Argentine Move : Plan to Shift Capital Stirs Last Frontier

It is a winter like no other on the vast and empty prairies of Argentina’s Patagonia.

Bemused expectation is in the air, skittering like desert tumbleweeds on the cold winds now raking this frontier region of the Southern Hemisphere, for President Raul Alfonsin proposes to move Argentina’s capital here.

The proposal has generated a sense of new promise across a landscape of limitless sweep that has traditionally proved more attractive to sheep than to man.

Patagonia, typically near the bottom of Argentine national priorities, is suddenly at the very top.

“It is electrifying, like science fiction,” Viedma Mayor Juan Cabalieri said recently. “Our wealth and beauty have always been forgotten, never by God, but by all governments.”

Architect Jose Luis Bacigalupo, who now heads a national planning commission recalled: “The president called me in April and took my breath away. He said: ‘I want you to help me move the government to Patagonia.’ ”

Alfonsin announced the plan out of the blue to a stunned country a few weeks later, proclaiming the need to establish “a second republic” as an antidote to stagnation and national shortsightedness.

Now, the government is preparing legislation that would transfer Argentina’s capital from Buenos Aires 600 miles south to a new 2,400-square-mile federal district here. The district would encompass Viedma, a three-plaza, two-movie-house administrative center of 30,000, and its cross-river rival, Carmen de Patagones, a historic cow town about half that size.

“We have seen projections for a population in this area of up to 300,000 in four or five years,” said Jose Pappatico, president of the Viedma Chamber of Commerce.

Already, new settlers are coming to Argentina’s last frontier.

“Every day families get off the train looking for a new life. It’s not an avalanche by any means, but the influx has begun. Our most urgent need right now is for mattresses,” said Bishop Gustavo Vetti, vicar of Viedma’s Roman Catholic cathedral.

Alfonsin’s idea has broad support in a congress as disillusioned as most other Argentines with the dominance of Buenos Aires over all aspects of national life. About 10 million people, more than a third of the population, live cheek by jowl in Greater Buenos Aires.

Quarter of Country

By contrast, Patagonia, everything south of the Rio Colorado from the Atlantic to the Chilean border, encompasses a quarter of Argentina’s national territory with an average population density of less than two people per square kilometer. Total population is just over 1 million, less than 4% of the national total.

“Our Patagonia is like the American Wild West used to be, except that Americans went West,” said architect Bacigalupo.

From the Atlantic to the snow-topped mountain frontier with Chile, Patagonia’s challenge has historically been more alluring to foreigners than to Argentines. At the turn of the century, there was not much beyond an end-of-the-trail outpost at Carmen de Patagones, nomadic Indians, British missionaries in Tierra del Fuego, and a tiny Welsh colony in what is now Chubut province.

Mixture of Peoples

In Patagonia today, thousands of Chileans, many of them of Araucanian Indian ancestry, mingle with the rough-hewn descendants of Italian, Spanish, German, English and Welsh settlers in isolated cities and on big-sky ranches stretching to the bottom of the Earth.

“There are some lovely valleys on this ranch,” William Roberts, the manager of one spread in Patagonia’s mountain Neuquen province, told a visitor.

The land is as poor and as dry as it is vast. Outside the river valleys, everything taller than a shrub has been planted and coaxed to growth by man. One rancher’s grazing rule for his standard four-league (25,000 acres) section in the new federal district: for pastureland improved with tough African grasses, one sheep per hectare (2.47 acres) and one cow for every five or six sheep.

All Argentine governments have delivered relentless rhetoric to Patagonia, but few have actually done much, in the Patagonian view, beyond exploiting rich deposits of oil from the plains, gas and coal and mountain hydroelectric potential for the benefit of Buenos Aires.

Fierce Pride

“We have always been the last to get everything,” complained Julio Ernesto Montenegro, a young shopkeeper in Carmen de Patagones. “Even now, they say the capital is coming--but try to get a building loan to be ready to compete with the entrepreneurs who will come with it.”

There is a fierce, almost tribal pride among the pioneers who have embraced Patagonia’s earth-tone beauty, its outdoors appeal and six-shooter flavor. Argentine city slickers tend not to trifle with patagonicos , as they call themselves.

“I am patagonico. I have made friends with the wind, and the emptiness,” said Pappatico, the 58-year-old son of a 1914 Italian immigrant.

Epithet Recalled

Justice of the Peace Candido Campano, a 73-year-old Viedma native whose father came from Spain in 1897, likes to remind visitors of an Argentine response to the epithet “accursed Patagonia” applied by Charles Darwin, the 19th-Century British naturalist.

“Maldita Patagonia, tierra de los hombres machos y las almas libres (Accursed Patagonia, land of macho men and free souls).”

“When my father was an old man, I offered to take him on vacation, but he imposed conditions,” Campano recalled with a smile. “ ‘Here in Patagonia, I pay. This is where I made my America,’ my father said. ‘If we go north, you pay. I will not spend a peso north of the Rio Negro.’ ”

Early plans call for construction of a government center to begin next year on both sides of the Rio Negro eight miles east of Viedma. Planners envision less a majestic Brasilia than a down-home Ottawa, light and airy, with plenty of green.

Where Wild Boar Roam

Wild boar, ostriches and guanaco, a relative of the llama, are now hunted half an hour from where Alfonsin intends to turn over the government to an elected successor in 1989.

At present, the proposed headquarters of Argentina’s government is an abandoned pioneer farm called Ya Veran (You’ll See)--once the pride of a self-described runaway American Communist named John Trousdell, who dreamed of irrigated fields and named his land to taunt disbelievers.

“After World War II, I looked at the map and decided Patagonia was a safe place to get away from the superpower struggle. I was right. I have lived here in absolute peace ever since,” said Trousdell, who now devotes himself to retirement astrology and the perfection of homemade whiskey: “toasted barley, alcohol, just a touch of glycerin and branch water--when I can get it.”

Lone American

A former champion rider now crippled at 83, Trousdell is the only resident American for hundreds of miles.

“In the early days, about one car every two weeks would bounce down the road from Viedma that was either dusty or muddy,” Trousdell recalled. Today, a paved road passes the farm on a straight 20-mile run between Viedma and the sea.

The government will expropriate Ya Veran, which Trousdell sold in 1975, along with other rural land in the new district for office buildings and housing units. In all, about 4.8 million square yards of construction will be required, according to Jorge Osvaldo Riopedre, an architect member of the planning commission.

There are no public estimates of the cost of all this to a country already sagging beneath the weight of an unpayable $50-billion foreign debt. The government insists that much of it will be borne by windfall profits, taxes, and resale of expropriated lands.

As capital of Rio Negro province, Viedma has quadrupled in size since 1960 without losing its folksy, know-your-neighbor flavor.

No Longer a Small Town

“When I was a boy, there were oxcarts, no running water, no lights, and two doctors. Now there are something like 800 professionals living here. When I go to civic meetings, I sometimes meet people I don’t know,” Campano said.

More picturesque Carmen de Patagones, the site of a fort that represented Spain’s first serious attempt to colonize Patagonia 200 years ago, retains some of the frontier air that attracted provisioning 19th-Century pirates and naturalist William Henry Hudson, author of “Idle Days in Patagonia.”

Both towns now wait in nervous expectation. Can it really be true that the last will be first? And what will that mean?

‘Then Came Euphoria’

“At first there was total surprise, shock. Then came euphoria: everybody would be a millionaire overnight. Now we are waiting with expectation to see what happens. We want change, but we want to stay being who we are,” said businessman Pappatico.

A housing shortage has long been the principal municipal dilemma, according to Mayor Cabalieri. The provincial government is the biggest employer in a capital-to-be that still has no daily newspaper, but salaries are low and accommodations scarce. The minimum wage is $133 per month. The local bishop’s monthly salary is $344.67, but a local hairdresser reports he pays $217 rent for a one-room shop and as much for a tiny apartment.

“We will welcome the newcomers while at the same time trying to maintain our life style. We are particularly determined to defend our river from pollution,” said Cabalieri.

Influx of People

Noting that “it’s hard to find anybody above the age of 35 who was born here,” Bishop Vetti, himself a recent arrival, worries that the influx of new people “will dilute what little sense of identity there is.”

“All sorts of people will be coming, some to build, some only to seek their fortunes. We are advising our parishioners to receive them with open arms--and open eyes,” said Vetti.

Amid the general uncertainty, it has become civic sport to mull the geopolitical, sociological and economic implications of modern Argentina’s prospective arrival in Patagonia.

Mabel Fracassia, a Viedma office worker frankly more preoccupied with the impending arrival of her third child, has already worked them out.

“What it means is that we’ll have to stop leaving the keys in the car,” she predicted.