María Eugenia Estenssoro and Silvia Naishtat met in 1983. They began their journalistic career as "young girls", debuting journalism along with freedom of expression. They worked together on several projects and their latest research, Laboratorio Uruguay, reveals the keys to understanding the region's more egalitarian and prosperous democracy, but also the reasons why many Argentines choose their land to live. It is a choral book, with voices ranging from Julio Bocca to Paul Elberse and from Pepe Mujica to Luis Lacalle Pou, which tell what Uruguay is.
Maria Eugenia Estenssoro and Silvia Naishtat. Photo Guillermo Rodriguez Adami.
Why make a book about Uruguay?
–María Eugenia Estenssoro: This is a political book and this year we are celebrating 40 years of democracy in Argentina; Uruguayans in two years also have their anniversary, like almost all of Latin America, which in the 80s with enormous enthusiasm embraced democracy as a way out of political violence, poverty, instability. Forty years later there are very few countries – and perhaps Uruguay is almost the only one in the entire region – that can say that they are much better off today than in the eighties. It is better in political terms, it has much more consolidated parties and civil society, better political dialogue than it had at that time, a much more prosperous and stable economy and it also has a society and a leadership hopeful for the future. It has no polarization, no rift, and all the things we see not only in Latin America, but in the rest of the world. And there's another thing: there's not that hopelessness and that disillusionment with democracy. So, choosing Uruguay had to do with that. It also had to do with the flight of Argentine elites, with the good management of the pandemic. All of that caught our attention. Why Uruguay achieved what no country – perhaps Chile can show remarkable economic progress, even poverty reduction, but failed to make a more open and inclusive political system. The ideal of progress of which Alfonsin spoke, "with democracy one educates, heals and progresses", we do not resign ourselves to the ideal of economic, social, civic progress, passing by as in Macondo, because we have everything: a very talented society, natural resources galore, climates. We do not resign ourselves to failure and to being part of the most unequal region on the planet. Argentina in these years multiplied poverty by five, by ten. That's why Uruguay, let's see what they did to learn, not to lacerate us. It is the smallest country, with less population, with fewer resources, surrounded by giants (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico), we are in a very delicate situation and they are advancing.
Since 2020, Argentine migration to Uruguay is getting bigger, but above all those who leave are technological entrepreneurs, professionals, owners of powerful economic groups that you mention in the book. How do you analyze this phenomenon? If in the last three years 30,60 Argentines left, what are the similarities and differences with the brain drain of the <>s?
–Silvia Naishtat: We had written a book called Innovative Argentina (2017) where we told the emergence of these new Argentine multinationals that are the unicorns, Mercado Libre, Globant, OLX, Despegar, and suddenly we saw that those who had founded those companies were leaving, that golden generation that Argentina needed so much because it put it in the knowledge economy. which is today a third export sector of the country with 8 billion dollars of exports, was leaving. And it is not minor that the owner of a company does not live in the country, it is a fact because where he is going to make his decisions about where the company is going, investment, technological innovation. The other issue is that it was not the first time that this phenomenon of flight occurred in Argentina. They always left. The intellectuals since the time of another dictatorship, that of Rosas, then comes the first brain drain in 66, the Night the long sticks, the dictatorship of Onganía that expels its best cadres from the university: (César) Milstein who goes to London and then wins the Nobel Prize, (Manuel) Sadosky who had brought Clementina, the first computer to Latin America, Uruguay goes and forms the computer career there and gives the seed so that today Uruguay is the first exporter of software per capita in the world. Then came the large agricultural producers before 2008, who helped transform Uruguay from a pastoral country into an agricultural country at the technological frontier of agriculture, because they do agriculture for the environment. And with this flight of the golden generation we think why people who can live in London, Paris, New York go here just half an hour by plane, an hour by boat. Partly because they want to be close, there is the hope of being able to return, of not breaking everything, and partly taxes weighed, the pandemic weighed, because of the feeling of total closure that there was in Argentina ... But it also weighed the possibility of survival of their own companies, of being able to operate. We have the case of Satellogic, which is a company that wants to make a constellation of economic satellites of an Argentine mathematician, Emiliano Kargieman, trained at the public university whose idea was incubated in INVAP, which is a public company in the province of Río Negro, left. It manufactures in the free zone of Montevideo because to make those satellites that are the size of a kitchen, you have 75% of critical inputs that you have to import, and to be able to put them into orbit you need the signature of five ministers.
–M.E.E.: He set up the factory and today Uruguay in its videos promoting the country says "we manufacture nanosatellites".
–S.N.: The creation of value that Argentina has and how it expels that value through the obstacles. Today Uruguay is a technology center, it has also developed special institutes where the State has a very active participation, they have enormous public policies and incentives.
But many Uruguayans also leave their country, it is a very high emigration for the region.
–M.M.E.: Uruguay has 20% of the population living mostly in Argentina, the United States and Europe, but the bulk of the entire Uruguayan diaspora lives in Argentina. It is a phenomenon that began in the 50s, 60s and Uruguay experienced great stagnation. What we say is not praise to Uruguay, how wonderful. It was an economically stagnant country until the 90s, which expelled population until after the very serious crisis they had in 2002. They took the measures that we did not take in 2001, they made the adjustment, they did not default, they paid 100% everything they owed, they complied and came out of that crisis strengthened with a very strong currency, with a very solid macroeconomic base and their economy began to modernize. It's true what you say, but that changed. Before people left Uruguay and today they want to live in Uruguay. Life is hard for the middle class and they have 20% poverty in childhood – although 10% at a general level, compared to almost 40 of us and it is more or less the paradigm of Latin America, half in poverty and an elite that lives it more or less well and a middle class that is small – Uruguay does not have that model. But it needs to generate more wealth and this path of innovation can be.
–S.N.: It is a country that has practically no industry, that is, innovation allows you to have investments without the need to generate industrial plants, they are very labor-intensive companies, you need many people, developers, creatives, etc., so it is an alternative, a great way for Uruguay. This country that was not industrial just took advantage of something that Argentina somehow discarded, which are the pulp mills, because the two countries in the 60s, when there was in Latin America the import substitution model promoted by ECLAC in Chile and one of the central imports of the countries was paper. We did not produce paper despite the fact that trees grow here much faster than in Europe, due to the milder climate. At that time the states of both Uruguay and Argentina, such as Chile and Brazil, generated a whole policy of afforestation with public funds, they paid for you to forest, and we had huge plantations and also cellulosic plants in Argentina. Uruguay also had its huge plantations. In the year 2000 the Finns who wanted to expand their pulp mills outside the world, because they were the leaders in paper manufacturing, think of Latin America and discard Argentina, with the happy coincidence that Uruguay had a forestry engineer, Carlos Faroppa, who had taken courses in Finland and Norway. and from there there is a whole procedure for the Finns to go to Uruguay, but that required a reciprocal investment agreement, a series of requirements on the part of the Europeans in the sense of respect for the rules of the game, tax exemptions. And Uruguay with many difficulties, because the Frente Amplio was opposed, in 2005 achieved something that had begun with President Batlle in 2000. And the first plant is installed at the time of Tabaré (Vázquez). Today it is 4% of Uruguay's GDP. They are the highest investments in its history: the first was for 1500 million dollars, they have just put into operation the third plant in the interior of Uruguay, on the Rio Negro, which is generating the transformation of an economy that was very poor towards the interior of the country. They are almost 3,400 million dollars, it will be the largest and most modern in the world. And as for environmentalists, they have a very strict law of renewal of plants and native plants. That is very important, because the world rejects you if you do not have a level of native forest implantation of that type of export. Its first export is meat, with this third pulp mill they will exceed their meat exports with almost two thousand eight hundred million dollars in cellulose.
Maria Eugenia Estenssoro and Silvia Naishtat. Photo Guillermo Rodriguez Adami.
How does Laboratorio Uruguay dialogue with innovative Argentina?
M.M.E.: Many of the protagonists of the book are gone, and we can demonize them "left, unpatriotic", or because they did not pay taxes.
Uruguay Laboratory, by Silvia Naishtat and M. Eugenia Estenssoro (South American).
Marcos Galperín is always mentioned, but there are others.
–M.M.E.: Galperín is the Messi of technology not in South America, but in the world. Governments, instead of saying what we can do to have the best technological selection in the century of technology and science, expel it. Our president meets with Pablo Moyano, who obstructed the distribution centers of Mercado Libre, saying that they are national heroes, and expels Galperín who does not ask for subsidies, that all his life since he started in the late 90s he could have created his company in the United States, where he studied, but he wanted to show that from Argentina you could create world-class multinationals, And that's what he did. How can it be that we expelled scientists in the 60s, in 2020 entrepreneurs, we are expelling talent that is needed to develop. This flight of the elites can amputate, if it lasts and is not reversed, the economic recovery of Argentina.
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