Argentina’s enigmatic wall on the Paraguayan border

An icon of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall separated its namesake city into two sovereign territories and gave concrete form to the “iron curtain”. While it stood, the reformist German chancellor Willy Brandt described it as a “wall of shame”. Another wall of this kind appeared 50 years later in Posadas, Argentina. A bridge connects this city to Encarnacion across the Parana River, whose middle defines the international boundary between Argentina and Paraguay. In 2014 and 2015, Argentina raised a cement wall 5 meters high and 1.3 kilometers in length near the Posadas offices of immigration, customs and border police. Shortly after completion, protestors and the mass media referred to it as a wall of shame. This border wall was doubly enigmatic: Polyvalent within Argentine society and elusive of simple explanations. The wall materialized under the government of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner whose policies encouraged immigration from neighboring countries. In contrast, Mauricio Macri, who took office in December 2015 with an unfriendly stance toward regional immigrants, criticized this wall and rebuffed proposals for other border walls. This puzzling sequence of events resulted from the developmental background to the Argentine wall's construction, the relative success of grassroots opposition to it and the continental stigma of border walls.

This chapter extends recent turns in Border Studies toward interdisciplinary and comparative approaches that conceive of borders as ongoing social constructs (Wilson and Dorman, 2012). It also corroborates the view that restrictive border policies derive from tensions between transnational flow and sovereign space intensified by contemporary global forces (Andreas, 2009; Vallet and David, 2016). Additionally, the chapter highlights nation-state centrality to border-making even as other actors and symbols influence the process (Grimson, 2012; Mavroudi and Nagel, 2016). With respect to boundary walls, however, this chapter complicates contemporary border theory. The Posadas cement barrier did not, for example, resemble a “great wall of capital" that would be a tool of Argentine empire (Chaichian, 2013). Nor was this wall built to reduce immigration flows, revive waning sovereignty or reject globalization per se (Brown, 2014; Jones, 2009; Roche, 2016; Vallet and David, 2016). These latter items informed the policies of Argentine President Macri, but he took office after the Posadas wall was finished and he excluded walls from his border-tightening toolkit. To address this perplexing case, the chapter unpacks globalization’s impact on borders in four ways. First, it considers border making within a broader set of international connections, as Argentina’s policies have not aligned neatly with a pro or anti-globalization agenda. Second, it treats transnational meanings of border walls as a causally distinctive element of globalization. Brown (2014) viewed this symbolism as a legitimating device that buttresses structural forces driving states to build walls. In Argentina, however, references to border walls elsewhere in the world had a delegitimizing effect. Third, this chapter approaches border securitization and militarization as historical variables rather than contemporary constants. Finally, it delineates border politics through an interactive approach among diverse players and positions on border policy. The rest of this chapter proceeds by explicating Argentine border policies within wider agendas of global engagement and situating the Posadas borderland between security and development imperatives. The chapter then examines the sources and consequences of building the Posadas wall and analyzes the causes and effects of public opposition to it. It concludes by revisiting the main argument and discussing the methodological implications of this case.