Estado, cooperativismo eléctrico y electrificación rural. La experiencia cordobesa entre 1930 y 1980

Abstract

Although the electric cooperative movement of Cordoba is one of the most important of the country and nowadays it moves great part of the economy of the interior provincial economy, its appearance and development is a matter that has not been sufficiently considered yet the local historiography. That is the reason of the decision to approach this issue which is analyzed in this chapter from the perspective of the relationships between the development of the electric cooperativism and the expansion of the state intervention in the electric sector, but paying special attention to the advances of the electrification in the rural sector. The analysis contains a wide period of half a century, between the appearance of the first electric cooperatives and the moment in which, from the electric point of view, the Mediterranean province stops being an independent system and incorporates to the national interconnected system and shows the role played by those entities in the process of electrification of the countryside which is an important chapter in the Argentinian electric development and in which the electric cooperatives were forerunner, long before the issue worried the public powers and when the politics of the private enterprises at the mercy of rentability, planned not even one metre of rural line. The cooperatives, instead, proved being able to do rural electrification with efficiency.