Operation Patagonia

Black topsoil, rolling 350 miles west and south of Buenos Aires, has nourished Argentina's agricultural past; but for its heavy-industrial future, Argentina is looking toward continent's-end Patagonia. Outwardly, Patagonia seems little more than 300,000 sq. mi. of wasteland lashed by 60-m.p.h. antarctic winds, blinded by spinning dust devils, cursed by endless drought that is relieved by only 5 in. of rain a year. Its 500,000 inhabitants earn a rugged living by running 18 million sheep and 1,500,000 goats on scrub grass.

Yet hostile Patagonia hides riches that can make the difference between boom and bust for Argentina's dollar-short wheat-beef economy. With a new "Operation Patagonia" and with massive infusions of foreign capital, President Arturo Frondizi has high hopes of unlocking the treasure house. He has already kicked off Operation Patagonia with a series of projects. One is a $149 million El Chocon hydroelectric project on the Limay River by a 27-firm British-French-Italian combine to provide 650,000 kw. of power, irrigate 250,000 acres of parched croplands. Another is a plan to exploit 200 million tons of 55.6%-grade iron ore found twelve years ago south of the Negro River. The government has also approved plans by Houston's Butadiene & Chemical Corp. to invest $40 million for three big petrochemical plants for synthetic rubber, carbon black and butadiene gas near Comodoro Rivadavia, plus another $17 million for an aviation-gasoline plant.

Power, iron and petrochemicals are only a few of the possibilities from a land that Charles Darwin once dismissed as "without habitation, without water, without mountains." Beneath the dry plains rest oil deposits that promise at least the possibility of Argentine self-sufficiency. Already 1,952 wells are pumping, but oilmen say there are major untapped pools underground. Standard Oil Co. (N.J.) has 1,184,000 acres in promising country north of the Limay River, will soon drill its first well, has begun work on a 14-in. pipeline to Bahia Blanca.

Coal deposits at El Turbio are estimated at 400 million tons, enough to supply Argentina for two centuries. Frondizi's government coal monopoly has signed a $42 million contract with a French company to triple last year's 250,000-ton output. And prospectors from Argentina's Atomic Energy Commission have found rich uranium deposits.

In the remote provinces, where wolves once roamed, 25,000 new settlers have arrived since June 1958 to practice what Frondizi preaches: "The fundamentals for national achievement are petroleum, coal, electricity, heavy chemicals. These mean liberty, democracy, self-determination and well-being."

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