"We were so good I don't get why we lost"

"4 YEARS OF GOVERNMENT WITHOUT RAISING ANY TAXES"
(Post-election advertising poster for the outgoing government,
almost identical to posters used in the campaign to boost
the government party candidate, who lost anyway.)

Reporter: "[Governor] Jorge Obeid said he'll leave you [enough] money to pay salaries and bonuses to the public employees in December, 200 million pesos from the anti-cyclical fund, 80 million from the public works fund, and 300 million for ongoing works, adding up to 1,400 million. What do you think?"

Governor-elect Hermes Binner: "That we're going to have to pay for a lot of advertising."

The cogs of the political machine

An Al-Jazeera video showing how politicians buy votes from the poor through punteros (middlemen), how they manage to confirm that those votes were actually cast, how much they pay, and how politicians hire people to fill their meetings and cheer for them... No less sickening because we've always known this is so.

Four more years?

She won in the first round! Let's welcome ourselves to four years of Cristina — four more years of Kirchner-style corruption, friends' capitalism, negligence, incompetence, short-sightedness, intolerance and nepotism. And the worst of all is — she was the best candidate...

I refuse to believe that is it, but it is. Not only did she win by a wide margin, which will cause her and all her husband's minions to gloat over the victory during her whole term, but Congress, already crowded with yes-people, will now be practically a club for the Kirchnerist sect.

And yet I say she was the best candidate. In a way, many people sensed that and acted on their own interest. Cristina is the only one capable of containing and guiding the mobs that rule the most populated district in the country, her land of adoption, the province of Buenos Aires. She's the only one who can negotiate with the whole parallel chain of command (mayors, police, drug dealers, weapons dealers, gang leaders, petty thieves of all stripes) and ensure that they behave. These are the same people who are called to attend certain union assemblies and political meetings when they're needed. Cristina has already made sure that the corporatist model her husband started to draft will work — co-opt or buy the less combative unions, pay no attention to the smaller groups, and hint at the bosses of the oligopolic industrial conglomerates that run the economy that they'll be allowed to get away with murder, up to certain limits. By pulling on or loosing those two reins, she can control either side using the other as a threat.

The soul of old Peronism is now shattered for good, as are most other parties; all their candidates together couldn't have beaten Cristina Kirchner. The dissident Peronist Alberto Rodríguez Saá had a dismal performance; former minister Roberto Lavagna only served to take votes away from Elisa Carrió; former Radical Ricardo López Murphy must still be wondering why he ended up being a candidate. All these people, one presumes, will accept the defeat and go back to their homes, their fragile makeshift parties dissolving or becoming insignificant in national politics.

Carrió did quite fine, but only got half Cristina's votes, and half of her own, I bet, were votes against rather for. In any case, she seemed quite happy, and justifiably so, because she's now a force to be reckoned with. Carrió-Giustiniani won Buenos Aires City and in Rosario (they came even with Cristina in Santa Fe Province as a whole), and they got a few Senators and Deputies in.

During the celebrations, Cristina's supporters sang the Peronist March and chanted rhymes against the gorilas. A gorila, in old-fashioned Peronist parlance, is an anti-Peronist — which in Perón's time included (but was certainly not limited to) the urban middle and higher class, the wealthy landowners in the countryside, the independent intellectuals, the right-wing press, the big companies both national and foreign that didn't submit to Perón's desires. Hearing such a resentful and anachronistic term used to label the opposition (i.e. all of us) as enemies of Cristina's "national project", and the March — a textbook example of a crypto-fascist personality cult hymn — made me truly fear for this country.

This blog will resume its usual cheerful status tomorrow.

Political silence... of the graveyard?

Did you notice there's almost no political campaigning going on? On TV and the radio, I mean. You see posters and such, and the president appears here and there to make those awful speeches he's so fond of, but today's exactly one month to campaign ban and only a few very short ads are airing. Nothing from the Most Righteous Blonde, nothing from the Castaway Minister, not a peep from One-Week President's brother, just a few seconds of the Teacher Killer saying he's "100% ready". And nothing from the Iron Fi(r)st Lady, or, as they call her in certain circles, Kristina.

That's sad and refreshing at the same time. Refreshing, because nobody likes political ads. Sad, because it's rather clear that not one of those who may end up ruling the country has anything to say that can convince us that they're not more of the same. Natural, you might say, because almost everybody knows Kristina will win, and because the government has all the money and the resources for the campaign and the opposition has none. And quite possibly also because politicians know, deep down, that all Argentinians have already decided whether they'll vote for Cristina Kirchner or against her.

I mean, really, how many people do you think will vote for anybody? Cristina relies on the robber barons of the Conurbano (Greater Buenos Aires) to gather votes for her, and the rest of Buenos Aires Province is sure to follow, especially with wishy-washy Daniel Scioli campaigning for governor. Half of Buenos Aires City will vote for her as well. City + metro area + province = 40% of the country's total vote count. Add the places where opportunistically Kirchnerist Peronist caudillos cling to power — mostly poor and depopulated places, but many anyway. Among the larger provinces, Córdoba might or might not react to the scandalous fraud perpetrated in the last election, but then remember that the two candidates are Peronists, both backed by Kirchner until months ago. Mendoza's governor is Cristina's vice president candidate. Entre Ríos is still safely Peronist.

The question might be Santa Fe. Governor elect Binner's right hand is Rubén Giustiniani, vice president candidate of Elisa "Lilita" Carrió. Giustiniani has about the charisma of a park bench, and Lilita really needs to check her dopamine level. But they chose to launch their campaign in Rosario, now viewed as the bastion of moderate progressive political thought. Both Rosario and Buenos Aires are large cities where candidates on a platform of moderation and non-ideological urban management ("I come to solve your problems with transparency and involvement"), but Buenos Aires is more like the bastion of moderate conservatism right now, with the Spoiled Brat and the Iron Nun ready to take office. So Carrió came to Rosario and seemed quite certain that she'll be the next president, and if it were for Rosario, I'd be tempted to agree.

I can tell you that Carrió is not a president I'd like to have. She's unpredictable and she has this tendency to alienate her allies (which amounts to suicide here). On top of that she's a Catholic fanatic. Giustiniani is a mystery to me. He's a well-trained Socialist Senator and seems to be OK, but what he might do next to Lilita is difficult to imagine. Lilita can be extremely good at speaking — hearing her the other night I almost believed for a second that she could actually turn the election and bury the Kirchners and their troupe of adept bootlickers. Then I remembered — this is not Europe. A coalition of moderate socialists, social-democrats and Christian progressives can win an election but it can't rule for long. Not with millions of poor people surrounding the capital, ready to be roused by the barons of old Peronism, which have brought down two presidents already since 1983.

So an empty envelope awaits me in the voting room, a month from now... unless somebody convinces me otherwise.

Santa Fe, Córdoba, Misiones

(I'll stop the politics after this. Promise.)

The election was Sunday, today's only Wednesday, and everything already seems to be upside down. Some people who were overconfident to the point of hubris are desolate. The parachuted former candidate Rafael Bielsa is going to resign from his deputy chair because "it wouldn't be ethical to represent the city of BA after I was candidate for governor of SF" (what, you mean now?). Governor elect Hermes Binner met with governor Obeid in the government house and the employees left their posts to go and greet him. The factions of Peronism in Santa Fe are at each other's throats, as they see their power structure crumbling like a house of cards. The President hasn't uttered the words "Santa Fe" (or "Córdoba") since Sunday.

And Binner is already laying out his plans, which include giving more money and more power to the municipalities, avoiding the discretional management of funds by the central provincial state, fighting tax evasion without raising taxes, ensuring that school classes start on schedule next year, and cancelling the construction of a new provincial hospital only 10 blocks away from a municipal hospital (a project that vice-governor, councilmember elect and well-connected architect María Eugenia Bielsa made up and is now defending with such foamy rage that it seems rather obvious she was going to make dirty money for herself out of it).

The situation in Córdoba after the election is a mess. Only 17,000 votes (out of more than 1.5 million valid votes) separate the two main candidates. The vote count was abnormally slow, the handling of the information was horrible, and the fraud is obvious; the only issue is whether it was a general effort, planned from the top down, or just minor tricks on the local scale (the latter are a certainty).

And, thanks to the Ley de Lemas, the elections in Misiones next Sunday will most likely be even messier: besides the board-kicking effect caused by the rejection of the constitutional reform allowing the governor's re-election, the Ley de Lemas, which allows parties to combine the votes of any number of minuscule factions and candidates, means 18,000 candidates will be running for something — one every 36 voters.

Anyway, we're done over here for now. There have been many interviews and articles about Binner's achievement, and in most of them one can realize that the media have caught the general vibe of the people and, besides the natural journalistic interest for "the first Socialist governor in history", there's a serene awareness that change for the better is coming. Nobody expects a lot, but then everybody expects something — even those who voted for Bielsa, who (for the most part, if you ask me) aren't so sure that they should be sad about the loss.

Election Sunday

What a weekend! I'm into politics, but I was waiting for this election in particular for personal reasons. I'm an employee of the provincial state of Santa Fe, so the governor election meant the citizenship was ultimately going to elect my boss, and the outcome could radically change my working conditions.

Well, the short version is: Hermes Binner won the election against the Rosario-born, porteño deputy Rafael Bielsa with a 10% overall difference. In Rosario, mayor Miguel Lifschitz was reelected, beating the repeatedly sold-out former Socialist mayor Héctor Cavallero by such a wide margin Cavallero didn't even bother to appear in public to protest.

The Front for Victory (Kirchner's version of the Justicialist Party) lost the governor election in great part thanks to Rosario's votes. It also took several surprising hits, losing its grip on several important cities that had been ruled by Peronists for years or decades, such as Santo Tomé (near the capital, pop. 60,000), San Lorenzo (30 km north of Rosario, pop. 45,000) and Villa Gobernador Gálvez (right south of Rosario, pop. 75,000). The biggest and quite possibly painful surprise was the provincial capital itself, where the Socialist Mario Barletta beat both the Front for Victory candidate Martín Balbarrey (seeking reelection) and the "dissident Peronist" Oscar Martínez. Starting in December, five of the seven largest cities in Santa Fe and more than half of the population will be ruled by Socialists.

Those were the objective numbers. Now the impressions... What I got from most people was simply relief, the comforting realization that a dynasty of mediocre opportunists was ending, the sudden awareness of this turn of events. Binner is the first Socialist governor in the history of Argentina, but it's obvious to everyone that he was voted by many people who wouldn't call themselves Socialist. Others don't like him very much, and many outside Rosario surely don't really know him at all, but voted against something: the crude inability of the Peronists to do anything but clinging to power (even as they fight among themselves for it), the aggressive language and derisive manners of a candidate that tried to pass for one of us when he hadn't set foot in the province for two decades, the plain realization that anything but a radical change would mean four more years of flat, uneventful decadence or, at most, vegetative growth. Four more years, after 24 years of corruption, of judges on the payroll of the party, of a police force stained with a string of unpunished crimes, of friends turned government officials who have no idea to do what they're supposed to do, of fundamental laws delayed and then passed and ignored, of callous indifference to the suffering of millions, of the State turned into a section of the Party. That was too much.

Another impression I got was that Rosario was the lever that moved the election. With almost one-third of the population of the province, the landslide victory in Rosario was important for the overall result, but I'm speaking of comparisons and imitations. People are not stupid. Rosario serves as proof that, while unable to work magic, a good administration can improve the citizens' quality of life a lot, even without help from the provincial state, and beyond the mere recovery of employment and consumption that follows automatically from a high economic cycle. Thus it shouldn't be surprising that the two largest cities in the Greater Rosario area changed hands last Sunday. San Lorenzo, an industrial port city, has an enormous untapped potential and a government that wasn't up to the challenge. Villa Gobernador Gálvez, next to Rosario, could not but watch with envy as the neighbouring metropolis flourished while a mafia government led directly or by proxy by a violent, uneducated thug continued to win elections.

Last night, minutes before Rafael Bielsa spoke to acknowledge his defeat (which he took ages to do), a dozen of cars with people waving Socialist flags (red and white, with the fist and the rose in the center) raced along my street, throwing confetti and honking their horns. I went up the roof to wave at them. Bielsa spoke then, and rather predictably he assumed all the blame. He thanked all his political patrons, from the president down, for lending themselves to the campaign, but apparently forgetting the 360,000 citizens that voted for him. Well, at least he didn't imply the rest of us were stupid, like Filmus did in BA. Binner's speech came minutes later, after shorter admonitions by Lifschitz and by vice-governor elect Griselda Tessio. The guys with the flags were already in his headquarters at the Patio de la Madera. Binner spoke in measured tones, remembering historical characters of the parties of the Progressive Front, and attacking no-one directly; the young militants, though, booed governor Obeid's and president Kirchner's name when they came up (Binner was saying that both had politely called to congratulate him), and quite loudly told the Peronists to shove their purposefully biased pre-election surveys up their collective asses.

And then that was it. The numbers continued arriving, and as more data from the bigger cities were input in the system, the difference between Binner and Bielsa widened. It didn't matter anymore.

We now have three months to wait. Binner is meeting with Obeid today to talk about the transition. Obeid, I think, will listen, and won't do anything stupid. He's an old politician, and he's on his way out.

What can we expect? Well, first of all, autonomy for Rosario!



Media coverage in Spanish: La Capital, Página/12, Rosario/12, Rosario3, La Nación, Clarín; in English: CNN, Buenos Aires Herald

The end is near

My Japanese calligraphy teacher's view of the candidates for the governor election: "There's the guy with all that beard... and the other guy who looks like Hitler." I had to laugh. It's very difficult to discuss politics in a language you're just starting to understand beyond the basics, and explaining Argentine and local politics to a foreigner from a vastly different culture is absolutely impossible. We left it at that. (Watanabe-sensei also inquired about Cristina Kirchner. I just said no.)

OK, that was just comic relief. We're right on top of the election, and that's a good thing, because I was getting tired of the incessant TV and radio ads, the childish taunts among grown men, the unsubtle campaign moves. If I hear the President is coming again to unveil yet another one of those hypothetical or half-finished public works that abound these days, I will lose it.

In case you didn't notice, I'm starting a news blog. I'm going to take news from local media and classify them with graphical labels according to their type... morbid, boring, useless filling, paid-for ads disguised as news, etc. It's en español and it's called Etiquetame todo ("Label Me All Over"). If you read Spanish, check out it.

Archaeological leftist remains

I started to make this into a post for Vista Rosario, but soon I was giving explanations to the reader, and I somehow guess that VR's followers (who are increasing) don't want the kind of thing that is clogging the gutters of today's political discourse. The images are current, and illustrative, and it doesn't matter that they show a form of urban decay — but they represent a kind of decay that I don't want to showcase there. So here it is. It's a couple of posters that the most leftest of the left came up with, and pasted everywhere.

One poster calls the people not to vote for anybody...

... and the other poster offers simple, radical solutions for the problems that afflict Argentina:

The text of the first poster (or rather, the parts that matter), includes a list of political scandals surrounding the national administration, and other things that bother us. The main text (next to the big red fist) says "Hit'em where it hurts them most", and below that, "Vote blank, void the ballot or just don't go". The first method means simply inserting an empty envelope into the ballot box, instead of an envelope with a ballot inside; the second means spoiling the ballot to force the authorities to discount it; the third means not going to vote, either violating the law or traveling more than 500 km away from your legal address so as to be exempt from voting.

The second poster offers a list of solutions. How do you deal with inflation? Exempt basic goods from the IVA (Impuesto al Valor Agregado, i.e. the VAT). The energy crisis? Re-statize natural gas and oil to regain energy independence. The government's imposition of wage tops (prez sits down with complacent union bosses, who promise they won't ask for more)? Give all workers a basic salary (not exactly a minimum wage, but close) based on a "family basket" (the cost of the goods and services that an average family needs monthly) of 3,200 pesos, or, at today's rate, about 1,000 U.S. dollars.

Makes sense, right? Well, the answer is not that simple. The Argentine tax system is regressive. It taxes the poor proportionally more than the rich. The VAT, being a tax on consumption that few items escape, is extremely regressive — because everybody consumes, but the rich can save a part of their income, while the poor cannot. A progressive government that cares for the poor, as Kirchner's is supposed to be, should have taken off the VAT from bread, some vegetables and cereals, and possibly beef. The state has a fiscal surplus, and part of the revenue loss could be compensated by increasing the taxes on personal and corporate profits, or simply by fighting tax evasion. Instead of that, the government recently increased the minimum wage that gets you taxed, and called it "a measure of social inclusion". Social inclusion means you give the poor a chance to stop being poor. People who earn three times an average salary, by definition, are not poor, they're comfortable middle class at least.

Re-statizing gas and oil companies is simply not possible. They were sold by mere pennies, and now they're worth mega-jillions and their owners are not willing to sell. Can't blame them for that. It's not that they're bent on taking away our national energy sovereignty — they just see big profit. That, and they're friends of Kirchner. Do you think you can rule an oil-producing province without friends in the business?

The salary tops — well, the only way for workers to get paid good money is from them to fight for it. Many well-off people today in Argentina think that workers are getting uppity about their wages. Those people have grown accustomed to inequality. Thirty years ago, a factory worker could support his family alone and go on vacations with them every summer, and have his own house and a small car. Today, even in middle-class homes both parents have to work, and it's difficult for them to buy a nice house. Thirty years ago, however, the state systematically murdered those who could think for themselves, organize others and fight for their rights. Some fled. More than a few sold themselves out. And this is how we have, today, union leaders who have no qualms agreeing with the politicians in charge that they won't make their lives difficult and will only fight to keep the workers from starving, so the economy continues to march ahead as planned.

It's a pity that the Argentine left is so miserable. They have no idea what to do to get our attention and our votes. They have a point or two, but they're so laughable most of the time that they make you feel embarrassed.

Campaign daze

There are so many ways to go about a political campaign! If you're the government, that's made easy by the fact that you can unveil public works and you can do it at the exact moment you want. If they actually serve a useful purpose, better yet.

This the Arturo Illia Tunnel on Monday, August 13:


This is the same tunnel on Tuesday, August 14 (the time of the day is about the same, but the lighting and the exposure are different):


The municipality changed the lighting system of the tunnel: they took out the fluorescent lights on both sides, and installed a double row of zenital cut-off sodium lamps, "for power efficiency and safety". So far, so good. Only the mayor Miguel Lifschitz, went there to inaugurate the lights. It was a lot of work, I get it, but I don't get a will-never-be-the-same feeling from the change. Lifschitz is campaigning for his reelection, though — which explains why he not only mounted a show to unveil the lights at a scheduled event on Tuesday although they were basically ready on Monday, but also why he's also unveiling a level crossing on a very minor street in a forgotten spot of the city tomorrow, and advertising it with pamphlets carrying the internationally recognizable symbol of the rose in the fist.

In his defense, I may say these things are actually useful, and they're working already. Other government authorities have a tendency to unveil things that are not complete, or worse, to gather thousands of people just to announce future works, which may or may not be impossible to do. Think the Rosario-Buenos Aires "bullet train", which I still refuse to dismiss as pure fantasy, but also remember how Carlos Menem infamously promised we'd have an airport for "stratospheric planes", and how he "unveiled" the Rosario–Victoria Bridge four years before it was completed.

Another way of going about your campaign if you're in the government is, of course, giving away money to public employees. This is even more useful if you avert a possible teachers' strike, and need not cost a lot. In the case of the Province of Santa Fe, less than 100 dollars per employee, one payment only, and lest someone think this is an electoral measure, it will be done after the elections (it's announced now so that people can adjust their monthly budgets, surely, and because nobody likes a surprise raise... I guess?).

Quis custodiet custodes?

The elections in Santa Fe are in three weeks. In the primaries, the opposition candidate Hermes Binner got about 2% less votes than the two ruling party candidates combined... but those were provisional numbers. Two weeks after that, the final count gave 15,000 more votes to Binner. The Peronist candidates added a few thousands as well, but the distance decreased significantly. Binner said "I want international overseers from OAS." The provincial government sneered at it: "We don't know why he's so uptight about transparency, but we'll get those overseers." So far, so far good.

Yet Government Minister Roberto Rosúa now says there's no need to bother OAS with a request of international overseers for the main elections, and proposes, instead, that we employ overseers provided by CIPPEC, a national NGO which I have nothing bad to say about a priori... except it's recommended by national Interior Minister Aníbal Fernández (that would be the Luiggi to Alberto Fernández's Mario). Fernández, I don't know why, seems to have power to decide over the transparency controls of the elections.

Not only that, but we learn that members of the provincial police force vote in special double envelopes, and those votes are not counted in the provisional tally. That's because of the special circumstances in which the police have to vote (they're on duty during the election, maybe guarding places far away from their legal addresses, etc.). Fine. Except there are 6,000 policemen in Santa Fe. That's 6,000 employees of the provincial administration, and that's also 6,000 votes that may suddenly pop out of nowhere if needed, after the polls are closed. We're talking of a party that doesn't like to lose, that hasn't lost an election in 24 years, that has people in every place where it may need them to avert a defeat, and that has a lot, a lot to lose. The ones who have to control the elections and the vote count are employees of this government, members of this party, and people recommended by a notorious member of the party.

Quis, indeed.

Out of dark rooms

Yesterday's election brought some unexpected things. A lot of people went to vote, more than 70%. You'd think a compulsory election (under the threat of jail for those who don't attend) should not be skipped by 30% of the voters, but given the complete lack of enforcement of the electoral law and the fact that many people didn't actually know who or what they were voting for (the system is new, a bit confusing, and a lot of people are indifferent to politics when not simply dumb), it was a success — the rate of attendance was about the same as in most main elections in the recent past. On the other hand, blank and voided votes were a lot as well, about 17%. The profusion of ballots of different lengths and the possibility of cutting them to combine candidates from different parties and factions probably contributed to the confusion.

The real surprise, however, was Binner's loss. The Socialist governor candidate believed (as we all did, based on surveys) he was going to get more votes than the two Peronists combined, which would make victory in September almost a certainty; but he gathered about 30,000 votes less than the total of Rafael Bielsa and Agustín Rossi. Worse, he went public before the official figures were out saying he'd won over both, and even the papers got it wrong. Rossi was crushed — Bielsa got double the votes. So it's going to be Binner vs. Bielsa, and the result will depend on whether people who voted for Rossi did so out of Peronist loyalty or focused on the personal qualities of the candidate. If the former is true, Binner could very well lose the main election by a few thousand votes.

Then there are also the smaller parties and the people who chose them. This is not a ballotage as in Buenos Aires, but it's likely that, now the real numbers are in place, the September elections will be much more polarized and people will resort to what's called voto útil, the useful vote — a vote for someone whom you may not like but who has at least some chance to win. There's a Peronist candidate running outside the Front for Victory, and there's a Radical candidate running outside the Progressive Front; the former got 28,000 votes, the latter got 41,000. Not much in a province with 2.3 million voters, but enough to tip a close-tied election.

In Rosario, the Socialist component of the Progressive Front practically mopped the floor with its competitors, both internal and external, but that was pretty much expected. The Peronists should take note that their best candidate for mayor, Héctor Cavallero, is a former Socialist mayor (who sold out to Carlos Menem), and he got more votes for mayor than the votes Bielsa got for governor in Rosario — i.e. a significant number of people wanted to vote Cavallero, who was a good mayor in his time, and a good mayor in the line of Binner and Lifschitz, but didn't want to vote for Bielsa, and took the time to manually cut the ballot.

In case you're getting lost, remember this was all for almost nothing except for the Justicialist Party to decide which candidate will run. The real election for mayor and governor is in September, and the final numbers may differ greatly.

Yours truly won't tell you who he voted for, though it shouldn't be difficult to guess if you check my many earlier posts about politics. I'm hoping for the end of the 24 years of Peronist mediocrity in power. Worse, Bielsa is basically a Rosario-born porteño sent to Santa Fe by the President to win an election, and he takes pride in saying he's nothing but a representative of the President's national project. I believe a province with 3 million inhabitants who generate a large part of the total wealth of the country deserves a strong local government and independent ideas.

Some of the people who didn't vote yesterday will go to vote in September. And I'm now hearing people on the radio some people who say they voted for Rossi but won't vote for Bielsa, for the same reasons as me, but for Binner. There's hope.

Wrapping up the campaign

We're in veda electoral, that is, the common pre-election ban on political advertising, since this morning. Though next Sunday's is just a primary election, it works like a main one and it's equally a bother: it's compulsory and you can't sell (therefore can't buy) booze the night before and during the whole day (you can buy booze beforehand and save it for Sunday, though).

In Rosario, almost exactly 700,000 people have the right and the obligation to vote; in Santa Fe as a whole, about 2.3 million. We're selecting the candidates who will run for their respective parties in the main election in September. Until 2005 we had Ley de Lemas, a perverse system by which a candidate could win with fewer votes than most of their opponents (follow the link). In fact, with Ley de Lemas you could win with 2 votes against someone who had gotten 1 million votes, provided you had 999,999 other candidates of your own party running beside you and they each got 1 vote (which would make a total of 1,000,001 votes for your party as a whole).

The system was repealed and replaced by simultaneous compulsory primary elections — compulsory for the parties, even if a party has internally decided to run with only one candidate. That's the case of the Socialist Hermes Binner, the favorite to win the governorship according to all surveys. The Justicialists (Peronists) have a more complicated task ahead, since they're presenting two candidates (Agustín Rossi and Rafael Bielsa) under the name Frente para la Victoria (Front for Victory), the faction of President Kirchner, plus one more, Roxana Latorre, who rebelliously decided to run by herself, and (naturally) claims to represent the true interests of Peronism. Latorre is (or was) a pawn of Carlos Reutemann, the Formula 1 race driver turned governor by the magic of Menemist popstar politics in the 1990s, and she doesn't like how the dominant faction has taken up her space.

Now common sense tells everybody that Latorre's proclamation of independence means less votes for the "official" Peronists; it doesn't matter now in the primaries, but it will matter in September, since Latorre will draw votes (very few, but some) from either Rossi or Bielsa. Binner, who runs solo and only appears as candidate in the primaries to keep the letter of the law, doesn't have this kind of problem. Socialism is allied with the Radical Civic Union, which managed to preserve a degree of local power (smaller towns scattered throughout the province) after they blew it once and again and descended into obscurity on the larger context thanks to President Alfonsín selling out to Menem (1994) and President de la Rúa selling out to Domingo Cavallo and fleeing the Casa Rosada on a helicopter (2001), not to mention other stupid blunders and many gestures of misplaced moral authority in the meantime and up to now who would've made Alem and Yrigoyen spin in their respective graves.

In Santa Fe, most of the Radicals saw the convenience of selling out once again, this time to Binner's Frente Progresista (Progressive Front), and are therefore telling their people to vote for Binner, who has placed a number of Radicals in his associated list of provincial legislators; a sensible move that will allow them to keep a foot on the parliamentary door and maybe, in a few years' time, run their own candidate for governor. Reelection is not allowed, so if Binner wins he'll be out again in merely four years.

In Rosario the mayoral candidates will be competing as well. We have two heavyweights on the side of Justicialism, Héctor Cavallero (former mayor, former Socialist and Binner's mentor, very good in his time, sold out to Menem — a pity) and Juan Héctor Sylvestre Begnis (former Radical, migrated to Peronism, son of Santa Fe's best governor of all time, served as a very fine Minister of Health of Santa Fe, also a pity since the one we have today is a living shame). There's the usual assortment of unknowns crawling around, too. On Binner's side, the current mayor Miguel Lifschitz looking for reelection — an almost sure bet, and Carlos Comi, a concejal (city council member) who belongs to the local branch of ARI. ARI, you'll remember, is the party founded by Elisa Carrió, the party that won its first governorship last Sunday in the person of Fabiana Ríos, the rosarina that moved to Tierra del Fuego. Funny!

Comi and ARI in general are not too happy with Binner, since the Socialist ballot we'll find in the voting room next Sunday carries Binner and Lifschitz on the same piece of paper, while ARI will not have such a big name attached to its candidate. If you want to vote for Binner and Comi, you'll have to cortar boleta — cut the ballot manually (or with a scissor), while if you want Binner and Lifschitz, you just need to tuck the ballot in the envelope as it is. Lifschitz thus benefits from Binner's preference..., you know, like placing the brand of potato chips you want to sell next to the beer aisle on the supermarket. So Fabiana Ríos and Elisa Carrió came to Rosario this week to support Comi's campaign, and they mounted a kiosk with a gigantic pair of scissors. Subtle.

The official Peronist candidates have been much kinder to one another, to the point of boring us all and the media. According to both of them, everything in the province is so darn well done already they only need to continue doing what the party has been doing since 1983...

Strange days in politics

Strange days! I blogged on Saturday and Sunday, and that must be a first. And didn't blog yesterday and I almost didn't blog today, but I thought, everybody's talking about politics... well, at least everybody on TV, and a lot of people in the capital of our proudly macrocephalic country, plus a few thousands near the End of the World.

What to make of Macri? Well, for one he has a terrific image counselor — at times he can almost pretend he's a kind human being. Then, of course, he speaks outside his extremely limited script and we can all see his shadow turn into an old man with a mischievous smile joining the tips of his hands and muttering "Excellent!".

Macri has been praised by the right and derided by the left, and yet he's new to politics and to public life, so there's no way to know what he'll do once he's in power. He might be just what the average, fascist middle-class porteño wanted, or he might not have what it takes. Because "getting Buenos Aires in order" is not a task that you can accomplish without turning the streets into a battlefield, killing (by accident or design) a few protesters, and causing a fair amount of distress to those citizens who naïvely believe "order" can be achieved with a simple recipe (à la "Zero Tolerance"). Página/12 speculates a lot about this today (What kind of ruler will he want to be?).

If I were a porteño, I'd be more concerned about vice-Chief Gabriela Michetti. Mark my words: Macri might have the money and a lot of simplistic and dangerous upper-class ideas stemming from his upbringing as a spoiled brat, but Michetti is educated, conservative, devout, firm as a rock, relentless — the kind of person who can have tea with you and then send you to the firing squad with an unchanging smile on her face. (OK, maybe that was too much.) Just my impression.

Then there's Tierra del Fuego. In case you didn't hear (almost impossible, since it was repeated ad nauseam last Sunday on TV), Fabiana Ríos, a 43-year-old pharmacist born in Rosario who lives in Río Grande since she's 23, won the runoff election by a small but significant margin over the Kirchnerist governor Hugo Cóccaro, and is the first female governor to be elected to rule a
province. She looks younger than her age and seems a nice little lady, until you hear she intends to meet the president and tell him, basically, that she doesn't want the national government to mess with her province now that it's changed hands. Bear in mind this is a province that lives mostly on tourism and has a smaller population than some barrios of Buenos Aires... in fact, only half of Kirchner's Santa Cruz.

Ríos is also the first governor belonging to ARI, the continuously mutating party that Elisa Carrió founded and still leads on the national level... sort of. Carrió wants to be St. George to Kirchner's dragon — or, in less poetical terms, they hate each other's guts. Ríos cautiously (and truthfully) noted that this is a victory for her and her constituency and against an entrenched corrupt political class, not a triumph of Carrió against the president. But to Mr. K, this and Macri on the same day must have hurt really bad. Well, pain teaches you to keep away from some things, so let's hope K is beginning to learn that lesson.

Politics against the people

It's been a couple of days... I'm doing some programming-for-hire during the afternoon, so I don't have the amount of spare time I'd like to have to craft long detailed posts. And the office has been busy too. So that's why. I promise (more to myself than to anyone else, because I know I'm a procrastinator) that I'll try to stick to one post a day during weekdays.

I was thinking of commenting on the ridiculous, half-childish, half-brutish behaviour of president Kirchner and his minions regarding Mauricio Macri's triumph last weekend, but there's no need — you can watch K's tirades in all their inarticulate muck-racking glory anytime you want, as he's on it all day. As much as I dislike Macri from the bottom of my guts (and the deceptively nice Iron Lady on a wheelchair that accompanies him), I'm beginning to think he's not that a terrible thing to happen. Buenos Aires can surely bear four years of plutocracy, and after that eventually porteños will either learn or repeat history, or maybe (just maybe) Macri in power will turn out not to be a horrible mistake. In the context of a local election in a district that is not really troubled, Filmus's apocalyptic warnings about a clash of ideologies is exaggerated to say the least.

But that's not what I was going to comment on. Although I did. As I said, I've been busy at the office. Yesterday, for a change, I did some fieldwork; office's Number Two and I went to Granadero Baigorria to check on a healthcare center. Now the usual idea of what a public healthcare center is like is a shabby building with workers either willing and desperately trying to do their work without basic resources, or (more commonly) undermotivated, accustomed to doing nothing, and exempt from control and punishment by their powerful union. (This description works for most of the public administration, of course.)

What we found was a group, a team, of people doing their work earnestly and diligently with modest resources, in a decent, clean building, and willing to get help to make it all better. They had everything in order, though most in dead-tree form; the computer was old but OK. The director was a nurse. The administrative staff (two women) were volunteers — members of the community who work there for free, or as we say, ad honorem, though they didn't receive any formal honours. One of them, a lady in her sixties, kept about 4,700 patient records on an Excel file; she didn't know how to do counts and filters, so I taught her. Prior to that, when the authorities needed a count of (for example) how many female patients under 15 are served by the health center, she needed to manually count them.

The authorities don't know or don't want to know that these women work hard, for free, or that they need a computer course the state should pay for, or that they would glady do a much better job if they had the tools, or that most of the structure of the state that feeds their incompetent asses is supported by hard-working people who don't get what they deserve.

Right at the entrance of the health center, a bit dusty because the street is not paved, a large painted banner read "Welcome, Rafael Bielsa". The Peronist party, which paid for this banner promoting Buenos Aires Province deputy Bielsa's campaign for governor of Santa Fe (!), is also the one in power, the one that should have paid for those two women's salaries, the one that campaigns to stay in power by noting the province has a surplus and hasn't raised taxes, the one that doesn't spend that surplus on, let's say, public works to keep the province from flooding whenever it rains more than usual. Politics is not nice, we all know that, right?

Voting: why and how

Matt asks whether (and if so, why, I presume) I vote, given the appalling choice of candidates and the fact that politics seems to go on as usual no matter what.

Just to clarify: in Argentina, voting is compulsory between the ages of 18 and 70, and optional above that. You're exempt from voting if you're sick or more than 500 km away from your legal address, but you must prove it — with a doctor's certificate in the former case, or with a certificate issued by a local police station in the latter. Convicts and public servants in essential places don't vote.

So if you're staying where your DNI (National Identity Document) says, and your health is OK, you just have to check where you vote. The government issues lists; these are displayed in certain public places, and many local party groups also set up desks on sidewalks where you can consult the lists. They're also available on the web, of course. Regardless, of course, many people don't bother to check until the very day of the election. Typically, you vote in a school in your neighbourhood. The polls open at 8 AM and close at 6 PM.

Once you're there you need to find which mesa (table) you belong to. A "table" is a physical desk with a vote box (a cardboard box with an opening for an envelope; in Spanish, urna... ominously the same word used for the container of dead person's ashes), staffed by a president and a vice president (common citizens, appointed by the government — yours truly served as one once) plus a number of watchers (fiscales) sent by the parties. You hand the authorities your DNI, they check everything's fine, and they give you a signed envelope. You go into the "dark room" and find yourself alone surrounded by piles of ballots. You choose the ones you want, tuck them into the envelope, and then get out and insert the envelope into the vote box. The table president returns your DNI, with a stamped mark, and off you go.

Now this is all compulsory, so how do you choose not to vote for any of those corrupt politicians? Well, you can vote en blanco (blank). A blank vote is the envelope with nothing in it. Since your vote is secret (and making it public during the election is a minor offense), you have to get into the dark room, spend some time there, and then come out again with your empty envelope.

You can also make your ballot void. A ballot is voided by the table authorities when it's torn or has marks or is defaced in any way. A vote is also void if something other than the ballot, or two ballots of different parties for the same post (i.e. mutually exclusive) are found inside the envelope. So some people write over the ballot, or substitute letters with insults, or return a ballot in pieces.

The phenomenon of intentionally voided ballots is called voto bronca, i.e. "anger vote", and it's common in times of public discontent, supposedly as a message to the political establishment, though politicians never seem to get it.

Many people have the completely unsubstantiated belief that "blank votes go to the victor", so this also contributes to intentional ballot spoiling. Depending on the situation, of course, it may be advantageous for a given candidate that many people vote blank. There's an important difference between a blank vote and a void vote — blank votes are correctly counted as votes for no party, while void votes are excluded from the count. This can influence the outcome of a legislative election where seats are assigned by proportional representation, and also the outcome of the first round of a presidential election.

I'm part of a generation of citizens who have voted on every election whenever they had the right and the obligation to do so. This is true of everyone born after 1965 (more or less), since those who turned 18 before 1983 missed at least one election while the country was under military rule — which has been on and off always since the 1930s.

I voted for the first time in 1995, and every two years since. I don't spoil the ballot, and so far I've never voted blank. I still feel a faint solemn satisfaction at fulfilling this right and obligation of mine, even while also feeling a bit stupid (or horrified) afterwards. I believe one doesn't have the right to complain about a process if one doesn't participate in it.


So when's the next election? The provinces and the country as a whole elect their authorities independently, even if the general rule is that both elections are typically held on the same day. That's been changed this time. Santa Fe has a new law mandating "simultaneous compulsory primary elections", that is, every party must present their candidate lists and we must go and vote. That's scheduled for 1 July. Then there's the main provincial election (for governor and vice governor, provincial legislators, and municipal authorities where applicable, choosing from the candidates selected in the primaries), on 9 September. And then the national election, sometime in October. I've never voted three times in the same year... My DNI is going to be stamped all over!

Elections afoot

Provincial elections are already on the run. Since every province is an autonomous state regarding authorities, each has its own rules and schedule. Most often the provincial elections are held on the same day as the national ones (presidential and legislative), but this depends mainly on two factors: whether the province was intervened or had its government otherwise removed prior to the end of the usual term, and whether its government chooses to manipulate the schedule (within a limited timeframe dictated by its own electoral laws). When people vote for a party's candidate (say, for president), a significant part tend to vote also for the other candidates (e.g. for governor and legislators).

This "dragging effect" can be advantageous or disadvantageous for the people in charge to call for elections. A governor is typically obligated to name a day for the election of his successor based on the day of the end of his term — e.g. between 90 and 120 days before. That leaves him some room to play.

President Kirchner is nowadays extremely popular, so he's viewed as a touchstone for electoral success by many a politician. The Radical Civic Union, the long-time rival of the Justicialist/Peronist Party, has de facto broken into many local factions; the rest of the opposition is also mostly localized (for example, the Socialist Party is strong in Rosario, less so in Santa Fe as a whole, and definitely not anywhere else; Mauricio Macri's right-wing PRO is strong in Buenos Aires City and to a much lesser extent in the metropolitan area; fronts made up of provincial parties dominate in several jurisdictions but have no national projection at all). Local political groups with even the slightest ideological affinity with the Kirchner administration seek approval and support from the president, and the president happily gives it if it looks like it might be a net gain.

With most of the provinces burdened by poverty, lack of infrastructure and growing budget deficits, the national government has the tools to co-opt provincial governments. This leaves provinces in the hands of fleeting minions (fleeting, because they're always ready to change masters) and makes Argentina's federalism a joke. Unfortunately, it's in the politicians' best interest to keep the people poor and continue plundering their budgets, as long as the national government comes to the rescue with political and economic support before the elections.

The electoral calendar has already begun. In Catamarca a Peronist governor won the election against another Peronist — the word "Peronist" is really not used anymore, being replaced by "Kirchnerist" or "non-Kirchnerist". Granted the loser is a veritable mob leader... Luis Beder Herrera, the new governor of La Rioja after ousting his own fellow Peronist companion (who was formerly a fanatic supporter of the right-wing neoliberal Carlos Menem, then swiftly turned into a fanatic supporter of left-wing populist Néstor Kirchner) is calling for elections 180 days from now, or so he says. Of course he will run for governor; that was his goal all the time. How low can you go? Yesterday two Kirchnerist candidates came in first and second in the governor's race in Entre Ríos; the winner is a minister of the current administration. Governor Jorge Busti, in a rather vulgar (and uncalled-for) confrontational style, saluted the victory of his faction as a victory of his own and of President Kirchner, by calling his opponents "losers", and by telling politicians of other parties to go home to their own territories.

In Santa Fe we'll have primaries in July, provincial and municipal elections in September, and the national presidential election in October. Santa Fe, unlike most of the provinces, is awash with money, and the likely winner, Hermes Binner, is a Socialist who carefully doesn't... officially... dislike... a priori... with Kirchner... all the time... in general. Kirchner looks the other way and has left the campaign in the hands of the local Peronism, whose leaders are understandably worried, if not a little pissed off by the lack of presidential support. So unlike the situation in other provinces, the outcome (besides the sheer numbers) is a mystery.

Fun with the mayor

Just two pictures to show the pathetic status of Rosario's political debate regarding the administration of mayor Miguel Lifschitz.

The first one shows Lifschitz next to Arnold Schwarzenegger as a "Terminator of Cities". Lifschitz visited San Francisco and other places in California, U.S., last month, along with local officials and businessmen. He was received by the mayor of SF and the lieutenant governor of California, but he didn't actually meet Arnold. The distinctly cartoonish quality of California's chief elected official is easy to make fun of, and prompted great hilarity this side of the border, though it's really not that fun. However, this unsubtle, childish poster was paid for by a university faction of the local Peronist party.


The second picture is merely one example of the similarly-themed graffiti that have popped up in the whole city as of late. It blames Lifschitz for the two last raises in the urban bus fee, which went from AR$0.75 to 1.20 in a year. The blame is to be placed in the outrageous demands of the bus drivers (backed by a powerful union), who now have initial monthly wages equal to two or three times what a policeman or a teacher gets. In truth, Rosario had a very cheap fee compared to most cities in the country, and the bus fee has been raised in most of them as well, except Buenos Aires, after the national subsidies to diesel for public transport were redistributed.


Lifschitz has kept a low profile and a good public image for more than three years. He's running for reelection in September, and it looks like he'll win by a landslide. The Peronist party has resorted to picking on every little fault and inventing problems — for example, that Rosario is driving out manufacturing industries due to its lack of industrial policies and its preference for sissy Socialist quality-of-life-inducing green spaces and its promotion of culture and tourism. I for one would rather see more green and less industry. Anyway industrial facilities are being set up in the neighbouring towns, and they produce wealth for everyone around.

The only mature choice the Peronists have made regarding the political contest is the decission of governor pre-candidate Ángel Rossi to enroll the "K Radical" Juan Héctor Sylvestre Begnis as candidate for mayor of Rosario. Sylvestre Begnis was a fine Minister of Health of Santa Fe in the past, a supporter of proactive policies regarding sex education and contraception that are much needed here, and one who worked very well with the national Health Minister. His father was governor of Santa Fe in the 1960s, and a very good one. S. B. is surely the best mayor candidate that his party has put forward since... well, ever. For a change, he began by acknowledging that Lifschitz is doing a good job overall, which suggests he'll campaign on doing more things and doing better, rather than focusing on the negatives.

Of course I prefer Lifschitz to win. With his former mentor Hermes Binner as the governor, as the election is likely to turn out, there should be less friction between the province and the city, and Rosario might finally gain its long requested autonomic status. That might mean reforming the provincial constitution, which Binner has vowed to do, and which must be done anyway to keep it in line with the national constitution in several matters (including, precisely, the issue of autonomous municipalities).