A sign on a rural road offers 'Cartas de Porte', a free digital document that is sold illegally for between 350,000 and 500,000 pesos to cover black-market grain. The gap between operating above board and off the books reaches 2 million pesos per truck.
“Hot showers,” reads a sign on the side of a road in a major agricultural region. Below that offer for grain truck drivers appears another tempting proposition: “Cartas de Porte.”
Cartas de Porte (CP) are a legal and tax document that acts as a transport contract and as proof of the movement of goods. It is the document required if police stop a truck on the road and ask about the origin and destination of a load: without the CP, officers may suspect that the grain being transported is stolen or that it is being sold on the black market.
What is striking is that CPs are neither sold nor bought: for some time now they have been issued free of charge from the AFIP website, today ARCA. That they are offered at the roadside therefore exposes failures in controls and in the traceability system.
The document went a long way before reaching its current format. Between 1990 and 2008 a regime of physical documents and transit control was in force: the Carta de Porte was a paper form regulated by transport and inspection agencies such as the Junta Nacional de Granos or the Secretaría de Agricultura, and enforcement was carried out mostly through checks on the roads.
For years, the forms were purchased through the Buenos Aires and Rosario grain exchanges and the Federación Agraria Argentina, which had in that sale one of its main sources of income. The system changed with the 2008 conflict over sliding export taxes: through Joint Resolution 2595/2009, promoted by Ricardo Echegaray —then at the head of AFIP and of the former ONCCA—, the State took exclusive control of issuance. Forms bought from commercial printers were eliminated and free application with the tax code and the Código de Autorización de Traslado de Granos (CATG) was implemented.
With the creation of the SISA and General Resolution 4310/2018, authorization to request Cartas de Porte came to depend on requirements such as each producer's tax scoring status and the declared planted area. The deepest change came with the Electronic Carta de Porte (CPE Granos) in 2021, which eliminated paper and established 100% digital use for road and rail transport of grain not intended for sowing. Then came the Electronic Carta de Porte for Grain Derivatives (CPEDG), which extended control to flours, oils, expeller and by-products.
Already during Javier Milei's administration, the deactivation of the RUCA and the migration of operators to the SISA through RG50/2025 created a period of confusion over who was authorized to issue these forms.
On a grain truck whose load is worth between 12 and 20 million pesos, the difference between the white price and the black price is at least the 10.5% VAT, and widens to almost 15% with the rounding of the so-called “operations in 2.” That is a difference of at least 2 million pesos for every truck sold outside tax rules.
Those who sell them are usually “valijeros”, middlemen who handle a given agricultural area and know who has a harvest “surplus” to sell through the black channel. They are the same characters who obtain the new registrations in the SISA records. To obtain them it is mandatory to operate a plant, but without having one there are dozens of legal entities that operate fleetingly and flood the market with fake Cartas de Porte generated from somewhere connected to the side of the road.
Those documents are fake in the sense that they are generated to cover unmanageable grain balances resulting from the enormous black-market grain purchases made by some companies. According to the sources consulted, these marginal CPs also serve to cover shipments to border crossings and to get through Gendarmería checks on Route 34, to the north, and Route 14, in the litoral.
Prices, according to some accounts, range between 350,000 and 500,000 pesos at specific spots along the roads. The amounts depend on the length of time the CTG must have to move the load, on the expiry date of the form and on whether the form is one that can be settled or not.
The sign in the photograph may look funny, but it reflects inefficient control mechanisms and exposes failures in the traceability system. With a difference against the State of at least 2 million pesos for every truck, these documents feed truck movements toward the border crossings of Salta and Misiones.
