COLUMN ONE : Argentina’s Vanishing Middle Class : The nation’s living standards once set it apart from its neighbors, but economic stagnation has widened the gap between rich and poor. Many fear impoverishment.

Argentina was different. In other Latin American countries, the labor class and the poor were the overwhelming majority, but more than half of all Argentines were proudly middle class.

From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, the Argentine middle class prospered and grew, setting an enviable example for the rest of the region. It was like a generous slice of the American dream served up in the far reaches of the South American continent. The Argentine dream glittered with new cars, maids and vacation homes, progress and upward mobility.

A comic strip about a precocious little girl named Mafalda depicted the great Argentine middle class in its heyday. Mafalda’s father dreamed of owning a car. And one day he bought one, a tiny Citroen made in Argentina.

“Now that we have the car, where are we going to go for summer vacation, Papa?” chubby-cheeked Mafalda asked.

“To the mountains! Brrrnnneeeeenn!” her father answered happily, imagining himself behind the wheel on an Andean highway.

Mafalda no longer appears in Argentine newspapers; perhaps the plight of the Argentine middle class now is too sad for the comics. Its once-comfortable living standard is falling and its dream is fading. Impoverishment, the great fear of the middle class everywhere, is a growing reality here. Argentina is no longer quite so different.

“Argentine society is becoming more Latin American,” observed Ricardo Sidicaro, a sociologist with a private Buenos Aires think tank. He said that while the country’s wealthy elite and the top tier of the middle class remain as well-off as ever, most of the middle class has lost much of its previous purchasing power.

As a result, a gap is widening between a small percentage of Argentines at the top and the bulk of the population below.

Sidicaro said the fundamental reason for the decline of the middle class has been economic stagnation since the mid-1970s. The country’s per-capita income has remained stuck at about $2,500 a year for the past 15 years.

Not only Argentina but Latin America as a whole suffered a slump during the 1980s, a period now sometimes called “the lost decade.” The dearth of economic development was especially hard on the poor, but the middle classes had more to lose, and perhaps none lost more than Argentina’s.

Today, Mafalda’s father probably could not afford to buy a car. One measure of the decline in demand: Argentine automobile production dropped from nearly 300,000 vehicles in 1973 to fewer than 100,000 this year.

Sales of air conditioners, refrigerators and automatic clothes washers fell by 40% between 1984 and 1989, indicating a steep drop in middle-class demand for durable consumer goods.

Most older middle-class Argentines own their own homes, but among the young, only the upper middle class can afford to buy today. Construction in Buenos Aires has dropped to one-third of its level in the early 1970s.

Middle class vacationers sparked a resort boom, including vast expansion in and around the famous traditional spa, Mar del Plata.

“They couldn’t build it again,” commented sociologist Sidicaro.

Telephones, a middle-class necessity, have been hard to obtain here for years because government-run phone systems stopped expanding. Now the government is selling the systems to private companies, and the cost of having a telephone is expected to rise beyond the means of many in the strapped middle-class.

“Part of the middle class is going to lose its telephones,” Sidicaro predicted.

Other signs of the middle-class decline abound in Buenos Aires, a city of wide avenues, stately buildings, verdant parks and countless restaurants.

During the evening rush hour, yellow-and-black taxis cruise downtown streets without passengers, the “available” lights glowing red behind their windshields. Middle-class restaurants and bars, once clogged well past midnight with after-movie crowds, now have little business at that hour.

The great Argentine middle class is riding buses instead of taxis, staying home more and eating out less.

“There were people who took taxis, and you see those same people waiting for the bus now,” said taxi owner-driver Marcelo Ramirez. “They don’t have money.”

Ramirez, 42, owns his own home and struggles to keep his two daughters in private school. He considers himself middle class, but he said his standard of living has suffered.

“If I used to go out to eat three times a month with my wife and the girls, now I go out once or I don’t go out,” he said.

The middle class has also cut back drastically on such luxuries as books. Pedro Sirera, owner of a book store on busy Corrientes Avenue near the center of town, said he sells only 10% of the books he sold three decades ago.

“Before, people bought four or five books,” Sirera said. “Today they buy one or none at all.”

Sirera, 51, works long hours because he can afford little help. He sold his car two years ago, and he also seems to have given up any middle-class illusions.

“The middle class doesn’t exist,” he said. “I am middle class, and I work 15 hours a day. Middle-class poor.”

Farther out on Corrientes Avenue, a middle-class neighborhood called Villa Crespo has a run-down look that bespeaks hard times: sidewalks in disrepair, worn and elderly cars parked along the curbs, apartment buildings in need of paint.

At a corner real-estate office, Estela de Camargo said that apartment buildings are “deteriorating month by month” because condominium associations cannot pay for needed maintenance. “Many buildings dismiss their employees to cut costs, and they rent out the employees’ living quarters,” said Camargo.

Sometimes, if a building has two elevators, the apartment owners shut one down to save electricity. Still, Camargo said, numerous apartment owners are unable to pay their share of condominium costs.

“There are a lot of apartments for sale, but there is no one to buy them,” she said. “Half of Buenos Aires is up for sale.”

Around the corner and down the street, Public School No. 22 let out for the day and teacher Marta Vera came walking up the sidewalk. Vera said she and her husband, a chemical laboratory supervisor, sold their car three years ago to save money.

Still, to make ends meet, she has been working separate shifts at two schools for the past two years.

“I get out of one school and run for the bus to get to the other one on time,” she said.

Teachers now earn little more than housemaids in Argentina. Many middle-class families have maids, but many are cutting back on the maids’ hours.

Many middle-class families also send their children to private schools. They say public school education has deteriorated in the past two decades, partly because of poor pay for teachers. But increasing numbers of families are being forced by financial circumstances to transfer their children to cheaper private schools or to public schools.

Weekend clubs with swimming pools, tennis courts, soccer fields and barbecue pits are a middle-class institution in Buenos Aires, and they too are feeling the financial squeeze as many members fail to pay their dues.

“Some clubs are in difficult situations,” said advertising executive Hector Solanas. “There are members who have quit, and they can’t find new members.”

Solanas contended that the decline of the middle class results from the decadance of an economic system that distributed wealth rather than created it. Argentina is rich in natural resources, but it never learned to work efficiently, he said.

Waves of immigrants early this century from Italy, Spain and other European countries came seeking a better life here, but “a culture of work was not created,” according to Solanas.

While it is debatable whether Argentina’s economic troubles can be blamed on an underdeveloped work ethic, there is no question that the middle class cannot prosper if the economy is shrinking.

“The middle class has gotten a lot smaller because the country has gotten a lot smaller,” said Nuria Susmel, an economist with a private research foundation.

In the last six years, Argentina’s industrial production has shrunk by 10%. Real salaries for public sector employees, largely middle class, dropped by 15% in 1989.

Inflation last year was more than 3,000%. It averaged about 400% annually between 1976 and 1989. Prices have risen, salaries have lagged behind and affordable credit for buying homes, cars and durable consumer goods disappeared, cutting off much of the middle class from the material things that help define it.

The resulting frustration is the dreary talk of the town. “Everyone talks about the fall of the middle class,” Susmel said.

Bernardo Neustad, a popular broadcast personality, recently televised a series of street interviews on the plight of the middle class.

“The middle class is the one that has the income of the lower class and the tastes of the upper class,” one man quipped.

With middle-class morale on the skids, the children and grandchildren of immigrants, with a right to citizenship in Italy and Spain, wait in long lines for passports from those countries. An estimated 40,000 to 50,000 Argentines a year are emigrating, most of them middle class.

Middle-class Argentines who stay are tightening their belts and pinching their dwindling pennies.

“You see it in their clothes,” said market analyst Cristina Francisco. “It is really pitiful. You go out and you see the old dresses, the old pants, the worn shoes.”

Cristina Navarro, who works in the same market studies firm as Francisco, has conducted focus groups with middle-class consumers. She said one conclusion drawn from the group discussions is that middle-class impoverishment has been especially traumatic for husbands and fathers who face demands from their families that they can no longer meet.

“The father has seen his role as family protector undermined,” Navarro said. “I believe this implies a very important transformation of family values, of the father figure.”

Sociologist Sidicaro said the deep frustration of the Argentine middle class has had little political impact so far, but he said it could eventually lead Argentines to accept ultranationalist or fascist proposals.

“When the middle class is in a desperate situation, there is a fertile field there for that kind of fascist solutions,” he warned.