Customs tariffs and sugar industry in Argentina. The sugar speech concerning the protectionism at the end of the 19th century

Abstract

The present article examines the role recovered by the Sugar Argentine Center in the construction of a sugar speech at the end of the 19th century. In this respect, we warn that the defense of the protectionism constituted one of the central topics of the sugar rhetoric, while the customs rates were considered to be a necessary condition to assure the industrial development understood as the route of the economic independence. The industrial implantation was associated with the “civilization” and the “progress. Thus, the establishment and consolidation of this type of economic activities were presented as a patriotic labor that was allowing the advance of the Central government in territories that were turning out to be dominated by the “barbarism”. In turn, in this allegation there turned out to be clearly delineated the functions that the public powers had to adopt with regard to the industrial sector. Hereby, one was claiming that the State had  to contemplate the interests of the set of country, and not associating the progress with the limits of the plain of the pampas. Though it is true that many of these argumentative lines they were present in the previous decade, the same ones they were systematized in the speech of the sugar corporation and of his monthly publication, the “Sugar Magazine “. It is like that, that from 1894 we can detect the presence of a “sugar speech “, especially in tariff matter, which with some shades will be kept inalterable up to the arrival of the radical party to the power.