You can't accuse Raúl Castells (right) of not knowing how to make a splash. The leader of a piquetero group--a union of demonstrators, originally formed during the Menem regime to protest lost jobs, who block roads to press demands (some have since been co-opted and corrupted by various political parties)--Castells opened a sort of soup kitchen in the midst of Buenos Aires' wealthy and, to my opinion, soul-less Puerto Madero neighborhood on Thursday. (According to Clarín, the comedor was originally supposed to open March 19, making it one of the first things in the history of Buenos Aires to open early.) Castells, the subject of Raúl, the Terrible, gained some fame after engaging in a hunger strike after being arrested for "extortion" for blocking a B.A. McDonalds and demanding 50,000 food rations for poor children.

On Friday we dropped by for a visit and happily found Castells walking table to table taking orders as he was trailed by a photographer. The location was plastered with his mug and the slogan "Luchamos por una Argentina donde los perros de los ricos dejen de estar mejor alimentados que los hijos de los pobres" (translated at the site, more or less correctly, as, "We fight for Argentina to be a country where the dogs of the rich stop being better feed [sic] than the children of the poor."). The place was full and food was indeed being prepared and distributed, the atmosphere was expectant, and the motif perfectly Marxist-Ironic. Running with the McDonalds theme, the fries are "McCastells", the "Employee of the Month" is President Nestor Kirchner, and the uniforms are, well, McDonalds yellow (La Nación foto, left).