Buenos Aires’s periphery—the conurbano—accounts for around 30 per cent of Argentina’s population. The largest electoral district, it embodies deepening social and economic inequalities, with over half its residents living below the poverty line. Since the 1930s, when its population growth took off, it has played a pivotal role in Argentine politics, from bastion of working-class support for Perón to hotspot of protest in 2001, when its piqueteros and cacerolazos (picketers and pot-bangers) shook the political establishment, paving the way for the transmutation of neoliberal Peronism into the redistributive politics of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. In the era of Milei, it remains a key ‘swing’ region, capable of tipping the electoral balance for the country at large. For Carlos Pagni, it is thus here that analyses of Argentina’s economic, political and social progress—or lack of it—must be grounded.
Pagni is a historian who teaches at the national universities of Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires, but also a seasoned journalist at La Nación and tn, among others. Founded in 1870 by former President Bartolomé Mitre, La Nación is one of Argentina’s oldest and most influential newspapers, and has played a significant role as a shaper of public opinion and political discourse. Initially a promoter of classical economic liberalism, it became known for its centre-right editorial stance, and has traditionally taken a critical attitude towards progressive Peronist governments. Pagni is a leading exponent of this outlook, turning out a stream of acute commentary on the daily minutiae of Argentine political life grounded in a historian’s grasp of the long view. He has been involved in some controversies: from 2008 to 2016 he was one of a group of journalists—along with former intelligence official Juan B. Yofre—embroiled in a legal case over the hacking of politicians’ emails; more recently he has been sued for libel by Javier Milei for supposedly comparing him to Hitler.
If the historical roots of Argentina’s socio-economic troubles lie in factors such as the destruction of the railways, deindustrialization and the collapse of regional economies that spurred migration to the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, it is in the latter that the core of systemic poverty has emerged, particularly since the 2001 crisis. According to Pagni, this process has reshaped the relations of city and country, and the political system as a whole. The nearly 800 pages of El Nudo (The Knot) thus place the conurbano at centre stage in a story of political and economic crisis and transformation, with particular focus on the turbulence of 2001: an ‘earthquake which unfolded, above all, in a geography’. It was here that a shift in the Argentine state occurred, encapsulated in a contrast between Perón and the Kirchners: ‘Perón offered, above all else, the inclusion of workers; the Kirchners, the administration of poverty.’ But for Pagni, this is not merely a matter of domestic party politics, for the conurbano—synecdoche of a failing society—even explains the place of Argentina in the world at large:
The interest in the conurbano is part of a broader questioning of the reasons that led the country to its distressing situation. In the complexities of its vast landscape, a long-running drama is being played out. An economic system that, having become a factory of the poor, degrades politics with the short-term temptation of patronage; a state overwhelmed by demands, with structural financing problems, which—hungry for tax—discourages investment. The solution is difficult: predatory adjustment isn’t the best response to authoritarian demagoguery. This dilemma leaves its mark on the conurbano. The damage it causes has tangible manifestations: social fragmentation; degradation of infrastructure; public schools reduced to a welfare refuge for the poorest; organized crime colonizing the fabric of the state. These features constitute, de facto, a foreign policy, a way of relating to the world. They condition the country’s position in the international context. And they are a determining factor for investment flows. They are evidence that there, in the conurbano, lies the crux of the matter.
To construct his case, Pagni draws on diverse perspectives—historical, political, sociological, economic, urban studies—analysing statistical and ethnographic data from the neighbourhoods of Greater Buenos Aires as well as cultural expressions: film, tv, literature, Instagram accounts. The book’s peculiar structure alternates between systematic and historical chapters, two streams which ultimately overflow into a rambling final chapter on the ‘conurbanization of politics’ since 2001 that is almost as long as the rest of the book combined—‘another book within this one’, in Pagni’s words. This form might be said to analogize Buenos Aires’s own preponderant and undisciplined sprawl, which is, for Pagni, ‘difficult to understand’ and thus ‘difficult to govern and transform’. Here we find a complex interplay between economy and politics, the legacies of Peronism and anti-Peronism, growing crime and narcotrafficking, and a clientelism that pervades the political spectrum. El Nudo shows the same appreciation for individuals, narrative detail and situational dynamism evident in Pagni’s journalism, while weaving this into a materialism of sorts, in which economic geography plays a major role in conditioning the decision-making of elites.
The first chapter is an x-ray of the contemporary conurbano grounded in economic geography. It is bookended by an ironic contrast between the rationalistic dreams of urban planners inspired by the likes of Le Corbusier, and the disorder of the villas or shanty-towns that—like medieval cities—developed in the absence of the modern state; an unruliness encapsulated in the tragedies at Once and La Plata—a rail crash and a flood. If the history of politics is, according to Pagni, that of how humanity has ‘produced predictability’, this is a place where ‘this exercise fails’. And yet—paradoxically—Pagni’s conurbano is also tied to the interventionist state that emerged from the collapse of the liberal international order in the Great Depression. The term itself dates to Oscar Alende’s claim that ‘the problem is the conurbano’, in a 1962 electoral campaign, when the votes of this area first exceeded those of the rest of Buenos Aires province. The region is afflicted by a double displacement, with migration from other provinces and the arduous daily commute into the capital for work, through which the latter’s population oscillates between 3 and more than 6 million. With its increasing divide between villas and exclusive country clubs, the conurbano is the landscape of a society in disintegration. The dreams that once defined Argentina—whose level of equality rivalled France—have crumbled in the face of booming inequality and polarization.
Pagni now jumps back to the ‘federalization’ of Buenos Aires in the late 1800s, which is at the same time an origin-story of the Argentine state. This was the outcome of a long and sometimes bloody process of struggles between centralized power and autonomous provinces—including that of Buenos Aires. In politics but also in journalism and literature, Bartlomé Mitre was the distinguished advocate of a liberal porteño leadership over the provinces, but his efforts failed. Ultimately, the elites of the interior would win out, forging a new central power by reducing the dominant province to a mere member of—and excluding the port city itself from—the federal system:
The decapitation of Buenos Aires was the ultimate expression of the consecration of national power. All sides understood it this way, although they assigned very different value judgments to this event. To constitute the nation was to subjugate Buenos Aires.
At the time, Leandro N. Alem—founder of the Radical Civic Union party—warned of the potential for this centralization to turn authoritarian, grounding his critique in an emphasis on individual freedoms. Alem appears here as a prophet of the conurbano, predicting that the federalization of Buenos Aires would leave the province politically ‘sterilized’, while the capital would sprawl into its suburbs, leaving an urban outgrowth that lacked a proper centre of government, falling between provincial and national power. The republic would thus be ‘forever unbalanced’. According to Pagni, this tension was left unsolved.
Switching to political economy to consider the problem of poverty, Pagni analyses Argentina’s labour market and increasing informality. At the centre of this story, for Pagni, lie a series of contradictions, between ‘aspirations and possibilities’, social demands and productive capacity, short-term fixes and long-term needs, national self-image and economic reality. These are rooted in long-term peculiarities of the Argentine economy, which led up to the mid-1970s exhaustion of classical Peronism and its import substitution model, the driving force of industrialization in Greater Buenos Aires. Since then, the economy has stumbled between high inflation—a variable that has distinguished Argentina from its South American peers—peso–dollar convertibility intended to contain it, and currency devaluations, driving deindustrialization and the expansion of informal jobs, as the wealth effect produced by high-valued pesos simultaneously undermined industry. Carlos Menem’s dollar-peg regime in the 1990s was a ‘drug’ that caused ‘a new disease’, issuing in a five-year recession from 1998 and the collapse of 2001. By 2002, 65 per cent of the population was under the poverty line, but the Kirchners soon came to power in the favourable international context of a commodity boom, and made real short-term gains in tackling poverty. According to Pagni however, theirs was ‘a utopia located in the past’ which could not overcome the structural problems of an Argentine economy soon showing the same morbid symptoms of low growth and high inflation. A crucial legacy of 2001 is the empowerment of social movements which, for Pagni, are a figure of poverty; its expression and perpetuation:
Social movements have become a de facto power that serves as a crucial mechanism for Peronism to exert pressure on the political system. They wield the power that was once the preserve of trade unions in a society of full employment. They offer themselves as guarantors of order, but through an extortionate operation . . . If one were to consider a long-term program to end poverty, it would be very difficult to decide whether they are part of the solution or part of the problem.
Into the global context of stagnation and sagging commodity prices that followed in the 2010s, the covid pandemic irrupted, with particularly devastating consequences for those where formal employment is a mere ‘dream’.
El Nudo’s next historical cut-back looks at the political significance of Manuel Fresco, governor of Buenos Aires from 1936 to 1940, leader of industrial workers and a precursor to Perón. In October 1935, Fresco organized a march on the capital which, according to Pagni, may have been ‘the first indication that the conurbano could sway politics with its demographic power’—and the first attempt to contain the threat of revolutionary chaos by channelling it. Fresco was inspired by Mussolini, and this was a highly disciplined parade; in the eyes of contemporary reporters the aesthetic was rural—gauchos and ‘creole countrymen’ in formal dress. Fresco’s rule involved the rigging of elections—‘patriotic fraud’—authoritarian policing and organized crime, but also public works, labour reforms and rapprochement with unions, inaugurating ‘recurrent themes of bonaerense politics’. And, for Pagni, Fresco bore out Alem’s prophecy, representing the power of industrial Buenos Aires straining at its constitutional leash.
There follows an ethnography of the villas, and an explanation of their emergence with the decline of Argentina’s regional economies, particularly in the North, which opened a ‘one-way street’ of migration to Buenos Aires. Although the latter was an industrializing region, its capacity for employment could never match this inflow. For Pagni, the condition of these impoverished, overcrowded neighbourhoods, devoid of basic infrastructures, was laid bare in the covid pandemic, when they were enclosed without basic necessities, rendering explicit their nature as ghettos. Despite their demographic weight, they are shrouded by a ‘statistical blackout’: if the conurbano is a mirror of Argentine society ‘that no one wants to peer into’, the task of this chapter is to look, marshalling a mass of statistics on percentages of children lacking schooling; bedrooms housing four or more people; residences lacking sewerage connections or with dirt floors. But Pagni adds colour with pen-portraits of residents such as Mabel, a shack-dwelling new mother who works as a lookout for her drug-dealer husband. In the absence of state and formal economy, other forces fill the void: dealers, organized crime—and religions, which offer a degree of social regulation and community leadership.
Perón and the emergence of the workers’ movement on Argentina’s political scene come next in the sequence of historical episodes. Pagni’s focus is the pivotal event of 17 October 1945, when workers marched on the capital to demand Perón’s release. If Fresco’s march was a prefiguration, this was ‘the decisive irruption of the conurbano into national life’, horrifying liberal Buenos Aires elites. But it was the outcome of a process of mounting unrest in face of union repression in the preceding years, with its locus in the Buenos Aires periphery. Perón—then an officer in the military government—had been quick to recognize this dynamic. Sensing the military’s lack of legitimacy, he had sought an accord with some union leaders while repressing communists like José Peter, who shunned such deals. In 1943, under the influence of José Figuerola—another Mussolini admirer and a Catalan who had played a role in the Primo de Rivera dictatorship—Perón had established a set of institutions for the integration of the working class, which gave him mounting power. This was the founding of Peronism, for which ‘the province of Buenos Aires was always an absolute priority’. But in September 1945, the ‘March for the Constitution and Liberty’ brought onto the capital’s streets a motley coalition shaped by the politics of the Spanish Civil War and ww2—students, middle-class liberals, communists—leading to a political crisis and Perón’s removal. Thus on 17 October the organized industrial working class of Buenos Aires claimed as their leader not a socialist or communist, but a figure from a military-nationalist government.
The last systematic chapter discusses clientelism, or ‘the exchange of favours for votes’. This permeates the Argentine political spectrum and involves most, if not all, political parties and classes, though in the case of the poor it involves the exchange of political rights for basic necessities. In places deserted by the state, these are offered through a face-to-face relationship with a broker or puntero—a role, according to Pagni, prefigured in the 19th-century justice of the peace, who embodied various functions of the state in rural areas where it had not yet fully formed. A 1912 attempt at reform only led to a transformation in such practices; long before Perón, the Radical party would put public employment to clientelistic ends. Perón transformed this existing phenomenon, organizing his social base through unions and the charitable Fundación Eva Perón. But from the crisis of the mid-1970s, the puntero would come to play a new role, mediating basic survival in the conurbano. According to Pagni, the withdrawal of the state and delegation to a puntero may be a deliberate, functional arrangement, but the latter is also an ambiguous figure, sometimes complicating state interventions in his territory. If such relations are at times read in terms of the concept of ‘moral economy’ that Edward Thompson identified with 18th-century England, in which the mutual obligations they impose are functional for social cohesion, Pagni wants to insist on their corrosiveness compared to a classical notion of the social contract—this is caudillismo writ small, at the level of the kind of welfare provision that has formed an important part of Kirchnerism.
The vast ramble of the last chapter looks at the role of Pagni’s ‘knot’—this region that condenses the country’s political, economic and social conflicts—in the unresolved economic and political crises of 2001. For Pagni, this was the culminating ‘conurbanization’ of Argentine politics—the point at which the region that had been sacrificed to the nation finally broke free from its tethers to ‘save itself from the abyss by capturing the national state’. He recounts the drama of that moment, when riots engulfed the capital—echo of the 1935 and 1945 marches—with a novelistic touch, before sliding into a meandering chronicle of political cut-and-thrust through the period up to 2023. There seems to be a conscious method here, of refusing to set aside ‘personal crossroads’ for merely collective or impersonal history, despite his central claim of a grand socio-political shift. For Pagni, a key vector of the crisis was a face-off between province and nation, with figures like Rodríguez Saá—momentarily President in 2001—trying vainly to steady shifting social structures. But a ‘bonfire’ had been lit in the conurbano ‘to summon whoever was in a position to extinguish it’: a form of political extortion that—according to Pagni—recurs through the history of Peronism. If popular action as extortion is a repeated refrain, Pagni also flirts with more conspiracist readings suggesting orchestration from above—in 1972, Perón had encouraged ‘civil war’ in order to settle it himself—though he mostly thinks better of it. He does, however, allow himself get-out clauses in G. K. Chesterton’s affirmation of exaggerations—alright if they exaggerate the right thing—and the claim that he is less interested in ‘discerning the character of facts than in registering the image left of them’.
Pagni’s story of conurbanization is also that of the transformation of party formations. In the 1990s under Menem, there had already been signs of a shift in the nature of Peronism, from a working-class party towards a corporatism of a new type, as deindustrialization accelerated. But for Pagni, it was Eduardo Duhalde, the Peronist interim President in 2002–03, who discovered the potential of the conurbano as a support base. The mood of 2001 was antipolitical, ‘que se vayan todos’ (out with them all) the slogan. As an unknown candidate in 2003, Kirchner was able to channel some of this sentiment—in contrast to Menem in particular, who was running despite his culpability for the crisis—by capitalizing on Duhalde’s discovery and shifting Peronist politics definitively towards a base in the deindustrializing periphery. This became a limit on political action, blocking the exit from an already-dead model, while the Kirchners—protected economically by the global commodity super-cycle—moved towards the non-Peronist left, aligning internationally with Chávez, Lula and Morales and facing off against the agrarian sector. With the end of that cycle, Kirchnerism began to unravel, without undoing the conurbanization of politics. The book was published before the election of Javier Milei, but late enough to conclude with a discussion of his rise as rhyming with the crisis of two decades previous: this was still the politics of ‘que se vayan todos’.
This is a detailed and incisive analysis of Argentina’s ongoing crises, a valuable contribution to our understanding of the interplay of historical, economic and political forces shaping its trajectory. Although Pagni is on the right, he draws on a broad set of references from conservative to left-wing academics; his thorough research and subtle argumentation make El Nudo crucial reading for anyone interested in Argentina’s troubled past and uncertain future. But what might be his blind spots? As a defender of liberalism, Pagni sees Argentina’s central dilemma as the need to implement deep ‘adjustment’ programmes versus the challenges of inequality and material well-being; he offers no alternative beyond such programmes, reflecting the standard blinkers of Argentine leadership. He makes a limited critique of financial elites’ recurring alignment with right-wing administrations and Argentina’s high-handed treatment by the imf, but sees the Fund’s return in 2018 under the Mauricio Macri administration—when the country acquired the largest loan in imf history—as a necessary step to address macroeconomic instability, even if the resulting austerity measures led to Macri’s defeat.
Pagni underplays the role of the military—and the world economy—in Argentina’s deindustrialization, persistent inflation and external debt. Under Perón, industry had a 50 per cent share of gdp, but this changed with the dictatorship in 1976—one of the first neoliberal experiments worldwide. In December 1982, at the end of the dictatorship, Argentina’s central bank took on nearly $17 billion of private debt, paving the way for the 1980s debt crisis. Subsequent adjustment policies went hand-in-hand with social repression. Further blows to Argentine industry came in the 1990s, during the golden years of the Washington Consensus. There was a pervasive cycle promoted by the idea of the ‘minimal state’: neoliberal hegemony and the enforcement of structural adjustment programmes led to successive spending cuts and poorer public services. For Pagni, the Perón and Kirchner administrations disallowed free trade, protecting industry with exchange controls and high export prices. But there is a failure here, typical of orthodox economics, to acknowledge that most successful industrialization has counted on some state protection. And regardless of government orientation—Peronist or anti-Peronist—the structural macroeconomic problems have remained unsolved. Even during the Kirchner administrations, the re-primarization of the economy deepened; unlike Brazil, Argentina never managed fully to take advantage of the commodity boom to achieve better macroeconomic stability.
There is a certain class disdain to Pagni’s position, with workers viewed as co-opted, from Perón to Kirchner. He blames the general consumption of the middle classes—they have higher aspirations than they should—while neglecting the role of external debt and capital outflows driven by elites, which generate a drain on resources. Though he discusses ‘popular economy’, he neglects to mention the Movimiento de Empresas Recuperadas, which emerged to take over enterprises devastated by the economic dynamics of the 2001 moment, and manages businesses in the metal, food and textile sectors. Documented by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis in their 2004 film The Take, this movement is emblematic of that crisis and still operates over 400 co-ops. There is a major structural problem underlying labour-market informality: deindustrialization and the transformation of the agricultural sector, in which the main crop, soybeans, only employs 15 workers per 1000 hectares—the current model of production simply does not absorb the available labour. Popular economy is thus not a matter of political will, but of the economic structure in a country that is becoming more and more peripheralized.
Meanwhile, the Argentine state has become one of the largest informal employers, hiring workers under ‘trash contracts’, which create job insecurity and prevent the implementation of long-term solutions, as each administration replaces a large portion of the workforce. This delicate situation worsened with the onset of the pandemic, during which 33 per cent of formal employees—including civil servants—fell into poverty. Argentina remains trapped in a dual challenge: its economic model cannot absorb the entire workforce into formal jobs, resulting in increasing levels of underemployment, while a significant portion of the formal sector earns wages below the poverty line. The result is a crucible of peripheralization, inequality, social fragmentation and loss of faith in established institutions. It is social weariness with the political establishment that led to the emergence of a far-right outsider candidate, Javier Milei, reflecting the desperation of many Argentines as traditional political systems fail to address their needs.