The Policies for Domestic Commercial Aviation in Argentina: between the Public Service Logic and Efficiency (1950-1970)

PIGLIA, MELINA

L'aviation et son impact sur les temps et l'space

Edition Le Manuscrit Savoirs

Lugar: París; Año: 2019; p. 101 - 122

This article aims to analyze domestic commercial aviation policies in Argentina, between 1950 and 1970, a period of accelerating technological change as well as of global standardization of procedures and tariffs, since those policies reveal tensions and oscillations between (two ways of understanding aviation): economic efficiency, on the one hand, and public service and the affirmation of sovereignty, on the other. The article characterizes these tensions and their material implications and shows how they were linked to the different projects of modernization and development, within the context of acute political convulsions in Argentina and Latin America. Since the late nineteenth century, Argentina was the most dynamic, industrialized and modern South American economy, seeking to achieve a regional leadership, and by 1950 it was one of the first countries on the continent with a locally based airline and would be the first with jet-propelled aircraft. Air traffic formed part of a wider political project, initially defined by economic nationalism and, from the end of the 1950s, by the concern for development and modernization. The history of commercial aviation in Argentina, and in Latin America in general, which combines social, political, technological and economic aspects, has been unexplored. This works aims to contribute to this history, highlighting the links between politics, processes of territorialization and a renewed view on transport as provided by the ?mobility turn? (Cresswell, 2006; Urry and Sheller, 2006). Moreover, it seeks to contribute to the debates about the role of the states in Latin American processes of modernization, to show how transport played a central role.