INCIHUSA   20883
INSTITUTO DE CIENCIAS HUMANAS, SOCIALES Y AMBIENTALES
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
capítulos de libros
Título:
The BID-CONICET loan: A case of financial dependency of Science public policy during the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983)
Autor/es:
BEKERMAN, FABIANA; ALGAÑARAZ VICTOR
Libro:
Academic dependency: the challange of building autonomous social sciences in the South
Editorial:
EDIUNC-SEPHIS
Referencias:
Lugar: Mendoza; Año: 2011;
Resumen:
On March 24th, 1976, the Argentine Armed Forces perpetrated a coup d’état against the constitutional government, launching a violent takeover of state institutions at their different levels and the imprisonment, and even disappearance, of union leaders, political activists, journalists, and intellectuals who were considered “suspects.” Up to that moment, scientific research was mostly concentrated in public universities and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET). During the dictatorship there were actions aimed at shrinking universities and selectively expanding other spaces of research within CONICET. In a short time, public universities were occupied by the military and their research activity was decimated. The military government implemented actions tending to shrink university enrollment and reduce teaching staff, accompanied by ideological persecution and mass layoffs. The result was the expulsion of thousands of teachers, a sudden reduction of the student body, and closure of research institutes/centers and undergraduate departments. There were also processes of purification/expulsion of researchers and internal reorganization at CONICET; there was a process of staff renewal after which the leadership of the institution fell in the hands of researchers who accumulated executive positions at different administrative levels. However, once the entire field was disciplined, the Armed Forces sought to remove every line of research from higher education institutions and to channel it through CONICET. Our empirical and bibliographic survey has allowed us to show that there was a transference of resources from national universities to the Council, causing the shrinking of the former and the expansion of the latter (Bekerman, 2010; Bekerman, 2009). CONICET increased its staff, multiplied the number of institutes, and implemented a decentralization program based on the creation of Regional Centers of Scientific and Technological Research in the interior of the country. This authoritarian scientific policy was supported, to a large extent, by a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) obtained in 1979. The general goal of this work is, therefore, to analyze the role played by foreign aid to consolidate the institutional expansion of CONICET to the detriment of public universities. We argue that this policy of decentralization of the national scientific system was based upon a direct intervention on the scientific field implemented with funds received through foreign aid. This analysis inevitably brings us to discuss the endogenous capacity of academic fields from the periphery to determine their own science policy and, for this reason, the question about—financial—dependency will be the thread of this work. We propose to explain the role of the loan by analyzing, from the perspective of critical political economy, the role of multilateral organizations during the dictatorships in the Southern Cone. According to Vivares (2010), IADB was the third pillar of the Inter-American system along with OAS and CEPAL—these organizations structured economic policy in the region. We will try to show that the Argentine military government, deeply rooted in its authoritarian foundations, promoted a conservative modernization of the science policy based on the expansion and decentralization of CONICET, which deepened the hiatus between the Council and public universities. We will argue that this kind of authoritarian developmentalism was possible because of the IADB loan.