In April 1934, an unnamed correspondent for the conservative provincial newspaper La Opinión travelled to one of Jujuy’s three industrialised sugar mills. His report, published in the wake of the Great Depression, stressed that the sugar industry facilitated the common welfare of the province: ‘Here, thousands of workers trade the nobility of their efforts, the sublimity of their daily sweat … muscle and capital united in a single end and for the same purpose: to produce. The former expends effort and the latter makes sacrifices.’Footnote 1 The sugar industry’s ‘sacrifices’ allude to an array of social policies: from wages in legal tender in lieu of vouchers, to medical care and housing, to ‘educational efforts’ to reduce the allegedly most destructive vices like alcoholism, gambling and prostitution. This reflected a concerted strategy. From the 1930s, sugar company owners highlighted their role in fomenting and, indeed, pioneering social progress through worker welfare in the Argentine interior. Journalists and government functionaries pointed to this ‘asistencia social’ as a marker of progress in the province of Jujuy and the Argentine nation more broadly.
This study builds on research that charts the development of social protection systems in Latin America, and the role of business–state relations in shaping welfare regimes. It also contributes an insight into the historical foundations of corporatist welfare systems in the region.Footnote 2 We de-centre the North Atlantic focus and the nation-state scale that are typical of research on the relationship between trade protectionism and social assistance, and we emphasise the importance of this relationship before Juan Domingo Perón became Secretario de Trabajo y Previsión (Labour and Social Security Secretary) in 1943.Footnote 3 If Perón’s emergence on the political scene was the moment the state took broad social security systems into its own hands – without delegating it to private companies – provincial states in conjunction with local industries had long acted to improve the lives of workers.Footnote 4 We follow economic historians and regional scholars in Argentina who identify the 1930s, rather than the era of Perón, as the crucial moment when state capacity for economic intervention emerged as a result of the expansion of manufacturing and industrialisation via import substitution. The provincial nature of state intervention in the social policy field prefigured national regulations from the 1940s, with an array of distinct realities across Argentina.Footnote 5
In Jujuy, historian Adriana Kindgard argues, the interplay of national and provincial policies during the Great Depression opened up interstices within which local political actors could promote limited social change. The sugar industry and its political organ, the conservative Partido Popular, wielded the resources and institutions of the provincial state in a context marked by unemployment and poverty. Although the industry made use of both fraud and coercion to entrench its power, Kindgard maintains, it also offered opportunities for work and income in the years of crisis.Footnote 6 The scale of socio-economic hegemony achieved by Jujuy’s three largest ingenios (in Ledesma, San Pedro and La Mendieta)Footnote 7 contrasted with the neighbouring province of Tucumán, where growers outside the ingenio system who owned small and medium-sized plantations typically supplied a large portion of the raw materials processed by mills elsewhere, making the jujeño case particularly relevant for understanding state–business interaction.Footnote 8
We identify and examine four distinct periods in the relationship between sugar industrialists and the state in the field of social policy. First, from 1870 to 1912, the provincial state was absent from worker welfare. Second, between 1912 and 1929, the state offered the first social policies following dramatic labour conflicts at the national level and between the ingenios and their workers in Jujuy. Third, from 1929 to 1934, a military coup d’etat and conservative domination of the provincial state legislature combined with the worst phase of the global Great Depression. Fourth, from the mid-1930s, when Argentina emerged from the slump, an array of sugar industry and provincial government publications about private social-policy initiatives called for continued government protection to help combat enduring social hardship in the province.Footnote 9 We examine why sugar industrialists introduced welfare measures in their mills during the 1930s and establish what social conditions shaped their choices. Following the Great Depression, sugar directors responded to a new era of mass politics which permanently shifted the ground of economic development in Argentina.Footnote 10
This study advances two interrelated arguments. Firstly, the rhetoric of ‘social assistance’ enabled the sugar industry to legitimise requests for state tariff protection and tax exemptions. At the national level, by presenting itself as a champion of civilisation and progress in Jujuy through worker welfare, sugar industrialists attempted to counter journalists and politicians in Buenos Aires who might endorse free trade.Footnote 11 Secondly, the implementation of very limited worker welfare measures and positions in the provincial power structure – for example, as legislators – allowed Jujuy’s paternalistic sugar directors to continue to justify their vast share of the province’s resources, curb the threat posed by unions and attain greater influence over workers’ daily lives.Footnote 12
Sugar, Power and Social Conditions in Jujuy, 1870–1912
The map of Jujuy shown in Figure 1 was published in 1933 by Billiken, a magazine for children. Forming part of a national atlas collection showcasing the national territory and its potential, Billiken represented the economic resources of each province in Argentina cartographically. It focused on production, industry, railways, hydrography and orography. Published as Argentina began to reconfigure its relationship to the world of global trade following the Great Depression, these maps chimed with the policy of import-substitution industrialisation; that is, the establishment of domestic production to replace foreign imports.Footnote 13 Not only does the map inflate Jujuy’s productive capacity, from mining to cattle ranching and, of course, to sugar, but the exaggerated size of the rivers and railways further stresses the region’s potential. Figure 2 zooms in on the subtropical San Francisco valley, locating the sugarcane (caña de azúcar) industry between the Río Grande to the west and the Río San Francisco to the east. The railway underpins the region’s connectedness to the world of commerce as it passes through the two largest sugar company towns: Ledesma and San Pedro.Footnote 14 What the maps do not convey, however, is that the sugar industry, concentrated in this pocket of Jujuy, controlled over 80 per cent of the province’s industrial capital. As the national census of 1914 suggests, production and employment were centred in the food and beverage sector; this was almost entirely accounted for by the three largest ingenios.Footnote 15
Province of Jujuy: Production, Industries, Hydrographic and Orographic Systems and Railways, from Colección Billiken, Álbum Geográfico Ilustrado de la Republica Argentina (Buenos Aires: Atlántida, 1933)
The San Francisco Valley: Ledesma, San Pedro and the Sugar Microregion
Whilst sugar cultivation in Argentina originated in the mid-eighteenth century, the technological modernisation of Jujuy’s sugar industry coincided with the increasingly frenzied international capital flows from 1870. This period witnessed the transformation of the old sugar hacienda with simple wooden mills into industrialised sugar factories.Footnote 16 The idea of the sugar industry as a conduit for ‘development’ and ‘progress’, both in social and economic terms, paralleled this fin-de-siècle development. Entrepreneurs in Tucumán, Salta and Jujuy obtained special concessions – tax exemptions for importing machinery, credit support and, from 1883, tariff protection – for the expansion of sugar cane, reflecting the trajectory of the wine industry in Mendoza and San Juan.Footnote 17 The sugar and wine industries proved an important tool for the national government to achieve a degree of regional fiscal convergence, and they retained a considerable degree of autonomy in economic and social decision-making.Footnote 18
An abundance of land, a small number of estates, and a scarce and heterogenous population were the central features of this nascent sugar region.Footnote 19 Haciendas in the San Francisco valley developed rapidly following their acquisition as private property by former military officers and individuals linked to the vice-regal administration in the final two decades of the colonial period.Footnote 20 By the late nineteenth century, by contrast, owners and investors in the sugar industry reflected a variegated demographic profile, illustrated in the ownership structure of La Esperanza, one of the most important ingenios in the region. In 1882, Roger Leach, an English engineer, formed a company with Pedro Miguel Aráoz, owner of the San Pedro hacienda, bringing European capital and Argentine land ownership together.Footnote 21 They installed machinery in 1883 and, shortly after the first harvests, the firm turned a handsome profit.Footnote 22 By 1912, Leach Argentine Estates Ltd. was trading on the London Stock Exchange with a market capitalisation of £731,038, a figure that utterly dwarfed the province of Jujuy’s entire revenue in 1915: $ARG1,455,790.Footnote 23 Such a disparity in available capital evinces the relative economic power of the industrialised ingenio, and showcases how, with the merger of European capital, Argentine land and new technology, the old haciendas became extremely profitable whilst their owners emerged as the dominant political brokers in the province.Footnote 24
Despite the profitability of the industrialised ingenios, labour scarcity was a constant concern for businessmen in Jujuy and statesmen across Argentina hoping to ‘modernise’ the national and regional economies.Footnote 25 Even in the age of mass migration, population figures remained low in the interior. Reflecting national trends, the local labour supply in Jujuy was insufficient. The first national census of 1869 counted 40,379 people living in Jujuy in an area of just under 95,000 km2. Of those inhabitants, just 3,448 were classed as jornaleros, peasants or farmworkers typically contracted by the day (with hours on occasion extending into the night), who carried out seasonal labour during the sugar harvest.Footnote 26 In response, Jujuy’s sugar enterprises unleashed a recruitment process which, through seasonal migration, integrated multiple external regions into their productive complex.Footnote 27
Enlisted by conchabadores (independent private contractors), a low-cost workforce emerged consisting of peasants from Argentina’s highland region of La Puna and Bolivia, as well as indigenous workers from the forests of the Chaco.Footnote 28 By 1910, 10,000 indigenous workers per year were migrating to the three main ingenios in Jujuy, double the number of permanent workers.Footnote 29 Because the vast stretches of land on the banks of the Río Negro to the east of the province were essential for the spread of sugar-cane production and what became large-scale territorial control by sugar industrialists, the state colonised these lands during the 1870s and 1880s. Mirroring hemispheric trends, it was an expansion that indigenous groups, including the Toba and the Kolla, contested violently.Footnote 30
Indigenous labour, a crucial resource, was controlled and coerced into the wage economy. The national army forced levies on Indians in the Chaco, confiscated land and encroached on subsistence economies. Meanwhile, permanent settlers displaced Indians, forcing them to sell their labour power elsewhere.Footnote 31 Indigenous salaries often took the form of vouchers, and money rarely changed hands. Workers bought food and other items at company shops owned by the ingenios, which in turn recorded account book (tarja) deductions. As a result, seasonal workers found themselves indebted to their employers. Prior to the appearance of trade unions in the early 1910s, wages were commonly 100 per cent non-monetary.Footnote 32 To take a typical example, Raúl Reynaga, who earned around $ARG2.50 daily at La Esperanza, owed his employers $9.50 at the end of September 1938 after working all summer.Footnote 33 Legislation favoured owners over employees, and Jujuy’s rural economy formed part of a transnational pattern of debt peonage.Footnote 34
The use of migrant workers during the harvest period generated a challenging set of social conditions. Until the 1930s, the Argentine Chaco constituted the primary labour reservoir for Jujuy’s sugar firms, yet the provincial government did nothing to regulate the labour relations that the ingenios established.Footnote 35 This was partly because no regulatory body for labour existed until the establishment of the Departamento Nacional del Trabajo (National Labour Department, DNT) in 1907.Footnote 36 At the turn of the twentieth century, increasing worker protests in urban spaces incited fear amongst government officials that revolutionary fervour might spread to the hinterland. In 1904, the national government sent the Catalan lawyer Juan Bialet Massé to the interior to report on the conditions of the labouring classes. During his country-wide travels, he paid particular attention to the most silent (or silenced) and forgotten sectors: creole labourers, indigenous agricultural workers, women and children.Footnote 37
Bialet Massé’s report noted the deficient state of schooling, housing and healthcare for temporary workers in Jujuy’s ingenios. Writing about the sugar industry, he detailed the ‘filth’ (inmundicia) in which peasants’ wives lived: ‘water only enters the hut for food, never for hygiene, such a thing is scarce’. Moreover, just a few bags of straw and a blanket served as a cover during freezing winter nights and rainy summer days while personal belongings were reduced to ‘a shoddy box with leather hinges, a saucepan, a tin pot for boiling dirty clothes, a maté with its corresponding bombilla, a kettle without a lid …’.Footnote 38 Overcrowding was ubiquitous.Footnote 39 Bialet Massé’s descriptions may often have reproduced tropes about rural workers typical of a certain current of urban socialist reformism, but there is little reason to doubt the misery of the conditions he encountered.
Health and sanitary problems were inextricably linked to the massive, concentrated influx of seasonal workers. At La Esperanza, Bialet Massé observed that medical and pharmaceutical assistance ‘is given to the Christian; the Indian receives only a portion of this aid [solo la ración]’. Additionally, the ingenio paid a single doctor to provide a free service in a very busy practice and to inspect the brothels in San Pedro.Footnote 40 In the case of victims of accidents at work, salaries were paid at half the daily rate until recovery. Bialet Massé reported two deaths during his stay, which the company attributed to ‘imprudence on the part of the victims’. The families of the bereaved received a small sum from the ingenio. Safety measures were lacking, the boilers – used for the crystallisation stage of processing sugar – were not subject to inspection by any authority, and nor were the workers encouraged to take hygiene precautions.Footnote 41 Economic progress in the province was assured, but at the cost of dangers to health and social misery.
Apart from the conditions in the ingenios themselves, their relative power and fiscal contribution were a historical constant. Unable to impose its authority due to varied geography and sparse infrastructure, the provincial state used the revenue from taxing sugar firms for numerous provincial services and public works programmes. Combined with the ingenios’ control over the civil administration of the province, this gave the sugar industry a major stake as to where funds were directed. The construction of hospitals, roads and irrigation networks could be traced in large part to the funds raised from taxes on sugar and alcohol.Footnote 42 Furthermore, governors periodically solicited loans from the sugar companies, making them creditors of the state.Footnote 43 Ingenios instituted few social assistance measures for workers before 1912, and labour on the factory floor and in the fields remained unregulated.
By 1912, the sugar industry had shifted the balance of political power in the province, and the place of sugar in the national economy. Despite Jujuy’s status as a frontier region and its traditional links with the Pacific Ocean and Bolivia during the colonial period, at the turn of the century the industry had ensured the end of Jujuy’s isolation from Argentina’s port cities.Footnote 44 Despite Jujuy’s remoteness, the arrival of the railway in 1890 connected the sugar firms to nodes of commerce elsewhere. Henceforth, the provision of sugar for the domestic market became a matter of national concern. Sugar dominance thrived unchecked in this prosperous boom period, but it faced new challenges at the national level in 1912. The widening of suffrage following electoral reform in that year and the ascendency of the Unión Cívica Radical (Radical Civic Union, UCR) from 1916 to 1930 challenged sugar’s hegemony and required new strategies of legitimation.Footnote 45
Workers, Tariffs and the Circumscription of Sugar Autonomy, 1912–29
From 1912 to the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, two major developments in the realm of trade and social policy rocked the sugar industry and caused its directors to consider new approaches to the social question. On one level, the ascent to power of the UCR and its free-trade preferences jeopardised sugar’s protected status, prompting the ingenio owners to respond by foregrounding the ‘common good’ of nationally produced sugar.Footnote 46 On another level, the UCR’s labour policies placed the autonomy of the sugar industry in question, especially in the aftermath of ‘La Semana Trágica’, the ‘tragic week’, in which federal police, the army and nationalist paramilitary groups crushed worker uprisings directed by anarchists and communists in Buenos Aires.Footnote 47 Violent suppression of rural labourers during the ‘Patagonia Trágica’ and worker massacres following strikes in La Forestal, Santa Fe, between 1919 and 1922 added to the outpouring of sympathy for workers and intensified trade union agitation nationwide and in Jujuy.Footnote 48 Relatedly, the ominous threat of the Russian Revolution introduced an element of fear among company owners strong enough to elicit concessions on their part and empower workers. Under intense pressure, provincial governments and the ingenios in the northwest enacted the first laws and social policies regulating and seeking to improve worker conditions on sugar plantations in the 1920s.Footnote 49
Whilst these challenges were confronted by the sugar industry as a whole, the prospects for sugar in Tucumán on the one hand, and Jujuy and Salta on the other, were asymmetric. This is significant because it ultimately resulted in the increased national importance of Jujuy’s three ingenios. With the establishment of universal, secret and compulsory male suffrage, the Sáenz Peña Law of February 1912 opened up the Argentine political system in a process that spelled the beginning of the end of the era of ‘oligarchic exclusivity’.Footnote 50 In addition, it reorganised electoral districts, which, by the time of the 1914 Census, increased the representation of the more populous provinces on the seaboard. Shifting the national balance of political power away from Tucumán, the legislation all but prevented the interior provinces from dictating economic policy at the national level.Footnote 51
Tucumán’s declining political power was further compounded by the outbreak of war in Europe and the province’s harvest failures during the winter of 1916–17. Sugarcane Mosaic Virus decimated Tucumán’s sugarcane fields, increasing the price of processed sugar nationally.Footnote 52 Consequently, Jujuy and Salta’s ingenios represented 15.7 per cent of national sugar production in 1920, a figure that rose steadily to 25.3 per cent by 1930 and increased thereafter.Footnote 53 Other causes of this reversal of fortune are more complex but can be summarised as follows: firstly, the scale of productive units, i.e. large capitalist plantations vs. small plots; secondly, Jujuy and Salta’s geographical advantage of a subtropical climate and proximity to cheaper labour; and thirdly, the differing degrees of industrial competition – independent cañeros in Tucumán were locked in an ongoing distributive battle with the province’s larger producers, leading to frequent disruption to production.Footnote 54
If Jujuy’s ingenios managed to consolidate a significant share of the national sugar market, their survival was still predicated on national protective tariffs. Buoyed by electoral reform, President Hipólito Yrigoyen swept to power in 1916 on a platform of consumer protection, reigniting an old debate about tariff protection for local industries versus free trade.Footnote 55 The Centro Azucarero Argentino (Centre for Argentine Sugar, CAA), created in 1894 as a defensive response to the industry’s privileged status, initiated what was essentially a public relations campaign through its monthly magazine, the Revista Azucarera.Footnote 56 The Revista Azucarera – aiming to counter anti-protectionist representatives amongst the press in Buenos Aires and the UCR – agitated against free trade, hoping to align the opinions of company owners in different regions on sugar matters. Critics of protectionism, for their part, condemned sugar’s tariffs and subsidies, particularly when drawing attention to the issue of non-monetary payment for seasonal plantation workers.Footnote 57
Corporate narratives of progress sought to refute criticism linked to workers’ issues, which the industry’s detractors considered especially serious because of its protection by tariff policies. As Ricardo Salvatore has shown, the preceding period from 1890 to 1913 was one of monetary stabilisation in which perceptions of economic injustice shifted from a focus on speculative fever and government corruption towards the price system and unemployment. A powerful contingent on the political Left complained that government interference in trade undermined a hard monetary base, which in turn harmed wages. Accordingly, many workers in Buenos Aires came to view protectionism as ‘an instrument of the capitalist class to raise the cost of workers’ subsistence’.Footnote 58 This explains why one of Yrigoyen’s first actions as president was to import 50,000 tonnes of refined sugar and 30,000 tonnes of unrefined sugar, tariff-free, which saturated the domestic market and caused the price of sugar to plummet.Footnote 59 Sugar imports met with consumer approval in Buenos Aires, but struck the northern provinces with fear. If profits were affected, so too would be provincial budgets.
Moreover, the national government was appearing to encroach on an area where the sugar industry had seldom faced intervention: social policy for workers. On 16 May 1919, shortly after the ‘semana trágica’, Yrigoyen laid down the basis of a social programme. Speaking before Congress, he included a section on social legislation, which incorporated conciliation, arbitration and social justice measures under the purview of the state.Footnote 60 Sugar industrialists wrangled over this social legislation throughout the 1920s, asserting that their own measures – made possible through subsidies and tariff protections – were sufficient.Footnote 61 The Revista Azucarera was already pointing to the benefits of the industry in Jujuy, noting its wealth and its provision of employment. In February 1923, one author highlighted that the three sugar mills of Jujuy, ‘great factories that honour the industrial progress of the country’, represented a capitalisation of more than $ARG50 million. Not only that, but more than ‘half of the province is directly involved in factory activities and 10,000 Indios from the Chaco, Formosa and Bolivia find an easy livelihood every year in the sugar cane harvest’.Footnote 62 The suggestion of uplifting indigenous groups through employment served to underline the civilisational benefits the industry could provide.
In Jujuy, strikes inspired by anarchism and socialism broke out at the Ledesma ingenio in 1918 and 1923 over salaries and sanitary facilities. On 29 July 1923, a strike began at Ledesma with permanent workers demanding eight-hour workdays, a 30 per cent wage rise and rights to housing for their families. It ended in tragedy on 31 July when 26-year-old Manuel Castillo was struck by a projectile and died at the scene. The police detained 29 workers.Footnote 63 Shortly after, provincial legislation sought to directly regulate worker remuneration and health. Sugar industrialists decried these measures, wedded as they were to an understanding of the social order as governed by laws of nature. They claimed that hierarchised individual roles would allow for the advancement of societies to higher stages.Footnote 64 Sugar directors thus endorsed social inequalities, on their plantations, in their factories and throughout the province, under the banner of the forward march of progress. Workers saw things rather differently. As Tierra Libre, an anarcho-communist periodical based in Tucumán, put it, the ingenios in Jujuy were ‘centres of tyranny and exploitation typical of the era of the whip and slavery’. The periodical’s authors expressed an alternative motivation for inequality: profit. Wage reductions and increased working hours in 1923, far from a feature of nature, amounted to sugar industrialists’ ‘voracity, their hunger for gold, their mad dreams of greatness’, which would ‘never be satisfied no matter how much profit they make’.Footnote 65
These opposing ideas were represented by three of the most important provincial governors in the 1920s. The disputes in Jujuy during this decade centred on the interrelated questions of land rents and the sugar industry’s political domination.Footnote 66 In fact, the UCR’s promise to resolve issues linked to the exploitation of labour in the sugar valleys formed the basis of the manifestos of the first two UCR governors of Jujuy, the ‘Anti-Personalist’ Horacio Carrillo (1918–21) and the ‘Personalist’ Mateo Candelario Córdova (1921–4).Footnote 67 Carrillo had become governor as a result of federal intervention, while his successor Córdova was elected with some evidence of UCR interference. Jujuy thus offers a good example of the pattern by which the UCR consolidated its power.Footnote 68 Draft laws under Córdova mandated the expropriation of large estates and the creation of a Banco de Protección Social del Estado (State Social Protection Bank). Although they did not come to fruition, these drafts were evidence of the provincial state’s interventionist tendencies in the early 1920s.Footnote 69
Benjamín Villafañe, a lawyer who had served as a national deputy, initiated the reaction to these tendencies during his governorship (1924–7). With the backing of Anti-Personalists and conservatives, he was the sugar industry’s preferred candidate. As governor, he gathered together political leaders across the Argentine northwest in 1926 at a conference to articulate an economic vision of the region that hinged on tariff protection. There, he discussed the main obstacles to ‘progress’ in the northwest, emphasising the importance of the creation and preservation of sources of work under protectionist conditions. He warned that Argentine industries would be ‘sacrificed in a holocaust to the doctrine of free trade’ if they were forced to compete with their counterparts in Brazil or Paraguay, where there existed ‘no minimum wage, eight-hour day or social assistance’.Footnote 70 And as the decade went on, his authoritarian opposition to popular democracy hardened. In 1927, he claimed that when equality before the law was confused with the equal rights to aspire to public office, a ‘chusmocracia’, or a ‘government by the rabble’, would result.Footnote 71
Jujuy’s sugar industry sought to preserve its material interests and privileges by resisting state labour regulations. During the 1920s, the provincial state attempted to exert some form of control over social relations in the ingenios. The most notable example of this was the prohibition of worker payment in any form of money other than legal tender, which became law in June 1924. Legal stipulations did not end there. In 1925, Law 673 obliged all ‘[industrial] establishments with more than 200 permanent employees’ (thereby including sugar plantations) to provide onsite medical assistance to all workers and their families, be they under temporary or permanent contract.Footnote 72 Despite the power of the sugar interests in the province, then, political developments could and did put ingenios on the defensive in the 1920s, even if laws were tricky to enforce. However, the collapse of global commodity prices and the onset of the Great Depression temporarily restored the pre-1912 oligarchic order and, with it, the relative autonomy of sugar in the realm of social policy.
The Great Depression and Unemployment in Jujuy, 1929–34
In October 1929, share prices on the New York Stock Exchange crashed, bringing an end to a period of global economic recovery and undermining the post-Versailles framework of international security. This was especially damaging to primary goods exporters, with notable repercussions for Latin American countries.Footnote 73 The Argentine economy, until then reliant on exports for revenue, shrank by 14 per cent and the value of exports decreased from $US906,946,000 to $509,380,000.Footnote 74 Public finances suffered as revenues decreased and external credit ran dry. To balance the trade deficit, the government restricted purchases and remittances from and to abroad by devaluing the peso and imposing exchange controls. Duties on imported goods increased and the government imposed quantitative restrictions on imports.Footnote 75 Such measures in conjunction with the abandonment of the gold standard in 1929 led to a steep fall in real wages which did not recover until the 1940s.Footnote 76
In this context, on 6 September 1930, a coup d’etat led by General José Félix Uriburu deposed the reform-minded UCR government of Yrigoyen and installed a regime that brought together statesmen influenced by European fascism and old-school conservatism. The resulting ‘Concordancia’ governments, a ‘conservative Restoration’, coincided with what is known in Argentina as the ‘Década Infame’ (1930–43), a period rife with political corruption and economic hardship.Footnote 77 But in parallel with the transnational trend towards mass politics, these governments spurred rather than impeded an institutional framework that restructured the state apparatus for selective interventionist social measures.Footnote 78 This is true even if the 1930s were characterised by the alliance between conservative politicians and dominant economic sectors.
Not only did the Great Depression make a clear, immediate impression on national politics, it also had visible effects on rural misery. The local press in Jujuy held that the prolonged crisis was responsible for an ‘almost total lack of work … increasingly accentuated every day, to the extent that many humble homes lack even the most indispensable [things] for their daily sustenance’.Footnote 79 With the crisis ongoing, the problem of unemployment pressured the provincial government into regulating the migration of Bolivian labour during the sugar harvest. In December 1931, the director of the provincial labour and statistics office informed the government of Jujuy that, in light of spiralling unemployment and the protection afforded to the sugar industry, ‘it was not possible to accept the unfair and troublesome competition [that works] against the employment of Argentine workers’.Footnote 80 Because the national government protected the industry with tariffs, employment of Argentines should, in the view of the provincial labour and statistics office, be privileged over that of foreign nationals. Law 908 was passed shortly afterwards, forcing labour contractors for the ingenios to employ a minimum of 70 per cent Argentine nationals during the 1932 harvest.Footnote 81
Unemployment thus became a social problem leading to expanding conceptions of the state’s role from the onset of the Great Depression. By May 1930, job losses were all the more pressing since social legislation typically covered only those in formal work, a problem to which Yrigoyen ally and soon-to-be deposed Governor Miguel Aníbal Tanco was attuned. In his annual address that year, Tanco asserted that because the unemployed were not eligible for state assistance, social legislation – from the payment of wages in legal tender to accidents at work and Sunday rest – could not be applied ‘strictly’.Footnote 82 Soon after the coup d’état, La Opinión advocated a huge programme of public works, citing the example of the Restoration government in the province of Santa Fe.Footnote 83 Two years later the Concordancia’s first elected governor of Jujuy, Fenelón Quintana, blamed lack of trade for ‘the [plight] of those who knock on the doors of the government asking for a living’.Footnote 84
The Depression exacerbated the poor state of public health services in Jujuy. When Tanco opened the session of the provincial legislature in May 1930, he complained that the provincial health department was totally inadequate. There were simply not enough funds for the ‘sanitary engineering and heightened prophylactic measures’ required to address epidemics such as malaria and pneumonia. He also pointed to the lack of ‘special services for infants’ and of support for children, ‘so necessary in our environment of poverty and deficient infant nutrition’.Footnote 85 The high level of child mortality in the provincial capital, San Salvador, testified to the general ill health of the province: between September 1929 and September 1930, 30 per cent of deaths were of children under five years, the majority of whom had not yet reached their first birthday.Footnote 86
Concurrently, access to decent housing for workers was hampered by speculation and limited funds. Tanco pointed to the proliferation of unaffordable housing that compelled ‘the needy class … to emigrate to the suburbs of the city to live in the greatest promiscuity, either in unhealthy tenements or in primitive shacks, which, as well as constituting an ugly attack on the municipality’s built environment, are also an enduring danger to the health of the inhabitants’.Footnote 87 As La Opinión pointed out, the working-class population was forced to pay ‘an exorbitant rent … to live in these tenements or in shacks built on the outskirts of the city, where there is a lack of sanitary facilities’.Footnote 88 Under pressure from the press, the provincial government conceived of housing as a sphere for public intervention.Footnote 89
Amidst this challenge to provincial social policy, the profits of the sugar industry in Jujuy remained resilient, as figures from La Esperanza disclose. In 1932, the company increased its profit on trading to £140,487, up from £97,979 for the previous year. After deducting debenture interest and depreciation there remained a net profit of £60,056.Footnote 90 At the 1932 shareholder meeting in London, Baron Frederic d’Erlanger, a spokesman for Chairman Walter Leach, was encouraged: ‘I feel sure that you will regard the results of the company’s last financial year as satisfactory in view of the economic crisis which Argentina, like the rest of the world, has been, and is still, traversing.’Footnote 91 Five months later, the three ingenios extended a high-interest emergency loan to the provincial government of $ARG 3.5 million (£205,882).Footnote 92 D’Erlanger informed investors that they had been ‘compelled’ to offer this loan because the local government had to find ways to meet immediate budget expenditure, and had ‘naturally turned to the local sugar factories … [as] the largest industry in the Province and consequently the largest source of provincial income’.Footnote 93 Jujuy’s sugar firms recognised that the provincial government had only two courses of action open to it: either to obtain a loan or to increase taxation on sugar. Nevertheless, the Revista Azucarera underlined the selflessness of the loan, reinforcing the idea that the ingenios were essential to provincial well-being: ‘with this loan, the financial situation of the province will be remedied and its economic development will be considerably improved’.Footnote 94
Despite profits in Jujuy, the immediate impact of the Great Depression led to a fall in domestic demand for sugar between 1929 and 1931, causing a national crisis of overproduction.Footnote 95 Jujuy’s ingenios weathered the storm due to a protectionist measure adopted in 1931 by the national government, which introduced an additional surcharge of 4 per cent on imported sugar.Footnote 96 This allowed Ledesma and La Esperanza not only to operate as normal, but to boost their operations, extend loans to the provincial government and spend limited amounts on worker welfare. Uriburu, a native of Salta, visited the northern provinces in February 1931 shortly after assuming power, and held talks with the administrators of the three main ingenios in Jujuy. They thanked him for the national tariff measures, ‘given the importance it [the sugar industry] has for the economic life of the north’. The Revista Azucarera reported effusively: ‘the president saved the … northern provinces through a patriotic deed of good government’.Footnote 97 Yet these supportive measures – which resulted in a higher price for sugar in Argentina than world-market rates – required continued legitimation in the face of the new conditions unleashed by the Great Depression. As the national economy recovered, the sugar industry in Jujuy aimed to underline the social benefits that its prosperity could help finance.
Sugar Mills, Paternalism and Social Policy, 1934–43
In the 1930s, countries worldwide grappled with tariffs and the trade-offs between cutting taxes, reducing expenditure and expanding social spending. In Jujuy, where the sugar industry needed tariff protection, but sought to avoid labour regulation, it adopted the language of social assistance and invested significant sums in it. Spotlighting sugar highlights the role of private enterprise in this historical process while the preferences of the industry’s firms – private welfare measures, the suppression of organised labour, and trade protectionism – co-existed in tension.
As Argentina emerged from the economic slump, sugar continued to play a pivotal role in both the jujeño economy and the province’s politics, and the personal connections between the two spheres were close. The restoration of conservative governments and the banning of the UCR meant that from 1932 the provincial legislature was controlled by the Partido Popular, whose members made up 17 out of 18 deputies. The extent of this majority was unprecedented; it included doctors, lawyers, administrators, labour contractors and a butcher, all of whom were affiliated with the sugar companies, often as direct employees.Footnote 98 Such a constellation resulted in a raft of legislation favourable to the ingenios. In 1932, for example, sugar in excess of 44,000 tonnes produced for export was exempted from all provincial taxes.Footnote 99
By this time, the workforce had undergone a profound change due to productivity gains and increased mechanisation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the three sugar refineries in Jujuy directly employed a total of almost 3,900 workers. During the 1930s, conversely, fewer than 900 people were needed for the production of sugar and distilled alcohol at the three plants – a 77 per cent reduction in just 20 years.Footnote 100 Furthermore, labour recruitment for temporary workers shifted geographically during the 1920s: from 1880 to 1920, the ingenios had recruited seasonal labour primarily from the lowland ethnic groups based in the Argentine Chaco – the Toba, Wichí, Chorote, Mocoví, Pilagá and Aba-Guaraní. From the 1920s, with the decline in the number of hands required in the sugar mills, recruitment was directed towards the highlands of north-western Argentina and southern Bolivia, which were somewhat closer to the source of the demand for labour.Footnote 101 The emergence of logging and cotton industries in the Chaco – which competed for seasonal workers – contributed to this shift.Footnote 102
Wage differentials between sugar mill employees and public-sector workers were stark. In 1934, a state employee on the minimum wage of $ARG 4.00 had $2.30 per day left after the family’s basic food needs were met. The daily wage of a permanent sugar worker was, by contrast, just $2.50, and they enjoyed few of the benefits enjoyed by their government-employed counterparts.Footnote 103
When Jujuy’s elections took place in March 1934, two key figures consolidated political power. First, Herminio Arrieta transformed his local political capital into national influence. An engineer by training and the main shareholder of Ledesma Sugar Estates, Arrieta quickly assumed a hegemonic position within the Partido Popular in the early 1930s. Appointed president of the party, in 1934 he was elected to the Cámara de Diputados de la Nación (National Chamber of Deputies) as representative for Jujuy and, four years later, to the Senado de la Nación (National Senate). Second, Lázaro Taglioli (an employee at Ledesma and notorious conchabador)Footnote 104 often pressurised indigenous tenant farmers in the highlands of Jujuy not only to work during the harvest but also to vote for the Partido Popular’s preferred candidate for the provincial legislature. If they did not comply, they lost access to the land they farmed.Footnote 105 These workers were not necessarily beneficiaries of the ingenios’ social assistance measures: their workdays were set by the rising and setting of the sun and sometimes extended into night work.
The rise of sugar power in both the provincial and national governments can be seen through the prism of Bolivian migrant labour. The Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia (1932–5) caused a minor migration crisis in Jujuy. In 1933, Governor Quintana stated that an ‘incursion of foreigners led to expenses [incurred] in reinforcing the border police and the deployment of more preventive measures in the city’.Footnote 106 However, much as with the Transandean region between Argentina and Chile, a porous border was necessary to meet the labour demands of Jujuy’s ingenios.Footnote 107 In March 1937 Taglioli expressed his concern in writing to Arrieta, by then a deputy in the national legislature. Bolivians, it seemed, were having trouble entering the country legally. The Argentine national government required documentation of origin upon entry, but the ‘the Bolivian government places every obstacle in the way so that people do not leave the territory’.Footnote 108 Taglioli asked Arrieta to resolve the issue; his letter demonstrates that whilst the ingenios needed this crucial source of labour, the geopolitics of war and economic recession forced them to negotiate both regional and national structures of governance and leverage their connections in the national capital of Buenos Aires.
Provincial government investment prioritised public works programmes, much like the New Deal Programme in the United States.Footnote 109 Where social legislation was direct, it was to formalise the position of the provincial state as an employer, as was the case with the 1932 creation of a provincial pension fund for administrative functionaries.Footnote 110 In 1933, Law 991 was passed to strengthen local industry, providing the ‘initial capital to invest in buildings, machinery and facilities’ for industries such as sugarcane, tobacco, cotton and other textiles.Footnote 111 This logic was summarised by governor Arturo Pérez Alisedo: ‘Industry means capital investment, it means work for the workers, it means an inflow of technicians, of businessmen; all of this translates into greater wealth, more culture and an improvement in the general standard of living.’Footnote 112
Although the direct threats of the UCR years had largely been avoided, sugar enterprises were still concerned with government intervention during the early 1930s. In November 1930, Villafañe, governor of Jujuy (1924–7), issued a warning to the new government. He claimed that ‘the old Socialist Party … succeeded in raising worker wages and in passing many laws for social protection [while] keeping the doors of our customs open to products from all the countries of the world, where wages are lower and capital is not taxed by laws which make production more expensive’. For Villafañe, such a policy amounted to ‘a crime, the … misery of the nation, death by starvation of the people whom it makes believe that it wants to save’.Footnote 113 As shown above, the sugar industry had consistently emphasised regional differences between the northwest and the Atlantic coast, and insisted upon autonomy when it came to social provision for workers. The early 1930s were no different: ingenios across Jujuy, Salta and Tucumán continued to construct arguments to fend off government intervention – in labour law, confiscation and re-sale of hoarded stock, and unrestricted importation of sugar – for it represented the realisation of the same ‘demagogic’ policy of state intervention.Footnote 114
The year 1934 was a turning point: the worst effects of the Depression had subsided, but appalling social conditions in the province endured.Footnote 115 During debates over protectionism in the Congreso de la Nación (National Congress) in 1932, the sugar industry was attacked by Socialist deputies representing constituencies in Buenos Aires, such as Federico Pinedo and Nicolás Repetto, for being ‘a parasitic industry … that constantly makes protection claims but does not know how to resolve its own problems’, and for being a vehicle for inequality – ‘there are very few individuals who benefit from tariffs’.Footnote 116 Sugar industrialists in Tucumán meanwhile lamented that ‘all the ills [of the province], from malaria to alcoholism, were being attributed to the industry’.Footnote 117
Unfortunately, workers’ testimonies regarding the welfare measures adopted by Jujuy’s ingenios are scarce for this period. Accounts of conservative provincial politicians – many with direct ties to the sugar industry – the press and the publications of the ingenios themselves are strong on self-congratulation and weak on hard information. However, they still indicate why the sugar industry attempted to present itself as a social actor. These accounts were countered in the pages of Tierra Libre – whose anarchist authors stressed the ‘parasitic’ and ‘exploitative’ nature of northern sugar bosses – as well as in the writings of Socialist deputies from Buenos Aires who underlined poor social conditions in the sugar provinces.Footnote 118 True as their assertions may have been, there exists some evidence that the sugar industry did invest in a multiplicity of in-kind benefits for select employees during the 1930s.
Even if legal obligations were few, sugar mills established some benefits for both industrial and field workers. Throughout the 1920s, Jujuy’s ingenios had affirmed their role in initiating an increase in the living standards of the rural population and, in general, in improving the socio-economic level of the province. But by the 1930s, the industry attempted to implement various forms of its own social assistance. Just as the social and labour conditions of Argentine workers were becoming a central concern for the government that emerged from the military coup of 1943, Emilio Schleh, secretary of the CAA, published a survey of the industry’s contribution to social welfare over the preceding decade. At La Mendieta’s Río Grande ingenio, Schleh pointed out that ‘these workers comprise a large number of families who live on site in comfortable, solid houses where they have everything they need: free medical services, hospital, schools, playgrounds and other social welfare services’. Beyond that, holiday camps in Humahuaca were organised for children who needed ‘a change of climate in a dry physical environment, fresh air and adequate food’.Footnote 119 The concern with fresh air for children addressed the attempt to combat pneumonia and tuberculosis, which were the first and third most common causes of death respectively in 1937.Footnote 120
Child well-being was a particular concern for the Socialist deputy Alfredo Palacios, who noted the appalling state of living quarters for workers in Jujuy. Employing evocative photographs of impoverished children and self-constructed worker dwellings, Palacios observed problems ranging from deprivation to school absence – particularly amongst children whose parents moved seasonally to the ingenios in search of work.Footnote 121 His publication was intended to reconsider state responsibility for the provision of social assistance through social reform, public health and education, and coincided with a number of reports submitted to the Congreso de la Nación by a commission of Socialists that visited northern Argentina’s ingenios in 1937. These legislators described the magnitude of the health problems and the dilapidated and insalubrious housing, and condemned the extortionate labour supply system that saw workers take on debt in their places of origin before migrating for the harvest.Footnote 122
Company welfare programmes, with the support of the provincial government, sought to reform this image, shaping the social and cultural worlds of their workers and training a ‘permanent, reliable, and semi-skilled work force for labor in a modern industry’.Footnote 123 Between 1942 and 1943, La Esperanza spent in excess of $ARG 0.5 million on a range of services, from medicine and drinking water to worker housing. The British-owned ingenio also invested $ARG 286,017.11 (£16,800) in new worker homes between 1937 and 1942.Footnote 124 This was a small, yet not insignificant, sum.Footnote 125 Furthermore, the Leach family constructed an open-air cinema and football pitches for worker entertainment. Football was not just a healthy practice, but it also had a ‘civilising’ value, emancipating those ‘in the fields from vice and indolence, in exchange for health and well-being’.Footnote 126 The provision of leisure and sport facilities enabled the Jujuy’s ingenios a degree of influence over how workers spent their free time.Footnote 127 They kept employees away from alcohol and gambling which, as sugar directors had long complained, led to disorderly behaviour and absenteeism.Footnote 128
These initiatives were supported by Governor Pérez Alisedo, who shared the moralising view of outdoor activity as a cornerstone of social policy. In 1935, he affirmed:
The government is seriously concerned with the problem of providing people with honest and healthy entertainment, keeping them away from the centres of corruption and vice, to which end it has at all times encouraged the development of basketball, football, tennis, cycling, etc., having succeeded … in reducing the number of people attending cafés, bars and drinking establishments, while increasing attendance at open-air physical exercise areas, with the consequent economic and public health benefits.Footnote 129
This approach was consistent with a global tendency that linked individual exercise with the dynamics of the industrialised workplace. Healthy and strong bodies resonated with the attempt to eradicate idleness through campaigns that stressed the virtues of hard work.Footnote 130 Hygiene specialists, criminologists and legislators in Argentina had collaborated since the financial crisis of 1890 to combat ‘degeneración de la raza’ (national population degeneration) with campaigns against alcoholism and prostitution, which were perceived as threats to public and moral health.Footnote 131 They used sport and ‘productive’ leisure as indispensable tools of interference in private lifestyles and important pillars of social welfare.
National government reports could be equally exuberant. In September 1943, engineer Alejandro Terrera, who visited Ledesma for the Comisión Especial Investigadora de la Industria Azucarera (Special Commission for the Investigation of the Sugar Industry, established by the national government that year), noted that housing provided by the ingenios was ‘almost entirely modern’: each building consisted of two houses with a dining room, two rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom ‘with all the comfort that can be offered to a middle-class family’. The medical assistance was ‘effective, there being three doctors in the industrial plant: one, paid by the ingenio; another, under the National Department of Hygiene; and a third, dedicated with the necessary personnel to the fight against malaria, a service which receives from the ingenio a subsidy of 60,000 pesos a year’. In addition, the ingenio operated a school in a ‘fine building donated by the company, which contributes to its support with an annual contribution’. Children there were provided with supplementary food and ‘adequate clothing’.Footnote 132
The rosy conditions described by Terrera and republished by Schleh likely referred to a small group of houses – accessible to a limited number of beneficiaries – in the immediate vicinity of the factory owners’ hacienda. The 1937 national census on illiteracy and housing showed that the subtropical valleys where the three ingenios were situated had the highest percentage of overcrowding in the province – 60.2 per cent compared with the provincial average of 55 per cent.Footnote 133 In addition, infant mortality in the Ledesma department stood at 239 deaths per 1,000 births in 1936, the fourth highest out of 14 in the province.Footnote 134 As Mirta Fleitas poignantly notes, the figures from Ledesma reveal the contradictory nature of the sugar industry’s claims to modernity, progress and civilisation.Footnote 135
Given that which workers benefited from the industry’s largesse was never specified, the advocates for the sugar industry dealt in half truths. The ingenio was a profoundly stratified space and the decent worker homes – showcased by the provincial press and the Revista Azucarera – tended to be the preserve of a select few skilled workers, such as company engineers or technicians.Footnote 136 We do not have access to the direct sources that would enable us to perceive the most basic issues affecting men and women in their work at the ingenios as well as in their domestic life, recreation and religious practices.Footnote 137 As housing historian Marcelo Jerez notes, sugar prosperity could not mask the ‘deplorable working and living conditions … [of which the] most dramatic manifestation was the inadequacy, backwardness and misery of the makeshift constructions improvised as dwellings for the poorest workers’.Footnote 138 Social assistance, then, functioned mostly as a tool for the sugar industry to advertise its good deeds, rather than as a set of concrete and far-reaching measures that reached all sectors of the workforce.
Conclusion
The 1930s was a decade of ambiguity and severe repression in Argentina, not least for the sugar provinces of the north. And yet, it was in this decade that private companies instituted their own ‘in-kind’ social policy measures – at least for privileged sections of the workforce – and breathed new life into narratives of social uplift. At the national level, labour bargaining power was eviscerated, but import-substitution policies stimulated the industrial capacity from which an urban middle class emerged and state social policies in the 1940s could be developed. The pro-immigrant, anti-union and pro-protectionism preferences of the sugar industry came under pressure when the Perón government empowered regulatory mechanisms, introducing new sugar production oversight and precipitating profound changes in labour legislation. The creation of the Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión (Labour and Social Security Secretariat) strengthened the supervisory role of the national government and ensured more effective compliance. Furthermore, trade union policy enabled ingenio workers to organise and, by the end of 1945, each sugar mill had its own form of representation. Increased bargaining power resulted almost immediately in the payment of a ‘Christmas bonus’.Footnote 139
This article has focused on how and why sugar industrialists in Jujuy developed and emphasised their contribution to social welfare. In the first instance, we highlight the legitimising function of spending on workers. The sugar industry could present itself as a motor for social and economic progress because of the province’s fiscal reliance on its profits. In this way, the national government could be kept from interfering in sugar plantations whilst companies maintained their protected access to national consumer markets. But that was not all, for social policy was also enmeshed in the paternalistic outlook of the ingenios. Disturbed by both the spectre of the welfare state and accusations of being social parasites, particularly after the convulsions produced by the Great Depression, the sugar industry purported to take social intervention into its own hands. By building leisure facilities, hospitals, housing and schools, they promoted themselves as civilisers. Thus, they legitimised their privileged status as a nationally protected industry and accorded themselves more influence over the daily lives of their employees and their activities after work.
Taking industrialists seriously as social actors adds to our understanding of the interactions between provincial policy and industry during the Great Depression. It reveals the diversity of policy responses and social realities within Argentina and sheds new light on the uneven distribution of social benefits in the 1930s. Furthermore, it prompts us to reconsider the importance of protectionism and social assistance before Peronism, and to apply a disentangled reading of oligarchy, industry and the state in the way it applied social assistance. In Jujuy and across the northwest, social assistance was fashioned to legitimise the hegemony that local industry had attained and ensure its continued government protection.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Global Dynamics of Social Policy, University of Bremen (CRC-1342) which provided funding for a research trip to Argentina, and the B11 working group in particular. Thanks to the archivists in Jujuy, particularly Nicolás Hernández Aparicio for his help in navigating an incompletely catalogued archive. With specific thanks to the following people who commented on, provided ideas for, or discussed this paper with us: the anonymous referees of the JLAS, Sara Niedzwiecki, Jonathan Ablard, Judith Byfield, Camila Acosta, Daniela Samur, María Corredor Acosta, Fidellithy Tan, Jean-Michel Mutore, Saomai Nguyen, Ernesto Bassi, Ray Craib, Marcelo Jerez, Charlotte Bracklo, Madeleine Lemos and Fabienne Müller.
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