Argentina

A country that was among the ten richest in the world a century ago and has spent the time since arguing about what happened. The Rio de la Plata had little silver and few settled indigenous peoples, so Spain neglected it until 1776, and after independence in 1816 the interior provinces and Buenos Aires fought for decades over whether the port's customs revenue belonged to the nation. The Conquest of the Desert in the 1870s took Patagonia from the Mapuche by force. Refrigerated shipping then made the pampas one of the world's great sources of beef and wheat, drawing some six million European immigrants, mostly Italian and Spanish, who remade the population and the accent. Juan Peron's governments from 1946 built a welfare state and a labour movement that has dominated politics ever since, for and against. The military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 disappeared around thirty thousand people and lost the Falklands war, and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have marched weekly since 1977. Repeated debt crises and inflation have followed. Buenos Aires holds a third of the population. Aconcagua is the highest peak outside Asia. The country is the eighth largest in the world by area and has about forty-six million people. Tango came out of the port districts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Iguazu Falls straddle the Brazilian border. Argentina claims a sector of Antarctica and the Falklands. Yerba mate is drunk almost universally. Around a third of the country is Patagonia, holding a small fraction of its people.

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