in virtually every country. Provinces proudly wed to their laid-back life styles are second-class citizens. They dwell on the outside of national life, looking in with a mixture of envy and disdain. Provinces, where most of the people live, propose; worldly capitals dispose.

In Salta, complaints about Buenos Aires exactly parallel those that Third World raw-materials producers often make against the industrial First World.

“They take our oil and refine it elsewhere. We fell trees so Buenos Aires can make planks. We harvest tobacco but make no cigarettes,” said Carlos van Cauwlaert, head of Salta’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Latin American capitals like Buenos Aires monopolize the biggest industries, the most jobs, the best schools, the latest movies, the smoothest asphalt and the best soccer teams. They are both the cause and the result of massive internal migration since World War II. Capitals are what foreigners know and where businessmen buy.

Pittance for Provinces

Salta is an oil-producing province, but all oil in Argentina belongs to the central government, which pays provinces a pittance for what it takes. A suit by Salta for $60 million in back payments is before the Argentine Supreme Court, according to Raul Eduardo Paesani, Salta province’s treasury secretary

The province fights the underdog’s war with innovation. Two kinds of currency circulate on the streets of this provincial capital city of 290,000. There is Argentine currency and there is up to $10 million in so-called provincial bonds, good only within provincial boundaries and redeemable only at provincial banks.

The bonds look like money, feel like money and spend like money, one to one with Argentine currency. Provincial officials insist solemnly, however, that their bonds are not money. Only the central government has the constitutional authority to issue legal tender, they piously observe to Central Bank officials who complain that the bonds are really money.

The bond concept, adopted here last year and since copied by a number of other provinces, is to avoid having to borrow at high interest while awaiting revenue-sharing funds from tight-fisted Buenos Aires. Public employees in Salta, the largest part of the work force, are paid in bonds.

“The bonds are the poor man’s credit card,” said Miguel Vinuales, owner of a supermarket, who, like almost all other merchants in town, routinely accepts the bonds. As an incentive to their retention, every week the provincial lottery rewards one lucky bond holder with a car.

Argentina is not the only place where provincial ingenuity discomfits national authorities. In Talara, an oil-bust city in northern Peru, a municipal bordello called The Red Rose is an important source of civic revenue. The mayor who thought it up is a local hero, even though the blue stockings down in Lima have drummed him out of their political party.

Provincial discontent bred by the centralization of power is not a new theme in Latin America, but these times of economic hardship aggravate historic inequity. Maoist ideologues seeking to ignite revolution along the spine of the Andes chose Ayacucho in Peru as their headquarters largely because governments in Lima have virtually ignored Ayacucho’s needs for four centuries.

Port Has Power

With a blend of scorn and affection, the people of Salta call Buenos Aires “El Puerto.” From their perspective, the port hoards political clout, economic power and social cachet. Salta and Argentina’s other 21 provinces get the crumbs.

“Argentina is two countries, divided by the highway that circles Buenos Aires. All provinces resent the port,” said Jorge Montoya, a director at the provincial Bank of Salta. “Which is the real country? It depends on which side of the road you live.’

A number of Latin American nations, Colombia, Chile and Peru among them, are unitary republics. There, provinces depend on the national government entirely.

The capitals--usually distant both in miles and priorities--make the policies, pay the bills and dispatch the officials, from governors to traffic policemen to school teachers. In Colombia, for example, the president appoints the mayor of Bogota and all provincial governors, who in turn appoint all mayors.

By contrast, the constitutions of Latin America’s largest countries--Brazil, Mexico and Argentina--contemplate a U.S.-style federal system in which provinces elect governors and legislatures, raise taxes and theoretically administer their own affairs the way states do in the United States.

Money From the Capital

That is the theory. Fact is different. Salta, as a case in point, manages to scrape up just 28% of its annual $180 million budget. Only five other Argentine provinces raise more money. All the rest must come from Buenos Aires.

Capitals dominate national life in every major country of Latin America today except Brazil, where backland Brasilia was conceived to challenge coastal pre-eminence. Today, Brasilia, with about a million people, is the seat of government, but the capitals of Brazil in everything but name remain Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, whose combined population approaches 20 million.

There are, to be sure, important provincial centers of development like Guadalajara and Monterrey in Mexico, Ciudad Guyana in Venezuela and Guayaquil in Ecuador, but they are usually pale echoes of the capitals whose policies spawned them. Caracas is Venezuela.

In Mexico, nearly a quarter of the national population, about 18 million people, live in Mexico City, where cries for overdue decentralization long preceded last fall’s devastating earthquakes.

Here in Argentina, federalists and unitarians fought a nasty civil war last century. The federalists won the war, but the unitarians have won the peace. Now, about 10 million of the 30 million Argentines live in and around big apple Buenos Aires.

Winsome Salta

Nearly half of all Chileans live in greater Santiago today. In Peru, where decentralization is a major national priority, 5 million of the 19 million Peruvians, including the overwhelming majority of officials at the Ministry of Agriculture, live in industrial Lima.

Salta, a more winsome province than most in Latin America today, is like all the others in simultaneously cherishing both its national identity and its regional independence. In pre-colonial times, Salta lay on the southern fringes of the Inca Empire. Even today, Salta’s Spanish is larded with words from Quechua, the Inca language.

Salta was settled from the north and administered from Lima until independence. Under the Spanish, it bred hundreds of thousands of sure-footed mules that were the mountain freighters of the era.

Today, thoroughly Argentine but as thoroughly Andean, the Saltenos are the world’s southernmost coca leaf chewers. Cocaine is refined from coca leaves, but the leaves themselves are of relatively low potency.

In Buenos Aires, few people have ever seen a coca leaf. Here, to armar el acuyico , as the Saltenos--in a blend of Spanish and Quechua--call chewing a wad of coca leaf, is to participate in a folkway found at all levels of society.

‘Aid to Digestion’

A government official or a businessman is as apt to offer a visitor coca tea as coffee. Friday night is fight night in Salta. For Saltenos, the best way to enjoy the boxing is to take a pinch of bicarbonate to stimulate the saliva and then armar el acuyico.

“If you are invited to a barbecue, you automatically accept that people will chew coca as a means of relaxation and an aid to digestion,” office worker Guido Carrion said.

Some years back, a military government forbade consumption of coca in Argentina. The law is relevant only to Salta and adjacent mountain areas of the northwest, the only parts of Argentina where there is a tradition of coca use. In those areas where the law is relevant, it is ignored.

Police and judges in the northwest, many of them coca chewers and all of them more in touch with the mountains than with the capital, will not enforce it.

It is not the only anomaly in the love-hate relationship between Latin American capitals and their provinces. Salta’s provincial bonds--the defiant money-that-isn’t--is printed on job contract: by the national mint in Buenos Aires.