The Argentine Republic: Its Development and Progress

by Pierre Denis

From the Andes of Tucumán and Salta to the banks of the upper Paraná in the province of Misiones the north of Argentina is now a vast timber-yard for the exploitation of the forests. It resounds everywhere with the axe. This exploitation of the forest is of early origin on the river; in the eighteenth century Buenos Aires was supplied with wood from the Paraná. In the western Chaco the difficulty of transport by land retarded the development of the forestry industry. The only market for the timber of Tucumán was the Andean region. It was not sent to Mendoza after the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the willow was acclimatized in the oases of Cuyo. Below Rosas the wood of the quebracho was at first taken in waggons from Santiago to Buenos Aires, but this traffic ceased when the river-route was reopened, and we do not find it resumed until recent times, when railways were constructed.

The outer fringe of the forest and the scrub where the industry has had to find labour, is inhabited by a very sparse pastoral population. There are, however, besides the thinly populated districts of the farms, certain busy hives which lend animation to the scrub. These over-populated cantons are districts of cultivation by bañados, or the cultivation of flood-lands. There is constant intercourse between these ancient centres of creole life and the timber-yards of the forest. The forestry industry recruits its workers there, on temporary contracts. The wages paid are brought back to these centres and spent there. They help to maintain social groups of an archaic type, which the meagreness of their production would otherwise doom to extinction.

The bañados are scattered over the range of all the sierras within the limits reached by the torrents from the mountains before they are lost. They also stretch along the two rivers that are considerable enough to cross the scrub, the Salado and the Dulce. The course of the Bermejo, where the natural conditions are much the same, lies outside the sphere of primitive creole colonization. The tilled lands are not continuous on the Salado or the Dulce. There are no bañados wherever the bed of the river is enclosed by high banks which prevent flooding. The course of the Salado threads together, in the manner of a rosary, three main groups of bañados below 26° S. lat., (Matoque and Boqueron) between 27° and 28° S. lat. (Brea), and between 28° and 29° S. lat. (Le Bracho and Navicha). But the classic country of the bañados, where they cover the widest extent and sustain the most considerable body of population, is the interior delta of the Rio Dulce below Santiago del Estero, in the departments of Loreto, Atamisqui, and Salavina.

Santiago is situated almost at the top of it. In its upper part the Rio Dulce is enclosed between high clay cliffs (department of the Rio Hondo). Below Santiago the river seems to run to the top of a sort of flattened alluvial cone, over which it wanders. Instances of the migration of rivers during the historical period are plentiful in the north of the Argentine plain. The scrub is scored east of the Salado with a network of dry beds, the edges of which gradually disappear as the vegetation extends over them. But there is no other part where the erratic nature of the waters is so marked, the vagabondage so considerable, as in this section of the basin of the Rio Dulce. The small towns of Atamisqui and Salavina, which lived on the waters of the Dulce, were suddenly ruined in 1825, when the river, in consequence of a particularly violent flood, turned away to the south and lost itself in the Salinas Grandes. A canal was dug in 1897 to irrigate the district of Loreto, on the left bank of the Dulce, but the entrance was badly protected, and the flood of 1901 swept into it, and, guided by it, reached the bed it had abandoned a century before, going south-eastward toward Atamisqui. That town and Salavina recovered their prosperity, while it was necessary to abandon the farms on the Rio des Salines, which now has water only during high floods. Actual beds, old beds that are always ready to serve again, and traces of canals changed and cut by the stream, form a great network in the midst of the plain; and the flood rolls to one side or the other according to the road open to it, and the facility with which the various elements of the network lend themselves to the passage of the water. Such is the land of the bañados.

You enter it to-day at Loreto station, where the line from Santiago to Frias approaches within a few miles of it. This station is erected in the midst of the arid monte, and owes its existence to the neighbouring bañados. Turning eastward from the railway, as soon as one has crossed the broad, sandy bed of the Rio des Salines, one finds oneself in the heart of the bañados farms. The road passes between hedges (cercas), over the top of which one sees the green of the wheat and lucerne. The plots are very small: gardens rather than fields. In clearing the ground they have preserved the best-situated trees, and the light foliage gives a useful shade to the crops. The crown of the algarrobas rises everywhere above the top of the hedges.

The fields do not cover the whole area of the annual inundations. They are confined to the part where the flood is fertilizing; where it leaves behind it a fine, useful clay which keeps the store of moisture for several months. In other places the current is too rapid. It furrows the soil, leaves large holes in it like the lônes in the flood-area of the Rhone, and sweeps away the barriers; or the water brings sterile sand which it deposits in long stretches; or again, if it is not drained away in time and evaporates on the spot, it deposits the salts it contains, and the land, looking as if it had a white leprosy, becomes unfit for vegetation.

The floods begin in summer, during November or December. They are caused by the rain-storms in the Tucumán district, and are very irregular. Some of the houses are evacuated, and others are protected by walls of earth, which are raised from hour to hour according to the rise of the waters. Behind these walls the people await the abatement of the flood. When the mud which is left behind has the proper consistency, they till it and sow wheat. The wheat grows in the winter, and is harvested in November quickly, so that the fresh flood may not overtake it.

The caprices of the flood compel them frequently to change the sites of their houses and fields. The ancient village of Loreto was evacuated after a flood, and is now merely a mass of deserted ruins. Round the naked trunks of the algarrobas, killed by excessive deposits of sand or salt, are uniform colonies of plants of the same age and the same species, which invade the area where the adult scrub has been destroyed. The mill has been rebuilt less than a mile away, and has not lost its customers, who have raised their ranchos some distance away. The insecurity of the plots has prevented the development of small ownership. The farmers are tenants of the ranches, which stretch from the river to a considerable distance in the interior.

The use of bañados for agriculture is of long standing. It probably goes back to the pre-Columbian period. Father Dobritzhoffer, who is the first to refer clearly to it, compares the Rio Dulce to the Nile[44]; and in point of fact, the bañados have some resemblance to farming in Pharaonic Egypt, while there is nothing like them in the irrigated zones of the Andean valleys. The bañados were then devoted to the cultivation of wheat and pumpkins. The pumpkin, which is of American origin, had not yet been eliminated by wheat, which was introduced by the Spaniards. The wheat produced in the bañados maintained a fairly active export trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the bañados were at times called, with some exaggeration, the "granary of the Vice-royalty." It is difficult to trace accurately the movements of the population of the bañados because of the constant changes of the administrative areas in the province of Santiago. The total population of the province is not now more than three per cent. of the total population of Argentina, but its comparative importance was much greater in the middle of the nineteenth century (nearly eight per cent. at the census of 1861). The departments of Loreto, Atamisqui, and Salavina on the Rio Dulce, which live mainly on the estates of the bañados, comprised 46,000 inhabitants in 1861, and only 43,000 in 1895. The Woodbine Parish map and Hutchinson's description clearly give one an impression of a dense population in the area of the bañados. I refer elsewhere to the antiquity and constancy of the streams of temporary immigration which spread the population of the bañados over a large part of the territory of Argentina.[45] The temporary emigration of the Santiagueños is distributed amongst most of the provinces of central and northern Argentina, but it is chiefly of interest in connection with the frontier region. The Santiagueño is a woodman above all else, and the forest area has the advantage over the other labour-markets of wanting workers at all seasons, summer or winter, whereas the sugar-cane harvest at Tucumán and the harvest in the south only last a few months. They emigrate from the bañados to Tucumán in May; to Córdoba and Santa Fé in October, November and December; but to the forests of the Chaco all the year round.