The heartland of the world’s eighth largest country is a broad grassy plain known as the Pampas. Here Argentina’s gaucho, like the U.S. cowboy, has galloped into his country’s folklore.

 For Spanish, Italian, Welsh, German, and other immigrants in the late 19th century Argentina held great promise. Today the literacy rate is high, the birthrate and the infant mortality rate are low, and most Argentines consider themselves middle class. But the recent past has been tumultuous. During the “dirty war” of the late 1970s more than 10,000 people disappeared—the Desaparecidos. Defeat by Britain during the 1982 Falkland Islands war loosened the military dictatorship’s stranglehold on democracy. The Radical Party relinquished control to the Peronist party in 1989—the first transfer of power from one elected official to another in 60 years.

 Since then much has been won: Greater freedom of the press, tolerance of opposition, and increased foreign investment. Privatization of state firms has reduced government debt by seven billion dollars, and the inflation rate has plummeted. Yet unemployment plagues the economy, even as the nation enjoys the continent’s highest per capita income.

 One in three Argentines lives in Greater Buenos Aires. By contrast, windswept Patagonia, stretching 1,600 kilometers to the island of Tierra del Fuego—southernmost tip of South America—remains sparsely populated. 

Text source: National Geographic Atlas of the World Revised Sixth Edition, 1995