Plan to Move Capital : Argentina: It Faces Heart Transplant

God is everywhere in Argentina, the saying goes, but he keeps office hours in Buenos Aires. He and everybody else.

Buenos Aires is the Big Apple, the heart and the soul of Argentina--and the nation’s biggest headache.

Once, hundreds of thousands of European immigrants flooded into this “Paris of the New World.” Now, the most dynamic among their descendants, from carpenters to scientists, emigrate when they can. The city is an exciting, vivacious but aging beauty, joints stiff, arteries clogged, breathing labored.

The government wants out, too. President Raul Alfonsin has announced plans to abandon burdened Buenos Aires for the clear, cold, Patagonian emptiness 500 miles to the south. He hopes to reawaken pioneer enterprise and recover national dynamism now submerged by urban melancholia.

Will Encompass 2 Towns

If Congress approves the move as Alfonsin expects, Argentina’s new capital will encompass the towns of Viedma and Carmen de Patagones, which have managed to accumulate a combined population of only 50,000 over 207 years of amiable anonymity on opposite banks of the Rio Negro. In their big-sky setting, they are about as far from Buenos Aires as the moon--though only 70 minutes by air.

The decision to relocate the government--and with it the Argentine future--is a gamble by Alfonsin. He seeks to redress historic imbalances of wealth and power while simultaneously opening a major new pole of development and challenging an urban, middle-class society to conquer its sparsely settled frontier.

By moving its government to the hinterland, Argentina would be doing what Gargantuan Brazil and petite Belize have already done, and what the presidents of other overcentralized Latin American nations as disparate as Mexico and Peru yearn to do.

Too Big and Unwieldy

Historic, once graceful capitals like Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Lima have mushroomed beyond productive size--in population, in the centralization they embody, and in their disproportionate clout in every sphere of national enterprise. Swollen by internal migration, throttled by bureaucracies, prey to urban ills by the bushel, the old centers are intractable roadblocks to effective government.

What is singular about Alfonsin’s pioneer vision is that the planned capital switch is less an example of nation-building than of nation re-building, a powerful symbol of a presidential quest for restored confidence in a once-sturdy nation that lost its way.

Proclaiming a “Second Republic,” Alfonsin also seeks to reform a dated Constitution, modernize a secretive judicial system, decentralize and energize a comatose public administration and exchange Congress for a Parliament with a French-Italian-style prime minister.

‘New Mental Frontiers’

“The attempt is to create conditions for a new republic that offers new mental frontiers to the Argentine people,” Alfonsin said in a nationwide address laying out his plans.

In the 19th Century, Argentines fought a civil war between those who sought a centralized, unitary country and those who preferred a U.S.-style federal system. The federalists won, moved to Buenos Aires with all the other uptown folk and became de facto unitarians. Now, Alfonsin wants to go back to basics.

In the Argentine context, mighty Buenos Aires today is New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles all rolled into one overwhelming package: the center of government, industry, business, commerce, news and culture, in addition to being the port through which Argentina trades with the world.

35% Live in Capital

About 35% of Argentina’s 30 million people live in metropolitan Buenos Aires. They hold 45% of all jobs in business and services nationwide and 48% of all industrial jobs, by Alfonsin’s count.

The mayor of Buenos Aires, whose metropolis has the most to lose, but perhaps also the most to gain, called Alfonsin’s initiative “courageous . . . revolutionary.”

Public reaction also appears positive, but there are those portenos (port people, as Buenos Aires residents call themselves) who are not impressed.

One politician called the idea “a smokescreen” to sidetrack criticism of the government’s economic policies. Another denounced Alfonsin’s idea as “inopportune,” saying there were many more pressing national issues to address. Trotskyites complained at the injustice of “removing political power from the center of the class struggle.”

Some Question Cost

Some critics have dwelled on the cost, estimated by Argentine newspapers at between $2 billion and $10 billion, in a nation that is plagued by prolonged recession and hard-pressed to meet payments on its $50-billion foreign debt.

“It doesn’t matter what it costs. Whatever it costs is worth it,” said the populist governor of a northern province, echoing the delight among Argentine provincianos who have long chafed over what they view as the capital’s neglect of their interests.

There are traditionalists, of course, who remind Alfonsin that despite such annoyances as what he calls an “asphyxiating bureaucracy,” Buenos Aires remains a metropolis of superlatives.

A European facade, broad avenues and gracious swatches of green help rank it among the most attractive of the hemisphere’s major cities. Uncounted visitors and residents alike will go to their graves remembering Buenos Aires as the home of the world’s best steaks, even if they are cooked amid the silence of the world’s worst telephones.

Must Change Mindset

One of Alfonsin’s principal targets in an assault on national decadence he has waged since taking office in December, 1983, is the capital mindset.

The archetypal porteno is careful to remember his tailor’s first name, but wouldn’t be caught dead in a hardware store. As triste-- sad--as his tango, more talker than doer, the porteno views the rest of Argentina the same way New Yorkers regard that vastness west of the Hudson River.

“Populate Patagonia” has long been a national slogan in one of world’s few underpopulated countries, but portenos see no rush to exchange cinemas and subways for saddles and sheep.

In its broadest context, Alfonsin’s dream is an attempt to jolt Argentines out of bittersweet nostalgia for a better yesterday with the prospect of an adventuresome, fruitful tomorrow.

Strong Medicine

It is strong medicine for a stubborn patient.

For most of this century, Argentina was the doyen of South America, leader in everything from industrial output to per capita income, from caloric intake to educational achievement. Indeed, except at times of trauma such as the 1982 Falklands Islands war with Britain and the current search for a regional solution to foreign debt, Argentina has historically found more in common with Western Europe than with the rest of Latin America.

At the end of World War II, which it observed in prosperous neutrality, Argentina was one of the richest countries on Earth. Pretensions survive, but Buenos Aires’ golden age is decades gone. Like the rest of Argentina, it has been running down while others have been growing up.

In the 1950s, Argentina’s gross national product was bigger than neighboring Brazil’s. Today, Brazil’s is five times bigger. Sao Paulo state alone, with a population about the same as Argentina’s, has an economy twice as big.

Industry Stagnates

Argentine industry, a Latin American pioneer, has scarcely grown as a percentage of national production in 50 years. What is more, it is obsolete and inefficient, exporting only 5% of its production. Argentine-made new cars cost twice what they would anywhere else.

“The modern world is sending us a message,” wrote one newspaper columnist in an example of current self-criticism. “Senores, we don’t need you. All you can offer we have in abundance, probably better and certainly cheaper.”

After prolonged economic misadventure aggravated by high inflation and accompanied over the years by demagogery, terrorism and state counterterrorism, Argentine living standards have slumped to levels first achieved nearly a generation ago. Beggars, once a rarity, are now a fixture of downtown life.

Argentina’s Brain Drain

By some guesses, as many as 2 million of Argentina’s best and brightest have emigrated, among them biologist Cesar Milstein, Argentina’s last Nobel Prize winner, who now lives in Britain.

The national decline worsened while military dictatorships ruled between 1976 and 1983. Still, a goodly number of Argentines are wealthy, even if their country no longer is. One American banker here estimates that Argentines hold as much as $20 billion in foreign bank deposits.

If Alfonsin can woo skeptics’ money and energies to nation rebuilding, he will have won his gamble even if the proposed new capital never approaches the glamour or sophistication of Buenos Aires.

Alfonsin announced his plans as a calculated surprise. Now, his government is preparing formal legislation for submission to Congress by mid-year. Alfonsin is so confident of winning a majority there, his aides say, that he is already planning to spend two days a week at work in Viedma, beginning early next year.

A Bonn-Like New City

At this early stage, planners envision an unpretentious Bonn-like new city of low-level buildings nestled amid open spaces projecting the image of a brawny country with limitless horizons.

Land values have rocketed in the proposed new capital district, and there is a beat of national excitement about the notion of having a backland capital. Alfonsin must labor mightily to nurture it. Inevitably, in the bars and sidewalk cafes of Buenos Aires, there are portenos already complaining how impossibly dull life will be, down there at the end of the Earth.