Bahía Blanca as a wake-up call

The downpour devastating the port city of Bahía Blanca during last weekend and beyond has already swept away homes and lives, but it should also serve to sweep away any illusion that state responsibilities can be abdicated in the name of the laws of the market or a fatalistic acceptance of the forces of nature. But before looking at those state responsibilities, it is necessary to address the responsibility of everybody else in the name of common humanity, in the face of what is essentially a human tragedy. A disaster hitting young and old alike (ranging from the babies barely rescued from a basement maternity ward to a majority of the fatalities being senior citizens aged between 78 and 101, mostly in retirement homes) although not so much rich and poor, unlike the recent Californian fires – core areas of the city recovered much faster than mostly low-income neighbourhoods in outlying districts like Ingeniero White and General Daniel Cerri. We can only endorse the various charity efforts already being launched and urge their support.

The aforementioned differential impact of the flooding within Bahía Blanca may serve as a starting-point for disputing the argument that the sacrifice of public works is not too high a price to pay if it means a balanced budget. The floodwaters hitting zones like Ingeniero White and Cerri so much harder can be directly attributed to unpaved streets in these lower-lying areas, given the city’s uneven terrain, because the run-off from the higher sectors down the slopes erodes the dirt roads, transporting sediment which ends up blocking the local drainage systems.

The resulting disaster should teach the government that just because the Kirchners allegedly stole much of the money allocated to highways via Lázaro Báez, this does not mean that roads should not be built. The farmers congregating at Expoagro in San Nicolás in the past week would be the first to echo the complaint about unpaved roads – the February rains (while nowhere near the 300 millimetres or 12 inches inundating Bahía Blanca in just half a day) have proved a severe bottleneck for the harvest by turning the dirt roads in much of the country into impassable mud. Adding the government’s inexplicable nonchalance towards the Hidrovía waterway tender transporting some 80 percent of the country’s farm exports, its attitude towards rural connectivity leaves much to be desired.

The tragedy in Bahía Blanca should banish any idea that infrastructure can be omitted from public spending without consequence. Sometimes it can, although by no means always – the government’s logic more or less works in the energy sector where Vaca Muerta shale is proving such a goldmine that investors are only too happy to fund the needed infrastructure privately, thus making the previous government’s Néstor Kirchner (now renamed Perito Francisco Pascasio Moreno) gas pipeline in retrospect a needless squandering of public money prompted by an ideological dogmatism inverse to Javier Milei’s anarcho-capitalism. Yet such cases are the exception rather than the rule. Most public services (not least the roads and drainage so pivotal to Bahía Blanca’s tragedy) are simply unprofitable without tolls or charges which would defy the law of supply and demand.

Laissez faire pushback against state intervention is worldwide and Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof’s “estado presente” slogan is widely mocked (even if he headed to the stricken city five days before President Milei), especially in the many areas where the state is absent, but Milei’s anarcho-capitalist frenzies throw out the baby with the bathwater here, as his “state transformation” does on so many fronts – a spendthrift and inefficient kleptocracy manipulated by a predatory corporate caste is one variant of the state but not the only one. Milei can even have his cake and eat it too because his declared objective of reducing public spending to 25 percent of Gross Domestic Product still leaves plenty of money which should not exclude the possibility of an austere but efficient state fulfilling its basic functions. Public spending can be totally eliminated on the basis of a country being made completely defenceless, justice awarded to the highest bidder and education and health for those who can afford it, but how could such a country possibly belong to the developed world?

The cost of rebuilding Bahía Blanca has already triggered a debate, ranging from the initial 10 billion pesos sent by the government for immediate relief, to the 200 billion pesos later committed and the 400-plus billion pesos estimated by the city’s mayor, but the whole question of infrastructure should lead to a wider debate.