The gloom is a stark contrast to the mood just a few months ago. Gaby Gandarillas, one of the club’s coordinators, remembers when as many as 300 people would fill the small hall and you could swap for anything from food to haircuts, computer maintenance or legal services. “I organized my daughter’s entire 15th birthday party by barter,” she says. At its peak, the nationwide network of barter clubs involved as many as 6 million people–one Argentine in seven. But recently the system has fallen victim to its own success, overwhelmed by the army of new poor created by the country’s devastating four-year depression. Offering little apart from secondhand clothes and electrical goods, the new arrivals dumped their unwanted possessions, cleared out the available food (the one product everyone wanted to trade for), and left. Meanwhile, the network’s growth attracted counterfeiters who reproduced the printed credits that had become a de facto currency within the network. With more fakes than real credits in circulation, hyperinflation set in. A few months ago a leather jacket at La Estacion, one of the largest barter clubs in Buenos Aires, would fetch around 150 credits, according to Susana Garcia, who offers orthopedic footwear there. Now the price is 3,000 credits. “I feel cheated,” she says. “I won’t be coming back.”
This decline mirrors the story of Argentina as a whole. For a time, barter offered an alternative to the country’s hopelessly dysfunctional real economy, which seems to get worse by the day. Nearly a quarter of the population is now officially unemployed. One in five Argentines suffers what economist Artemio Lopez calls extreme poverty, meaning they go hungry without food handouts. Amid the collapse, barter seemed one way to make ends meet. Now even that is falling, prey to the same forces that broke the traditional economy–corruption and inflation. Small wonder that some of the jobless dream of winning a spot on “Recursos Humanos,” a local TV show where viewers vote by phone to decide which of two desperate contestants is given a job.
For a country that was once the richest on the continent and believed that its European flavor set it apart from poorer neighbors, such misery has provoked much soul-searching. According to pollster Ricardo Rouvier, almost half the population describes its principal reaction to the crisis as anxiety, sadness or bitterness, compared with less than a third who feel angry. Scattered protests have been organized by impoverished street people, as well as wealthier bank depositors demanding the return of their frozen savings. But the movements have little in common and offer few proposals beyond the removal of the nation’s politicians under the popular rallying cry, “Get rid of the lot of them.”
Meanwhile, amid surging crime rates, bartering has taken on new, perverse forms. Buenos Aires’s middle classes are currently terrified by a wave of “express” kidnappings, where victims are exchanged within a few hours for just a few dollars. Many small-time crooks have been making off with live telephone cables, drain covers and bronze wall plaques, selling them off as scrap. “Devaluation means robbing a cross from a cemetery is more profitable than working,” Lopez says.
So is scavenging in the rubbish. Pepe Cordoba, who runs a recycling cooperative in the industrial wasteland around the capital, reckons that 300,000 Argentine families are living on what they can find in the nation’s trash. As night falls, the center of Buenos Aires fills with cartoneros, as these small-scale recyclers are popularly known, rummaging for wastepaper and scrap metal before the garbage vans arrive. Despite appearances, the cartoneros are not doing so badly. Demand for locally produced raw materials has soared with the peso’s devaluation. A cartonero can thus earn about $170 a month, one and a half times the average wage. Indeed, says Cordoba, “we are collecting so much raw material that we could get some local factories reopened.” Taking a lesson from the barter system, he is also working with the local council to get the cartoneros to band together to improve working conditions and boost profits by eliminating intermediaries.
Although the volume of trade on the barter network is down by as much as half this year, Carlos de Sanzo, one of the original organizers, believes such self-help is the only way out of the country’s crisis. They also believe that barter will be resurrected, phoenixlike, in September. That’s when a new trading credit will be issued that is much harder to counterfeit. To encourage users to put their credits back into the market, rather than hoard them, the notes will be replaced every year at a 12 percent discount. “We want to create a different sort of currency that is simple and discourages speculation,” de Sanzo says, adding that barter is still growing in popularity in the provinces, where the system has been less affected by fakes.
If such optimism is justified, Argentina’s new barter network could become more than a stopgap way of coping with economic collapse. It could hold the makings of a solution to Argentina’s crisis. At least, that’s how Elida Gomez sees it, a doctor who’s organizing a medical-insurance program in Mendoza province, payable in credits. “Our system is generating new leaders who solved the problem of hunger,” she says, “and are not corruptible because they are motivated by solidarity.” Maybe so. But even de Sanzo acknowledges that Gomez’s barter network came close to collapse. Speculation set in. Commodities that were most wanted, such as food, proved less plentiful than articles people needed less, suggesting a fundamental imbalance between supply and demand. And in the end, barter is barter–a primitive foundation, at best, for a modern economy. If such a system is indeed the country’s best hope, pity poor Argentina.
