World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [36]
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In Argentina, the largest landowners and producers of beef in the country are now two Jewish brothers, rather startling in light of Argentina’s long, proud tradition of cattle raising. In fact, Eduardo and Alejandro Elsztain—who in 1997 doubled their rural landholdings to 1.1 million acres—are revolutionizing Argentine ranching with biotechnology. Their farm company Cresud recently entered into a joint venture with the Texas-based Cactus Feeders to begin fattening one hundred thousand head of cattle a year with corn rather than traditional pampas grass. Argentina’s gauchos were incredulous: Corn-fed cattle produce marbled beef, and as anyone who has tried (and been disappointed by) bife de lomo knows, Argentinians like their beef very lean. The Elsztains, however, have their eye on global markets. Cresud’s cows are being corn-fed both to increase yields and to appeal to the multibillion-dollar, fat-loving markets of North America and Asia.
31 (Think porterhouse and Kobe beef.)
The presence of commercially dynamic immigrant populations—not just Jews and Lebanese, but also Germans, Italians, Palestinians (in Belize and Honduras), and other groups—is observable in virtually every country in Latin America. These relatively recent arrivals are important in that they have broken up the traditional economic stranglehold of the old, “Spanish-blooded” landowning oligarchies. But they have not altered the basic pigmentocratic reality of Latin American society. These immigrant groups have become part of the tiny white minority that, in almost every Latin American country, controls nearly all of the nation’s wealth, including the most advanced, lucrative sectors of the economy.
Countries without Market-Dominant Minorities
The major exceptions to the rule of pigmentocracy in Latin America are Argentina, Uruguay, and arguably Chile. These countries have only small or negligible Amerindian populations. In Uruguay, for example, the indigenous and famously fierce Charrúa and Guaraní Indians largely perished in seventeenth-century battles with Spanish and Portuguese forces. The last Charrúa Indian died in 1948, and supposedly only 8 percent of present-day Uruguayans are mestizos.
32 Furthermore, all three countries saw enormous waves of European immigrants around the turn of the twentieth century.
33 Unlike in the rest of Latin America, the descendants of these immigrants eventually came to represent a majority of the population. Consequently, the wealthy in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay are not ethnically distinguishable from the less-well-off majorities around them. Indeed, by Western standards, most people in Argentina and Uruguay, wealthy or not, are “white.”
Chile is a slightly more complicated case. Chile’s indigenous peoples, including the increasingly activist Mapuche Indians in the south, currently number roughly 1 million out of a total population of 15 million. Compared to Argentina and Uruguay, a much greater percentage of Chileans are mestizos, but still this percentage is nowhere near a majority. Precise figures are difficult to obtain, in part because of the deeply subjective dimension of ethnic identity: Many Chileans who have some Amerindian ancestry would be the last to admit it. Throughout Chile, many among not just the upper, but also the middle classes, pride themselves on their “whiteness” and, according to historian Frederick Pike, “by and large believe[] in the inferiority of Indians and mixed bloods.”