Argentina has long suffered the not-incorrect image of a haven for Nazi war criminals post-WWII. But I've thought that era was past, as was the era when soldiers working for the dictatorship threw "subversives" from planes at altitude. But several recent events made me rethink my optimistic denial of the old stereotype. Three events, actually, as being a magazine writer I know the trend-story cliche: one in a curiosity, two is a coincidence and three, well, that's a trend. To whit:

1) On May 13, Serbian militia leader Nebojsa Minic was picked up in Mendoza on an arrest warrant on war crimes from the Hague. His militia, among other things, was accused of a massacre of 41 Albanian serparatists. In Argentina since September 2003, he is dying (here) of AIDS and is soon to be (a well-informed birdy tells me) the subject of at least one profile in a Major U.S. Newspaper.

2) In August, police in Buenos Aires arrested Milan Lukic, a Serbian wanted for the killing of 134 people (mostly Bosnians) during the Balkans war.

3) And on Monday, fugitive Cosa Nostra capo Pietro "The Butcher" Bonanno was captured in the Buenos Aires suburb of Hurlingham. He'd been in the country since November 2004 and was known in his adopted nabe as "Rafa."

Is it the wine? The steak? The atmosphere of casual corruption? What brings them here?

Sunday’s Argentine elections, for governors and congressional reps, were largely considered a snoozer (or a hot girl-on-girl Evita remake) in the non-Argentine press. But beyond serving as a “kind of plebiscite” on Kirchner’s rule (albeit one boycotted by almost 38% of voters in a country where voting is obligatory), it also created the first remapping of the party system in, well, decades. As Joaquín Morales Solá, a well-known political columnist for La Nación, points out:

“The historic Peronist and Radical parties together garnered only 20 percent of the national vote. That is, perhaps, the most pathetic sign that the old party system has crumbled. Until 1999, the numbers were exactly reverse: the two traditional parties, which sustained the old bipartisan system, gathered the 80 percent of the votes, leaving the remaining 20 percent to small forces of the right and left.”

Now before anyone jumps on me, let me note that I’m well aware that in an election beset with allegations of vote fraud, Kirchner’s winning “new” party, which pulled the rug (and votes) out from under the “old” Peronist party, really is the same one with a new label and a new boss, and the bigger loser is the Radical party, which has withered on the vine. But still, imagine if in the U.S., during an election riddled with allegations of vote irregularities, one faction of the Republican party took over, marginalized the rest of the party, and the Democrats went limp. Wouldn't that be bizarre?

Oh, wait, that happened.

[Photos: Cristina Kirchner above Chiche Duhalde]

The Secretary of Culture of Buenos Aires, Gustavo López, announced yesterday, after the 39th salary-related strike of the year, that he was suspending the performance schedule at the world-famous Teatro Colón until "we can guarantee the season will proceed in a predictable and reasonable way, and over all with repect to the theater-going public." This is the third performance suspension--after 1984 and 2000--due to labor disputes. Today, musicians and theater technicians asked that the theater be reopened, and the ATE (the Asociación de Trabajadores del Estado, a state employees union) threatened a general strike.

As someone who both lives in Buenos Aires (and endures strikes, and deals with the inflation people are striking over) and has gone to see a show at Teatro Colón (the Barber of Seville), let me say that it's one of the most beautiful performance spaces I've ever seen, and for so many reasons I hope that this can be resolved quickly. [Colón interior photo via Soldi.com.ar]

Because of its cafe culture, architecture, and reliance on the mustache, Buenos Aires is fairly, albeit reductively, referred to as the "Paris of South America." Its restaurants and bars are often more Italian than Italy (hell, I'm told one of Buenos Aires' popular pastas, the sorrentino, is a local invention What is it? An oversized ravioli. More Italian than Italy indeed). And it seems a good half of Argentina's citizens have Italian or Spanish passports because of those countries' diaspora citizenship laws. This leads to the occasional contretemps: An Argentine friend of a friend used his Italian passport to enter the U.S., as the U.S. doesn't require the expensive entrance visa of EU citizens as it does of Argentines. Sadly, however, the immigration officer tested the visitor's Italian ability. When it turned out he couldn't speak a word, he was told he would be refused entry and sent back to Italy--where, comically, he had never been.

But I digress. The point is that unlike Mexico, which has its mestizo culture and magical realism (think Frida Kahlo; think Mexico City--a city of 22 million built atop an indigenous empire) or Cuba, which blends Africa, America and Spain into something new, Argentina looks in Europe's direction for inspiration and recreates itself in that image.

What this ends up creating, for better or worse, is a Cover Culture. Before I get jumped on for cultural snideness, let me just say that, yes, I understand that Argentina does produce its own ideas (like, say, rock nacional, Peronism, and Tango, though I'd note that the last wasn't accepted into mainstream Argentine culture until the French deemd it trendy). But there is an odd ubiquity of facsimile art.








In the last several weeks, I've walked into the Museo de Bellas Artes with an American friend who couldn't contain a giggle at the raw amount of derivative works (including, for example, Emilio Pettoruti's El Improvisador, a Picasso Lite); been bathed in Beatles covers by local musical heroes like Charly Garcia at nearby restaurant Primi Piatti (among other places); hummed along for the 7 millionth time to a top-selling album of jazzy covers of Prince and The Cure; and realized that repeated exposure now allows me to recite by heart the songs on the v. popular Rolling Stones-via-Brazil cover album Bossa n' Stones.

The breaking point came yesterday when the owner of the local Luna Cafe dug deep into the annals of cover culture for the 1999 Sheryl Crow cover of Guns n' Roses' Sweet Child O' Mine. I hesitate to indulge in too many trite metaphors inspired by such a small sample of music covers--there are covers the world over--but what can it mean that Argentina looks so lovingly toward remixes of comfortable culture? You could say this mirrors the country's ethos--Like Europe, Just a Little Different--but I wonder: Is Argentine creativity hamstrung by its yearnings for Europe?

Shattered BankBoston ATM Kiosk (Photo from La Nacion)

Last night, in another of the aforementioned pre-Summit of the Americas "Polite Anti-Bush Bombings", the Comando Antiimperialista comandante Che Guevara-Maurice Bishop bombed a BankBoston ATM in the nearby city of La Plata (where, among other things, we played squash and drank mate last Saturday). The usual: leaflets, shattered glass, no injuries. But who are these bush0-league pseudo-leftist "revolutionaries" taking inspiration from? Che Guevara is a known entity, but Maurice Bishop?

A little poking around Wikipedia revealed the following resume, which adds grim absurdity to an already grimly absurd situation:

Maurice Rupert Bishop was a Grenadan politician. His New Jewel Movement overthrew the Government of Sir Eric Gairy in 1979 and he became Prime Minister of Grenada. His government started grassroots democracy intiatives and workers' councils while seeking closer relationships with Fidel Castro's Cuba, the Soviet Union and other Communist bloc nations…In October 1983, Bishop was overthrown and executed at Fort Rupert, St. George's along with a number of his supporters after a Stalinist military coup d'état, led by Bishop's erstwhile friend and Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard. This event prompted a U.S.-led invasion of the island, "Operation Urgent Fury," to depose the pro-Soviet Coard. Bishop had planned to build a large, controversial international airport on Grenada with Cuban assistance, which was eventually completed with U.S. assistance several years later.

It takes a weird sense of humor to base your movement on a leader whose death inspired that parody of a conflict, the near-forgotten U.S. Grenadan Airport War. And Operation Urgent Fury? That sounds like the gastric distress I feel after eating an over-spicy vindaloo, not a war. But I've said too much already.

In an impressive move toward downright Scandinavian Honesty, Argentina moved--practically friggin' leapt--11 places in Transparency International annual honesty/corruption rankings, released today. After years mired among the corrupt and unjust, Argentine has powered into gentrified respectibility. Once the land of the two-bit bribe--the coima--the country that bore Evita now can brag...

Okay, scratch that. Even the local papers couldn't spin the Transparency Int'l report. Clarin titled its article, "Corruption: Argentina improves, but still very low," and La Nacion came stright out and said, "Argentina: Among the countries with the greatest perception of corruption." With 2.8 points out of a possible ten on the honesty scale, it seems you don't make it far up the list of 159 countries. Argentina did rise 11 places--from 108th to 97th--which is nice, but still sort of like being the smartest retard.

Let's just say Club 97 ain't the swankest place. Fellow members include Algeria, Mozambique, Serbia and Montenegro, Madagascar and Malawi. If I recall, a good portion of those were involved civil war or crimes against humanity a few years ago (ah, the pride swells; we've really come a long way). At least there's something to aspire to: If Argentina works real hard, someday it could catch Rwanda--at spot 83.

Argentina's involvement--or obsession--with psychoanalysis is more than a running theme in its image in the outside world, the impetus behind the name of the Villa Freud neighborhood, and the subject of two brilliantly-named books by Mariano Plotkin (Argentina on the Couch and Freud in the Pampas). Is such a hyper-analyzed culture the sign of self-centeredness and ego-love? A reaction to the stress of constant economic crises? A reaction to repeated swings between dictatorship and democracy? The unavoidable lot of self-proclaimed Europeans stuck at the end of the world? What one decides on that front probably says more about the watcher than the watched, but one thing is for sure: There are plenty of shrinks living La Vida Parrilla.

How many, however, was not clear to me until now. A story in today's La Nacion reveals the results of a study conducted by one Modesto Alonso. According to Alonso's numbers, there are 56,000 licensed psychologists in Argentina, a rise of 50% in the last five years That breaks down to 154 for every 100,000 inhabitants, or the incredible figure of one for every 650 people. Of those, 80% are women.

In context, how does that compare? If true, it's amazing. The U.S. has 45 per 100,000, Mexico 98, and Brazil 87. And in woefully unanalyzed Ecuador, South America's center of the unexamined life? There are but 1,500 shrinks, or 13 per 100,000 people.

Truckers block a Coca-Cola plant (Photo from La Nacion)

"Buenos Aires" is often mistranslated as "Good Airs" or "Good Winds" when the actual meaning, in ancient Quechua, is "Land of Work Stoppages." Strikes are as much a part of the Argentine ethos as tango, red meat and dog walkers, a kind of background noise that's almost as intrinsic as alcohol is to New Orleans.

The most recent strike du jour has been one involving beverage companies and the trucking union, which began when the union demanded a 50% salary increase and, to make their point, blockaded beverage plants. During the action, soda and beer prices rose 10% and the beverage shortage led to awkwardly comic signs in our local Disco supermarket advising parched shoppers that we would be limited to two bottles of beer during each store visit; the cafeteria at my language school offered no liquids save for coffee and boxed juice; and today at lunch our local "Casa de Lunch" only offered fizzy water, no soda, sorry kids.

Happily, last night beverage producers and the trucking union resolved the strike. The drivers will get a 20% salary increase plus various raises in overtime and the like. And by Tuesday, they say, we'll have back our regular supply of beer.

And that's what really matters.

I tried to copy stylish Nadine's habit of creating a lil collage from the thumbnail photos available online for free. The little dot of lime green = Ian and white = me and the other white thingy = the finish line.
Sources:
www.fotos42k.com.ar
www.maratondebuenosaires.com

A bombed Blockbuster in a B.A. suburb (Photos from La Nacion)

While in the U.S., you hear very little about the pettier acts of anti-Americanism that happen around the world. But they exist, I suspect, in great frequency. Last Thursday's attacks near Buenos Aires are a prime example. A day after the White House confirmed George Bush's attendance at November's Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, two previously unknown group that call themselves Comando Antiimperialista Comandante Che Guevara and Coronel Dorrego planted six bombs at various symbols of America: Blockbuster Video, Citibank and Ford. Leaving aside the fact that some of these business are completely separate from their U.S. namesakes--trust us, after immense difficulties trying to transfer money from Citibank U.S. to Citibank Argentina, we can promise that, yes, they are not the same company--such bombings point to the painfully obvious fact, more-or-less unknown in the U.S. because of the lack of coverage, that George Bush is about as popular as Stalin in South America (except for in Chile, but whatever).

Seventy percent of a Blockbuster was gutted, via a bomb filled with anti-Bush pamphlets; two Citibank ATM were bombed, though the fires quickly extinguished; a Ford dealer was bombed; and a BankBoston branch was attacked.

Admittedly, these were "polite" bombs , in the way so much Argentine terrorism seems to be (outside of the horrific AMIA Jewish cultural center bombing of the 90s). Propaganda was shot about, walls burnt, but no one was hurt. These hall-assed, pseudo-leftist "armies" have little-to-no popular support, but the lack of public outrage or fierce official condemnation suggests that such dimwitted acts, as long as they're bloodless and directed against American symbols, are to a point "OK": the current U.S. administration's image in large swathes of the world, including in Argentina, is simply far enough beneath contempt that a burnt Blockbuster is almost an acceptable release valve. There's almost no discussion about the U.S. admin; the Grinch has better poll numbers.

Thankfully, such animosity does not extend itself to citizens of the U.S. It is an interestingly clear separation, whereby the citizens are utterly cleaved their leaders' actions. Which may say something about the Argentine cynicism toward their own politicians, but that's only a back-of-the-envelope psychological sketch.

Villa 20, a 25,000-resident shantytown on Buenos Aires south side

Argentina's congressional elections, coming on October 23, hold the appeal of a good, old-fashioned cat-fight. . The chief rivals are President Néstor Kirchner and former President Eduardo Duhalde, both of whom are “Peronists” in theory, although with Peronism being more of a religion than a political ideology, saying that they're both "Peronists" means about as much as saying that Bill Clinton and George Bush are both Christians. For those who don't know, Duhalde led a caretaker regime before the 2003 election that put Kirchner in power--the two apparently, were more or less allies--and since then the two have fallen out over control of national politics and the party machine. Duhalde now leads the traditional Peronist party, Partido Justicialista (PJ), and Kirchner runs a splinter group, El Frente para la Victoria (FV).

To give the current race the full Eva Peron treatment, the wives of the two—Chiche Duhalde and Cristina Kirchner—are running against each other, via their respective husband’s political party, for senator in the province of Buenos Aires. Cristina is ahead by 25% in the polls, pepole are comparing their opponents to Don Corleone, government destabilization pacts are ominously mentioned but never verified and now, less than three weeks before the election, a vote-buying scandal has exploded. Or, well, whimpered into view.

Just as Eva Peron was loved for handing out sewing machines to the poor, the two competing Peronist parties have been caught distributing appliances, building materials and checks in poor, hotly-contested precincts in the province of Buenos Aires. In a series of front page articles in La Nacion that began October 4th, the paper documented a “virtual purchasing of votes” whereby government representatives of the competing parties have recently delivered washing machines, construction materials, and checks for between 300 and 500 pesos (about $105-$170) in areas where candidates were campaigning. Checks were delivered by the provincial Senate, which is run by vice-governor Graciela Giannettasio (a Duhalde loyalist) and goods were delivered via the national Ministry of Social Development, which is run by the President’s sister, Alicia Kirchner. Those receiving appliances said they were given a menu and told to chose pieces valued up to 1,000 pesos, a middle-class monthly salary and a huge amount to the poor in a country where 38.5% of the population lives below the poverty line. Supposedly people in the neighborhoods laughed at the 1,000 peso figure because it was so high, and didn’t believe their lucks until beds, refrigerators and the like arrived. (Many appliances were apparently resold for cash.)

Inside Villa 20

Government representatives denied the existence of a menu and claimed that they’d been delivering appliances for ages—that this was not an election tactic—while residents in the areas contradicted this and said that they were offered checks and goods to attend political rallies and that appliances were delivered to those affiliated with the correct political party while those not affiliated watched from the sidelines and yelled. From my own visit to a shantytown inside the city, the process of “clientelismo”—where the poor become “clients” of a political party and sell their votes for aid—is common. In the Villa 20 shantytown, I was told that the “villa’s business was the villa”—i.e. it thanks politicians who provide investments with votes—and that the majority of the jobs inside were government-paid construction jobs. Argentina has long had a patronage political system and from one angle the current aid can seem natural, albeit cynical: the government helping the poor in a “grey” way. This angle is the one officials nervously take when forced to comment. And why shouldn't the poor vote for those who help them?

The more sinister side, made clear by the claims of cash-for-attendance and preferential donations, is what feeds the current scandal. Helping the poor is good. Yes. But buying your party votes with tax receipts? Spinning that into something palatable thrusts the citizenry far deeper into cynicism's smirking maw. No wonder no one pays taxes here.

It started today at 7:30 AM -- or more like 7:34 AM. No gun, just a "diez, nueve, etc." chant from the front-runners who could see the clock. The estimated 4,000 runners hailed all over South America -- with Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and more Peru proudly displayed on many shirts & flags. I also noted flags and colorful outfits promoting Mexico, Sweden & South Africa. I know there were other estadounidenses among us, but none advertising our affiliation lest we get hit with anti-Bush leaflets. (Just a couple of days ago, "leaflet bombs" & vandals hit Citibank, BankBoston, Blockbuster and a Ford dealership to protest George W.'s visit to Argentina in November.) Fourteen barrios later, we crossed the finish line. For me, that was 4 hours and 6 minutes later. For Ian, it took just 3 hours and 13 minutes. It was actually fun enough to start planning for next year.

The most popular article in today’s La Nacion – according to the online count – is “Nadie te cree, Argentina.” Prompted by yet another doping scandal for an Argentine tennis player, the article is a laundry list of what’s wrong with Argentina’s credibility in front of the world. Let’s see: Debt default, rampant tax evasion, bribes for votes, scoring a very important soccer goal by hand... I have to say, I like the fact that Argentina is so self aware and almost eager to chastise itself. There’s a column that appears regularly on page 2 of Clarin called “Como nos ven” – how they see us – that reprints (in Spanish) some foreign country’s take on an Argentine issue. Usually it’s from Brazil, Chile or England. I wish there were something similar in U.S. papers... But maybe the paper goes too far with its regular look at what its readers think of yesterday's paper: "El juicio final." It lists the very specific likes and dislikes of some Clarin reader re: yesterday's news. I suppose all this self-reflection is not surprising coming from a city with more shrinks per capita than any other city in the world.

It was my brother’s birthday, 31 years ago today. I didn’t think October 5 would become a sad day in my lifetime, but he died suddenly this March from a lethal complication of Type 1 (aka juvenile) diabetes--diabetic ketoacidosis. In pursuit of a cure for this terrible disease, Rod’s network of friends and family have raised about $40K in his name so far. (See links below to find out more.) This photo is of Rod enjoying his 30^th birthday last year. His good friend Jere arranged for a monkey to deliver a birthday card on the set of an MTV promo he was directing. The monkey delivered the card & jumped into his arms.

▪ RoddyScott.com
▪ The Roddy Scott Fund at the New York Chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation
▪ The Roddy Scott Fund at the Princeton Area Community Foundation