Bad news, prospectors. If the government gets its way, Argentina will no longer proffer cash rewards to individuals who discover a coal mine.

The government has sent a bill to Congress to repeal obsolete laws, which it argues will make it easier and cheaper to do business in the country and promote respect for individual liberties. Known as the hojarasca (fallen leaves) law, the bill seeks to remove around 70 laws, some of which date back to 1864.

“With the fallen leaves law, the government seeks to remove barriers for citizens that affect individual liberties and generate useless costs through various pieces of over-regulation,” read a government release. 

Examples include a specific law on smallpox vaccination superseded by the general vaccination law, an old law allowing color television broadcasts, and a requirement for any product with a map on its label to be approved by the official Cartography Institute.

Deregulation Minister Federico Sturzenegger, who signed the bill together with Chief of Staff Guillermo Francos, identified six broad reasons to repeal the laws identified in the bill: 

• They restrict individual liberties and private property
• They have been superseded by subsequent legislation
• Technology has rendered them obsolete
• They remove “pointless” bureaucracy
• They apply to organisms that no longer exist
• They involve financing public bodies that should be self-funded

One law to be removed, dating from 1951, penalizes those who “foster political or economic sanctions against the state” and was commonly used to persecute the political opposition, including those who report rights abuses. Likewise, a 1969 law establishing government intervention in the paper business was used to control newspapers during the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía.

The section on public bodies that the government believes should finance themselves refers to the Circle of Legislators, a group of current and former Congresspeople, and the Argentine Federation of Municipalities, a registered non-profit allowing municipalities to work on issues of local governance and their interactions with national authorities.

Some of the laws on the chopping block are little more than historical vignettes: law 94, dating back to 1864, establishes a 10-year ban on holding public office for officials who have someone whipped. Such floggings, the bill points out, are banned by the Constitution. Law 448, passed four years later, establishes that anyone who discovers a coal mine shall receive a cash reward.

Fast-forward to the 1970s, several laws require documentation to be kept on microfilm. One 1974 norm even regulated hitch hiking, creating a “backpackers’ permit” to be used by anyone who “for the purposes of tourism, requests the collaboration of third parties to move around within the country’s territory.” 

The permit supposedly offered benefits such as access to camping spots but was largely a pretext allowing the security forces to shake down anyone they suspected of belonging to rebel groups, Monday’s bill points out.

Other legislation that violates individual liberties includes a 1983 law, passed days before the end of the dictatorship, allowing the authorities to detain people with leprosy against their will if they are not following their doctors’ orders.

The government claims it is seeking to return to a legislative approach that assumes an activity is allowed unless it is explicitly prohibited in the Constitution. 

“Unfortunately, the most interventionist ideological movements, predominant during the 20th century […] have imposed the view that for the ‘acquisition’ of a right, it was necessary for a law to authorize that right,” wrote Deregulation Minister Federico Sturzenegger and Chief of Staff Guillermo Francos in a message to Congress explaining the law.

Correction: the original version of this piece stated that anyone who finds coal would be offered a “metal prize,” a translation of “premio en metálico.” This has been corrected to “cash prize.”