The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay

by J. A. Hammerton

Bags of Wheat awaiting Shipment at a Railway Station.

Three Huge Piles of “Jerked Beef” outside a “Saladero,” or Curing Factory.

Before turning from this subject, I must add a final word about the extraordinary incompetency of native labour, already mentioned, which conditions to so large an extent the business life, not only of the Argentine, but of all South America. Inefficiency is the keynote of the Spaniard as a worker. A complete indifference to the pressure of time is another of his characteristics, and both of these we find more or less eminent in the South American. The Argentine himself is steadily escaping from the influence of his Spanish original, and will eventually become a more wide-awake, competent, and altogether a more intelligent worker. But even so, he has still to rid himself of innumerable faults in order to come into line with what modern industrial conditions exact from the worker in France, Germany, and Italy, in Great Britain and in North America. The tradesman will dismiss you with the blandest assurances of completing the work he has in hand for you “to-morrow,” and probably you will discover a week later he has not yet begun it. He doesn’t care a hang whether you are pleased or not. The professional man will make no attempt whatever to keep an engagement within half an hour of the appointed time, and the employee does not believe that the interests of the employer and his own can ever possibly be identical.

There is but one way to deal with the Spanish-American worker, and that is never to encourage him, never to express your approval of his work, never for one moment to let him feel you value his services, and never voluntarily to advance his wages! The master who finds his native helper really useful and shows his appreciation by doing any of these things will speedily have to meet a demand for an impossible increase of wages, or to suffer the annoyance of seeing his employee “slacking” at every opportunity and assuming an attitude of disregard for his interests. The man reasons that if his master thinks so well of him as to advance his wages without a request, or to express his satisfaction with his services, he has become so invaluable to that master that he can presume on him by taking liberties which a less useful worker would not expect to be allowed. Presently, the only thing his master can do is to discharge the man whom he has thoughtlessly encouraged, and it may be that the latter will retaliate by waiting at the door and either shooting or stabbing the misguided employer.

Especially in handling the peones is it necessary to maintain the severest, almost the most brutal conditions of discipline. Among my acquaintances in the Argentine is a wiry little Englishman, whose reputation as a disciplinarian is so widely known that his services are much in request to “clean up” estancias where unsuccessful managers have allowed slackness to prevail among the hands, or “arms,” rather: agricultural labourers being collectively brazos or braceros, though the latter term is also used in the singular. He looks the last man in the world for the job, having more the appearance of a natty, little London lawyer. But he was wont to ride among the rough Italian and Gallego labourers, always complaining about the inefficiency of their work, and if one ever muttered a protest, he calmly smashed him to the ground with a well-directed blow on the forehead from the butt of his loaded riding whip. On various occasions he has even gone so far as to have two peones seize one of their number who had retorted to some complaint, carry him to a barn and strip off his shirt, and after having him tied to a post, personally apply a substantial number of lashes to his back. It might be thought that this was just the type of man to receive a shot some night, or a stab in the back, but that is not the way of things in South America. He has gone about his business for nearly thirty years and has won the respect of the creatures he has knocked down and flogged, as well as that of all the others who did not wish to feel the weight of his strong hand. No, the type of employer more likely to be assassinated is he who has treated his employees with ill-directed kindness.

I met a gentleman, the manager of an estancia, at our hotel in the middle of one week leaving for his home and heard the following Sunday that he had been shot dead by a labourer on the Saturday, because he would not re-employ the man whom the mayordomo had discharged during the manager’s absence. The fellow had no grudge against the man who discharged him, who was probably in the habit of making his arm felt among the workers, but the manager, who had shown a kindly interest in the peones and braceros, and could, had he wished, re-engage this one, was the natural object of his vengeance. Another gentleman with whom I came into occasional relationship was shot dead one evening by one of his workers because he would not advance him a day’s money, declaring that he already had received sufficient for the week. Wages are paid nominally by the month, but improvidence is so common among the workers that seldom has a man, no matter his status, to draw his full pay at the end of the month, continual advances having been asked for week by week.

Therefore any North American or European house that purposes branching out in the Argentine is faced with difficulties that do not exist, at least to the same extent, in almost any other great centre of trade, and some allowance must be made to discount these in money values from the cost of doing business there.

Blackmail and “graft” entering so largely into business and politics, it would be surprising were it entirely absent from the Press. In proportion to its population, Buenos Ayres probably supports more periodicals than any other city in the world. There are about fifteen morning and evening journals devoted to Argentine interests, “national” newspapers; two dailies which cater for the Spanish community in distinction from the native Argentine; three or four Italian morning and evening papers; two English dailies (one of which has a wide circulation and is extremely profitable to its proprietors); two French dailies; two or three flourishing German dailies; one Turkish daily (containing four pages about the size of a New York evening paper, printed in Arabic characters), and weekly, semi-weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly publications almost innumerable, catering for all manner of interests and representing a veritable babel of tongues—Yiddish, Scandinavian, Syriac, Russian, Greek, Catalan, Basque, to mention a few at random. A mere glance at a list of these journals would be sufficient to indicate, even to the uninitiated, that they cannot all be getting an honest living. Those that are conducted on strict business principles are relatively few; the blackmailer is busy on the others. His methods are simple, naïve to a degree. The advertising manager calls upon you and states that he has seen your advertisement in La Prensa, La Nacion, La Razon, La Argentina, or El Diario, all of which are reputable and important journals, and that he would like you to put it into his paper, and if you do not think of doing that, his editor is contemplating publishing an article attacking you, and it would be a pity to let that appear. They are foolish indeed who allow such threats to induce them to use space in any of the numberless rags that issue from obscure printing offices, as the circulation of these sheets is so small, their influence so contemptible, that it would scarcely matter whether they published a full page denouncement of a Calle Florida tradesman as a thief and a swindler and offered their paper for sale at his door, so little attention do the general public pay to them.