History
The Bariloche Foundation started in the year 1963 with the purpose of furthering research, post-graduate and other creative activities, and of sharing its experience and breakthroughs with society at large. Its guiding principle, according to its statutes, and above all, to the spirit and praxis of its founders and members, has always been a total respect for academic freedom and the defense of democratic republican principles. This institution was created as the result of the scientific interests of a group of scientists working at the National Atomic Energy Commission, among whom are Carlos A. Mallmann, Jorge A. Sábato, Fidel Alsina, Francisco Morey Terry, Juan G. Roederer, Ricardo P. Platzeck and Alberto González Domínguez, as well as of business people such as Arturo Mallmann, Guillermo Linck, Cecilio Madanes, William Reynal, Teodosio Brea, Eduardo Braun Cantilo and José Azulay. The experiences of the Di Tella Foundation, with the contributions by Guido Di Tella and Enrique Oteiza, also concurred in this project, as did those of the Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas, founded by Luis Federico Leloir, with the participation of Horacio G. Pontis. José Miguens, Juan T. Lewis, Augusto Conte, Eduardo Tiscornia and Juan Carlos Secondi also contributed to it.
Ever since its creation and up to the mid 1970s, the Foundation comprised a Board of Directors, a Board of Advisers, the Executive Presidency, an Administration Division and a Development Division. The Board of Directors comprised the permanent members – among whom were several of its founders –, the department directors, representatives of the different business groups and of the academic and administrative staff as appointed by their peers. The Board of Advisers comprised representatives of the business groups and one representative of the academic staff. The Executive Presidency, initially held by Carlos A. Mallmann, had the support of the Administrative Division in Bariloche, and the Development Division in Buenos Aires. Apart from administrative support activities, the latter was also in charge of finding global and special economic resources. Gradually, work groups were set up which mapped out their research agendas on topics related to natural sciences, social sciences and art, according to regional and national interest topics.
Barely over a decade after its creation, the Foundation already had the following departments and programs:
- The Mathematics Department, which carried out three programs: Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Operations Research.
- The Biology Department, with programs on biochemistry and plant microbiology;
- The Natural Resources and Energy Department, which implemented three programs: Geology, Ecology and Energy Economics.
- The Social Sciences Department, which conducted research programs on Philosophy and Politics, labor movements, Political Sociology, socio-economic development problems.
- The Music Department, which carried out two programs: training on and performance of chamber music, and music dissemination. As a result of the work done by the former group, the Camerata Bariloche was created.
- Program for the transfer of cultural and scientific knowledge.
- Study program on regional, national and global prospective.
The Foundation had almost 200 permanent members, including researchers, scholars, technicians and administrative staff. Renowned researchers such as Horacio Pontis (Biology), Peter Heintz, Manuel Mora y Araujo, Luis Aznar (Social Sciences), Alberto Lysy, Oleg Kotzarew (Music), Félix González Bonorino, Carlos E. Suárez, Amilcar Herrera (Natural Resources and Energy), Hugo Scolnik (Mathematics) and Fidel Alsina (Transfer) participated in and were heads of its programs. The research activity has been very fruitful. Much of its work has been published and made known, an important number of scholars have been trained, and seminars, theater performances and music concerts have been held, all of which has rendered this institution the most renowned cultural center in the city.
Some of the best-known achievements of these first years are:
- Setting up the first computer ever in downtown Bariloche. Its processing capacity and speed were very low, according to the technology at the time, and the facilities needed to set it up required an area of almost 80 square meters, as well as permanent temperature and humidity conditions. Its operators, card punchers, made up a work group.
- The Camerata Bariloche performances at the Snow Festival in Bariloche, as well as in Buenos Aires and the rest of the country, and gradually in other parts of the world, placed the Foundation among the highest positions regarding chamber music orchestras.
- The Latin American World Model, an interdisciplinary work piece conducted by Amílcar Herrera, also became well known around the world. Its findings were presented in several famous university centers, with the permanent company of the Camerata. This Model was the answer submitted by the Southern countries to the Club of Rome thesis which, along the lines of a Malthusian point of view, meant to curb the development of these countries on the basis of the purported exhaustion of natural resources. The alternative model developed by the Foundation revealed that, by making hunger eradication the main development goal for these countries instead of the consumer style of the central countries, natural resources, including land, were enough to sustain a population three times larger than the population at the beginning of the 1970s. It also revealed that the best means for birth rate control was to promote human development in the countries in question.
- The Latin American Post-graduate Courses on Economics and Energy Planning – unique in the region – trained a large number of Latin American and Caribbean professionals.
- The Social Sciences Department pioneered the use of quantitative resources for social research in our country.
As of 1976, when the military government took over, the situation of the Bariloche Foundation underwent a drastic change. The new government conditioned the granting of national government subsidies – one of the main economic supports of the institution – to the dismissal of some researchers and the control of research contents. Executive President Carlos E. Suárez, the Board of Directors and the rest of the staff refused to abide by those conditions, and at the end of that year, thanks to the sale of land that had been bought in order to build a campus, all the staff received severance pay. Along the following years, the Foundation was reduced to 15 members, who took the risk of going ahead using the funds of their own redundancy pays and giving their own time to the institution. These decisions, meant to guarantee the continuity of the Foundation, stemmed from strategies defined on the basis of opinions expressed by Carlos A. Mallmann, Jorge A. Sábato, Carlos E. Suárez, Juan Carlos Secondi and Eduardo Tiscornia.
A new stage started, then, with the same objectives but a different reduced organization. The Music and Biology Departments managed to re-organize themselves and thus survive in Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata respectively, and they created new public bodies. The Ecology group, named ECOTONO and headed by Eduardo Rapoport, joined Comahue National University, maintaining and increasing its international prestige. The Mathematics and Transfer Departments, on the other hand, broke up, and the same happened to the Geology, Hydrology and Ecology groups of the Natural Resources and Energy Department. In turn, the Administration Division in Bariloche, and the Dvelopment Division in Buenos Aires, were reduced to their minimum operational capacity.
The activities that did not disappear were channeled into new groups integrated or associated to the institution. Thus, the environmental problems program headed by Gilberto Gallopin, and the energy program headed by Carlos E. Suárez, which were part of the Natural Resources and Energy Department, formed the Institute for Energy Economics (IDEE), headed by Carlos E. Suárez. Likewise, Carlos Mallmann, from the Transfer Program, and Oscar Nudler, from the Social Sciences Department, promoted the creation of the Center for Human and Social Development Studies (CEDHS). At this stage, the Center for Project Development (CEDEPRO) was also created, headed by Juan Carlos Secondi. The continuity of the institution along this period was mainly possible thanks to the cooperation of public and private international organizations.
With the return of democracy in 1983 and the subsequent recovery of academic freedom, the work of the Foundation was no longer jeopardized and it started to receive official encouragement. The research groups started to re-organize themselves towards the end of the 1980s. In 1990, the Philosophy Program was created, devoted to research and post-graduate training on different branches of Philosophy, particularly Epistemology. The Quality of Life Program was created in 1994. This program enhanced the research into the life quality level of the population in Bariloche and the Province of Rio Negro, and also of Argentina at large, which had begun at the end of the 1980s. The Environment and Development Program started in that year, thus continuing the activities on environmental issues that the Foundation had carried out from the very beginning. The Foundation library – which specializes in topics related to energy, energy economics, the environment and social sciences – has been named after the president of the Institution, Carlos E. Suárez, since 2003.
The above description is meant to honor the efforts and contributions made by those who created the Bariloche Foundation, those who committed themselves to its continuity and growth, and those who are presently facing new tasks and challenges, homage paid by those who inherited and now maintain the Foundation faithful to its principles of academic freedom and social commitment, trying to sustain and increase its academic excellence.
|
