Argentina: New Breed on the Pampas

As men measure their landed wealth in Latin America, no class ever exhibited such fabled riches as Argentina's cattle barons. On the grassy pampas stretching south, west and north from Buenos Aires, the more affluent estanciero could once gallop for days without finding the end of his land. His animals numbered in the tens of thousands, and people across the world wistfully spoke of being "as rich as an Argentine."

All that is changing now. The great baronial manor houses are still standing and there are still one or two spreads that make Texas' King Ranch look like a truck garden.* But the vast green bulk of the pampas is being crosshatched by fences and boundary roads into smaller and smaller holdings. So, too, is the Midas-rich patrón of yesteryear giving way to hundreds of relatively small farmers and cattlemen who count themselves lucky to make a middle-class living. In the late 1930s, one-fifth of Argentina, or 139 million acres, belonged to just 2,000 families. Today, says Gustavo Pueyrredón, vice president of Argentina's stockbreeders' society, "the average farmholding in Buenos Aires province scarcely exceeds 2,000 acres."

Pots of Silver. Land reform, that ever-popular rallying cry, was not responsible for the estancieros' downfall. They were victims of history and their own excesses. The original estancias were carved from the wilderness in the early 19th century by an adventurous breed of Spanish, British, Italian and Irish immigrants. Their sons and grandsons made their own legends by squandering the wealth. Argentines knew them as ninos bien, the wellborn children.

Some lived in Spanish castles and French cháteaux so opulently furnished that even the chamber pots were made of silver. Nearly every tree on the pampas was laboriously planted by man. The ultimate status symbol was a eucalyptus-tree drive leading up to the manse, and some of them ran straight as a string for seven miles.

The peones and gauchos did the ranching, while the gentry cut a swath through Europe. Returning from a trip in the 1920s, the four sons of one family brought home a complete French brothel plus a year's supply of champagne and páté de foie gras—and in case that palled, they also brought 100 Ibs. of opium. Another turn-of-the-century estanciero in Patagonia got his kicks by staging Indian hunts with his chums; well-buttressed by booze, they rode out in parties of a dozen or so to slaughter the nomadic tribesmen who shared their pampas, and once had a grand day massacring an entire tribe they cornered in a seaside cove.

At War with Perón. The estancieros' undoing began in 1944 with the rise of Dictator Juan Perón, who promised his lower-class descamisados (shirtless ones) steak on every plate and decreed meat prices as low as 6¢ a Ib. When the landowners opposed him, Per¶n ordered prohibitive land taxes, forcing the breakup of many ranches, decreed 60% wage boosts for workers, lured away cow hands by promising still higher wages in newly established industries. The most far-reaching legislation of all was an inheritance law that provided that each heir must get an equal share of the land, thus assuring the eventual breakdown of the huge estancias.