Doing business in Argentina: A constant feeling of crisis
inc.com
inc.com
BA is beautiful but tragic, there are massive shanties surrounding a city designed after Paris and built 100 years ago, when Argentina was among the wealthiest nations in the world.
If you don't think politics matters, study Argentina and the way their elites, inspired by the statist Peronista ideology, have ransacked the nation and its people.
It quotes Alberto Cavallo, who's father was the minister of economy that led Argentina to the 2000's crisis...
I live in BA and the situation isn't as bad as the article describes it.
Full article with comments: http://www.inc.com/magazine/201106/doing-business-in-argenti...
That's like saying, "Based on the typical news about Miami (or Anchorage), you will get eaten by polar bears and die of hypothermia".
Mexico is not South America, and it's nowhere close to Argentina. The distance between Juarez and BA is about the same as the distance between London and Seoul. Seriously. Worlds apart.
You can't generalize South America. It's bloody ginormous, and has far more cultural diversity than North America. It's far from homogenous. There are some places in South America that are dangerous. Most aren't. Similarly, you don't judge San Francisco by Detroit.
I've travelled through Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Buenos Aires is basically Paris or Madrid, but a little run down and depressing (much better night life, though). Bolivia is mostly alpine desert in the south and jungle in the north, and almost all poor. Peru ranges from modern metropolis (Lima) to shacks on a beach (Mancora), to mountains, jungles, etc. Ecuador is the only place I ever felt unsafe, and only in parts of Quito and Guayaquil. The worst places for crime and personal safety were apparently Venezuela and parts of Brazil.
Anyways, the point is you're trying to shoehorn an entire continent with dozens of countries and hundreds of cultures into a single mental schema, and that's just a dumb thing to do. It would be like saying "Asian culture" and thinking you could fit China, North Korea, Japan, Thailand, and India in one label.
As far as the violence goes, it tends to be cyclical. Certainly in parts of Columbia FARC activity is still a major issue, and Venezuela is bad for petty crime and assaults. You get the occasional Shining Path incident in Peru, but it's very low-level. Bolivia has regular strikes that bring the riot police out in La Paz, but the rest of the country seemed perfectly safe. Never had a problem in Argentina, or heard of anyone having problems in Chile, Uruguay, or Paraguay. Brazil is mostly kosher, but I heard of a few people getting robbed, or more likely picking up a girl from a club and getting mugged after.
But seriously, do go down if you get a chance. I had a blast there.
However, at the political level, generally speaking, it's run by morons from the top to the bottom. All the major government offices are filled with cronies. no one in government will speak on the record (i have friends who work for bloomberg, washington post, al jazeera, etc who confirm this) as they have little real power. See this week's example of the president spending massive amounts of energy attacking the UK for the Falklands (subtitled in english) - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/falkl...
She takes this approach to every issue - blocking ships in the port for capricious reasons, like the recent rumor that no Apple products are getting in recently out of retribution for the fact that Foxconn is going to build a factory in Brazil instead of Argentina. They recently held a US Air Force plane for a month here on a training exercise invited by the AR government because they didn't declare the morphine in the safety kit, claiming that the US Air Force wanted to sneak drugs into the country. It's the kind of behavior for which I'd ground my teenager (if i had one)...
Unions extort even relatively small businesses. i have a friend with a shipping company 40 employees and he was recently scared for his life due to threats from the trucker's union, which rules the country in many ways; the leader having been put in place by the Kirchners but then he became too powerful. Another friend who runs an import/export business from (an asian country) who has to pay massive (you have NO idea how big) stacks of cash to get his containers through each week, every container.
And yet... my company is small and we don't have to worry about the larger political climate. And there's a thriving tech scene. We're organizing RubyConf Argentina and expect to easily have 400-500 attendees, making it the largest Spanish language Ruby event ever... Startups are growing here, there's starting to be more local VC money, etc. It's a great place to be if you're in certain industries, if you are a foreigner wanting to bootstrap your startup, etc.
But a lot of what the article says is true - the fix is in; to flourish in Argentina you have to be a) part of the small middle class whose parents at least have some real estate, b) A foreigner, c) from a wealthy elite family that can afford, literally, to ignore politics, or d) one of those guys with the cushy government positions clapping in that video.
P.D.: I happen to work at one of the companies you are outsourcing to :p
I remember a simple case showing that corruption is everywhere and the style of life of Argentina: there were new scanners in the airport to speed up the control of the luggages... at the end the personnel were using it to steal travels stuff. We are talking about small "spontaneous" organized crime inside the airport based on high technology scanners. Obviously there was someone in charge to control their work... and all was filmed.
Original in Spanish: http://spanish.martinvarsavsky.net/general/porque-ya-no-voy-...
English automated translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...
This country has lots and lots of issues, corruption, you name it, but is not that bad at all. In fact, it has improved a little bit since 2001. And what is even more important to this place, it has a little but important entrepreneur community (Pallermo Valley, for instance).
Perhaps, constant adversity helps people to sail agains the wind or any other cliché you might love. And don't start talking about politics without knowing, we were never one of the richest nations of the world, just a couple of very rich people that thought we did and made a couple of history books about it ;).
I can understand the "it's not that bad at all" sentiment from a personal perspective but it doesn't mean that things aren't bad on a rational, comparative basis.
I grew up in Poland, a country at the time under communist regime. It would take a book to describe all the ways the economy and life was fucked up compared to west countries.
It really was a terrible country to live in. But at the same time 40 million people did and on some level our lives weren't all that different from people in richer, cleaner countries where people could buy toilet paper every day. People have amazing ability to adapt to very adverse environments.
From reading the article I get the impression that Argentina is truly, factually fucked up country, compared to other countries, just like Poland was under communism.
While your reassurance that "it's not bad at all" is a testament to adaptive power of humans, unless you challenge the facts described in the article you're not very convincing.
As to your claim challenging the notion that Argentina was a rich nation, well, the rich people you speak of were very successful at rewriting the history. According to Wikipedia:
"Argentina increased in prosperity and prominence between 1880 and 1929 and emerged as one of the ten richest countries in the world, benefiting from an agricultural export-led economy as well as British and French investment. Driven by immigration and decreasing mortality the Argentine population grew fivefold and the economy 15-fold."
Sure, if you consider the top upper class as the whole country. The people never saw that kind of wealth and prosperity in those days. Field workers lived in the most absolute poverty while the owners of those fields lived in luxury and traveling abroad for vacations. North of Argentina still remains one of the poorest regions in Latin America, as it was those days. Sure, we were exporting goods everywhere. Not much was being invested on improving the well being of workers everywhere. At least, not until Peron grew to power.