Part I: A National Company

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Argentina led Latin America in telecommunications development and infrastructure. Like the railroads of the 1800s, foreign capital originally dominated as the French, the British, and—by the 1930s—the United States invested heavily in Argentine networks.Footnote ⁶ After Juan Perón's election in 1946, the new government pushed an incremental nationalization program that culminated in the establishment of Telefónos del Estado in 1949. Seven years later, this company became the Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones, the name it bore for more than three decades. From the 1940s through the 1980s, various administrations considered at least partial privatization, but few seriously attempted large-scale overhauls.Footnote ⁷ Rather, during the mid-twentieth century, there existed a broad if unsteady consensus that certain economic sectors were of national interest and therefore these public enterprises should not be sold off, including the state telecommunications company. This general agreement, however, did not prevent pervasive instability throughout the cycle of civilian and military administrations over that same period.Footnote ⁸ For ENTel, this meant irregular access to investment capital, which translated to varied and inconsistent expansion that often reflected an absence of coherent central planning.

As the telecommunications industry grew, Argentina's telefónicos pursued better conditions and better pay. Fighting back against the foreign-owned companies of the early 1900s, workers eventually formed the Federación de Obreros y Empleados Telefónicos (FOET), the precursor to FOETRA. FOET played a key role in the labor movement's growth during the 1930s and 1940s, aiding Juan Perón's rise to power.Footnote ⁹ On April 20, 1950, this organization formally became the Federación de Obreros y Empleados de la Republica Argentina. Despite the 1955 coup and Peronism's proscription, FOETRA's political power continued to grow. The union backed the Peronist Resistencia through the early 1960s, even as employees confronted growing factionization with the foundation of new unions for administrative personnel and supervisors in 1958 and 1962, respectively.Footnote ¹⁰ The 1960s witnessed a rise in worker militancy, and in 1968, Julio Guillán, the secretary general of FOETRA Buenos Aires, assumed a key role in the CGT de los Argentinos (CGTA), the combative left wing of the labor movement led by Raimondo Ongaro and Agustín Tosco.Footnote ¹¹ Although the CGTA petered out, the 1975 convenio colectivo (collective bargaining agreement) negotiated by FOETRA demonstrated the union's strength, providing telephone workers numerous concrete material benefits related to pay, vacation, overtime, and healthcare.Footnote ¹² Because these policies were decided through centralized negotiations led by the national-level union, they reverberated down to the local chapters even when those chapters remained disconnected from the negotiations themselves.Footnote ¹³

Like most Argentine trade unions, there existed considerable ideological and geographic differences among ENTel's chapters. For example, disconnects between national leadership and shop-level committees could produce contrasting views on “the union” as an institution, with some rank-and-file members criticizing the union bureaucracy.Footnote ¹⁴ FOETRA Buenos Aires, led by Guillán, adopted an increasingly militant role on the national scene, but few telefónicos from Pico recalled holding strong political beliefs during the 1960s/1970s. Responding to questions about conflicts at ENTel from this period, their answers reinforced the distance between Argentina's urban centers and rural interior. Where telecommunications workers in major cities frequently confronted management over salaries and working conditions, ENTel employees in La Pampa described more harmonious relationships. Comments like “[we] always depended on Buenos Aires” or “those things happened in Buenos Aires, but they didn't really happen [here]” underscored the physical and political separation.Footnote ¹⁵ Instead, their accounts tended to emphasize respect and loyalty both between workers and the company and among the workers themselves. While everyone belonged to FOETRA—and while they occasionally participated in national-level actions—ENTel Pico's personnel felt a common bond across job classes. Alberto Lamella, a former operator, discussed the workplace's internal dynamics, stating that even when the company was intervened after 1976, “there was always very good treatment [between administrators and employees]…[we] went out to eat, had cookouts, hung out together.”Footnote ¹⁶ Almost everyone confirmed this general collegiality.

While Pico's ex-telefónicos tended to remember this period vis-à-vis their relationship to the company, most did not explicitly connect the national union to, for example, the benefits they received. However, those benefits nevertheless played a key role in fostering the wider culture of respect and loyalty, as exemplified by ENTel's capacitation programs. The mid-twentieth century's revolving door of civil and military governments ensured that state enterprises faced constant uncertainty, which for ENTel meant that diverse technologies and equipment often had to be made compatible in daily practice. Former workers recalled the company's continuing education programs (formalized in the 1975 collective bargaining agreement), which taught everything from electrical and electromechanical skills to computation and technical service, as central to what made the job worthwhile.Footnote ¹⁷ Employees attended trainings across the country, though mostly in Buenos Aires. Some remembered going two or three times a year, and explicitly stated that these courses continued even under the most recent military dictatorship (1976–1983), despite the regime's common association with the rise of neoliberalism in Argentina.Footnote ¹⁸ As one ex-employee explained, “ENTel was of the state, the state had a relationship to the worker. I think there was an affinity for training people.”Footnote ¹⁹ Multiple factors undoubtedly contributed to the recurrence of respect and loyalty in these narratives, but the company's investment in education played a key role. Subjects specifically mentioned the possibility for advancement, the acquisition of new knowledge, and even the appreciation for colleagues’ abilities as reasons they felt connected to their jobs and their coworkers—including management.Footnote ²⁰ Because of the hodgepodge of technologies that ENTel relied on, these company-provided trainings both foregrounded employees’ value and enabled them to increase that value.

Significantly, former telephone workers also spoke frankly about ENTel's failings.Footnote ²¹ Demand for new lines always outpaced supply, sometimes by orders of magnitude that could lead to multiyear waits for customers wanting a home phone. Repairs often took weeks to complete, depending on numerous factors ranging from the availability of materials to the attitude of personnel. For Pico specifically, connections to the rest of Argentina suffered from long wait times and inconsistent service.Footnote ²² Yet many also framed the story as one of incremental improvements, even under difficult circumstances. Despite the brutality of the most recent dictatorship, workers tended to describe that period in positive terms both professionally and personally. Many acknowledged the regime's violence, but explained that their work remained steady, and that they married, had children, and built homes. As one interviewee stated, “For me, it wasn't that bad.”Footnote ²³ The dictatorship's minister of economy pushed an aggressive laissez-faire agenda, but these policies produced inconsistent results for ENTel, especially for more remote branches like ENTel Pico.Footnote ²⁴ In Buenos Aires and other major urban areas, the company's military administrators intervened the union, extended hours, and repressed dissent—sometimes violently—but nationally the total number of employees remained steady, and the state continued to invest in infrastructure, albeit somewhat haphazardly.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, because the 1975 collective bargaining agreement technically remained in effect (despite the 1976 prohibition on collective bargaining, existing convenios were left in place), at a formal level workers retained the benefits authorized by those agreements.

The 1983 election of Raúl Alfonsín brought the return of democracy and a shift away from efforts to shrink the state sector, generally, and ENTel, specifically—at least in the initial public discourse. In 1985, an ambitious plan to install one million additional lines over the next five years, known as Plan Megatel, launched with the goal of resolving the company's persistent problems around financing and service. The project, however, never came to fruition as only a fraction of the promised lines and upgrades materialized, paving the way for the government's attempted privatization in 1987—an attempt that was scuttled in part by opposition from FOETRA.Footnote ²⁶ Several former Pico workers recalled Plan Megatel with some clarity, and one claimed the initiative had been part of a larger shift in La Pampa as the province “really began to work” in the 1980s.Footnote ²⁷ Another contrasted the mid-1980s to the dictatorship period, noting that only after 1985 was expansion and the incorporation of new technologies successfully implemented.Footnote ²⁸ Yet given Plan Megatel's overall failure, we must read these interpretations cautiously.Footnote ²⁹ As the following section will explore in more detail, the trauma of privatization continues to condition memories of the ENTel era, such that accounts of Plan Megatel's success might well reflect an idealized recollection meant to, in part, contrast with privatization under Menem.

Part II: The Trauma of Broken Things

The disappointment of Plan Megatel effectively sealed ENTel's fate. By the late 1980s, Argentina found itself facing economic catastrophe as hyperinflation racked the country, producing record instability and undermining everything from financial systems to food access.Footnote ³⁰ Under pressure from all directions, Alfonsín stepped down prior to the end of his mandate, allowing incoming president Carlos Menem to assume control several months early. Though a Peronist, Menem's approach contradicted decades of accepted Peronist orthodoxy. During his nearly ten years in office, he would oversee the dramatic reorientation of Argentina's economy as public enterprises were sold off to private investors, the state sector was drastically reduced, and financial speculation flourished. Recent scholarship has shown that this overhaul went beyond the economic sector, remaking Argentine social and cultural relations, as well.Footnote ³¹ Critical to the transformation of industrial relations after 1989/1990 was the passage of Law 24,013 (the so-called “Ley de Empleo”), which alongside several executive decrees paved the way for the flexibilization of labor through new contract regimens and restrictions on workers’ actions.Footnote ³² This, in turn, would reverberate across workers’ social lives, contributing to a partial but significant disaggregation of the social bonds that had linked Argentines throughout the previous decades.

The sale of ENTel reflected the broader logic of Menem's presidency, as it aimed to both generate immediate revenue to help control the country's inflationary spiral and rid the state of a long-term investment (specifically by dismissing ENTel personnel).Footnote ³³ Since 1990, it has become a paradigmatic example of the Menemist program, generating a considerable bibliography that explores the reformation of the telecommunications sector.Footnote ³⁴ Various governments had considered shrinking the state's role in telecommunications over the previous four decades, with the most recent military dictatorship expanding tertiarized workers and the Alfonsín administration proposing privatization. But these plans never fully materialized, at least partially owing to resistance from workers and state officials. Within months of taking power, however, Menem permanently changed the landscape, setting the stage for previously unimaginable levels of precarity. Returning to David Harvey, the transition from ENTel to Telefónica marked a significant redistribution of power away from labor and in favor of capital, typified by those laws that facilitated the firing of public-sector employees and the sale of state enterprises.Footnote ³⁵ Combining Harvey's analysis of neoliberalism with workers’ testimonies illuminates the remaking of the social relations of labor at ENTel/Telefónica in General Pico.

For telefónicos in large cities, especially Buenos Aires, their resistance to the 1990 sale remains a critical moral and political touchstone, a point that reinforces their agency. FOETRA Buenos Aires, for example, has established and sustained a narrative that centers the union's militancy in defense of historical conquests won during the ENTel years.Footnote ³⁶ Conversely, in Pico, not only were accounts of local opposition absent but subjects did not mention any national efforts to fight back in 1990. Privatization loomed over their professional and personal life stories, but largely as something inevitable. In response to questions about other periods of their careers, like the 1976–1983 dictatorship, interviewees consistently returned to the 1990 sale and its fallout as the rupture that transformed relationships among workers, between workers and the company, and between the company and customers.Footnote ³⁷ The trauma of privatization thus conditioned the broader (re)construction of their personal narratives.

As Harvey notes, a central claim of neoliberal discourse is the free market's ability to correct the “failures” and “inefficiencies” of state-directed enterprises by increasing their competitiveness.Footnote ³⁸ Per this logic, privatization encourages competition—and, consequently, progress and growth. ENTel had a longstanding reputation for inefficiency, which critics delighted in pointing out, and which former employees corroborated.Footnote ³⁹ However, no interviewee suggested that privatization had resolved these issues.Footnote ⁴⁰ On the contrary, most insisted that Telefónica brought worse service and working conditions. Vicente Galdós, who started with ENTel as a night operator in 1970 and eventually rose to supervisor before retiring from Telefónica in 2013, spoke to this tension:

Galdós's description typified a broader pattern by stressing privatization's negative effects across multiple overlapping fronts. First, though his former coworkers repeatedly mentioned ENTel's inefficiencies, Galdós highlighted something else entirely: he argued that people's pride in working for a “national company” translated to greater effort and productivity. Relatedly, his critique reaffirmed the disconnect between the supposed improvements brought by Telefónica and the apparent consequences for clients. The various issues that racked ENTel were not simply less important than the breakdown of relationships between workers, company, and customers, they no longer featured at all. Instead, long wait times and shoddy repairs were caused by neoliberal attempts to “modernize” the infrastructure. Finally, Galdós explicitly criticized the introduction of a piece-rate system, itself a long-standing objective of capital during the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴² Rather than grounding this claim in the transformation of labor practices, however, Galdós underscored the antagonistic relationship between client and company. His memory, echoed by other ex-telefónicos, supported the larger claim that privatization had not produced a better system—it had destroyed what the workers had built.

This declaration, alongside the testimonies analyzed previously, raises critical questions about memory and oral historical practice. That workers’ accounts of privatization and its effects might be “inaccurate” matters far less than what meanings we can draw from them. For example, looking at telecommunications workers in bigger cities, like Buenos Aires, we note a discrepancy between today's dominant narrative emphasizing resistance and research indicating that telefónicos in the late 1980s tended to favor privatization. In interviews with ENTel employees before the 1990 sale, Peter Ranis identified a general belief in the efficiency of private (and especially foreign) enterprises as compared to state-run companies, even as some subjects voiced trepidation about the possibility of layoffs.Footnote ⁴³ That this logic—which closely parallels the rhetoric Menem used to justify privatization—would be politically untenable in the present illustrates how the “errors and inventions” of current memory paradigms reveal implications that might otherwise go unnoticed.Footnote ⁴⁴

Unlike their Buenos Aires colleagues, testimonies from former ENTel Pico workers were framed primarily by nostalgia for a past foreclosed by privatization rather than as a story about opposition. Everyone I interviewed spoke about the future with something akin to hopelessness. No one envisioned a world in which things might “get better,” and certainly not one where the labor conditions at Telefónica might return to what had existed under ENTel. Questions about past professional experiences often produced answers that lamented the present-day rise of crime, general lack of respect, and breakdown of social norms. In this sense, the ex-telefónicos’ recollections were infused by an emotional and almost reactionary longing for what once existed, rather than what some scholars have characterized as “progressive nostalgia,” or “nostalgia for the future.”Footnote ⁴⁵ There were, perhaps, elements of this “progressive nostalgia” present in these testimonies: a “sense of loss, tempered with overt pride” and “a desire to assert a sense of communal belonging and sense of place in the context of rapid deindustrialization and social change.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Nevertheless, the affective register of the interviews did not suggest a potential “solution” for the future, but rather mourned a vanished past.

This nostalgia's roots lay, at least partially, in positive recollections of ENTel's treatment of workers (e.g., benefits, training programs, sense of belonging), but this attitude cannot be divorced from the trauma of privatization itself. Subjects recalled that when Telefónica arrived in Pico, “they wanted to erase everything, to throw people out in the street,” and that the new administrators “just kicked out” those employees that were no longer needed.Footnote ⁴⁷ Descriptions of the perceived mistreatment of human beings closely paralleled the sense of loss in memories of the destruction of old equipment. In both cases, the transition from “national company” to private enterprise destroyed the existing infrastructure, whether technological or interpersonal, and left most of Pico's telefónicos at the precarious margins. For decades, their value had depended on their ability to manipulate the complex and not entirely compatible array of switchboards, computers, transmitters, and Telex machines. After 1990, the arrival of new materials, new practices, and new technologies steadily eroded that value—and unlike ENTel, testimonies portrayed Telefónica as unconcerned with providing opportunities for employees to keep up with those changes. New convenios colectivos, imposed in 1990 and increasingly decentralized (i.e., no longer negotiated or functioning on a national scale), eliminated many of the existing benefits and protections that workers had enjoyed over the previous decades.Footnote ⁴⁸ Small wonder, then, that ex-employees who saw their knowledge and experience discounted and discarded interpreted the transition as an assault on their very selves.

Across the interviews, subjects frequently became emotional remembering their time at ENTel/Telefónica. Nearly everyone felt that Telefónica had treated them and/or others poorly, and they lamented what they had lost during the 1990s. Responding to a question about company-provided healthcare, one former employee explained that while ENTel's plan had remained strong through the 1970s and 1980s, it effectively disappeared after 1990.Footnote ⁴⁹ Along similar lines, Ana Ortíz, an operator who spent more than three decades with ENTel and Telefónica, recalled that her benefits (sick days, vacation days, and bonuses) just vanished after privatization, explaining with a rueful chuckle that “Every time, they took more from us.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Although all those I spoke with still lived in the small town of General Pico, their references to old coworkers and past experiences made clear that they did not see one another very often. I identified subjects via the “snowball method,” which brought former colleagues together, often for the first time in several years. Many of these interactions included emotional conversations about the past and ended with participants crying openly. That these people, who had worked alongside each other for years, now essentially never interacted (even in a small town of some sixty thousand people) reinforced the atomization of social relations in the aftermath of privatization. It became evident that the “more” to which Ortíz referred went beyond sick days and bonuses—it also meant connections with colleagues, pride in the job, and a sense of identity.Footnote ⁵¹ Harvey describes the neoliberal transfer of public assets to the private sector as a policy of dispossession aimed at rolling back workers’ gains made during the postwar era.Footnote ⁵² For Pico's telefónicos, privatization dispossessed them of not just job security, wages, and benefits, but ultimately the status and relationships that had defined their lives.