Our illegitimate debt

The government of Ecuador is considering defaulting on 40% of its debt because it's "illegitimate, corrupt and illegal" (as per the words of president Rafael Correa). An ad hoc international committee studied 32 years of indebtedness, with a focus on the dictatorial period of 1976–1980, and produced a 30,000-page document detailing how and why a large part of the buildup of Ecuador's US$13-billion debt involved questionable or outright criminal maneuvers by governments, creditors, negotiators and other middlemen.

The committee included President Correa's advisor, Argentine historian Alejandro Olmos Gaona. You might remember I mentioned the possibility of Argentine collaboration with Ecuador in a post of February 2007.

Crítica de la Argentina titles this, quite appropriately, Ecuador hizo el Nunca Más de la deuda — a reference to Argentina's Nunca Más ("Never Again") document about forced disappearances. To my knowledge, this is the first time a Latin American country revises its history of debt in this manner. Most of if not all Latin American countries have had long periods of right-wing dictatorship in the late 1970s and early 1980s and neoliberal governments during the 1990s, and a common tendency for these has been to get the country indebted with the IMF, the World Bank and other financial vultures, then divert funds for corrupt purposes and finally trash the economy, leaving the next administration with no seeming choice but to ask for more money and repeat the cycle... each time squeezing the economy a bit more.

Not only did the Argentine military abduct, torture and murder thousands, but they also increased our debt and stole whatever they could. A creditor that lends money to a corrupt, illegal government shouldn't expect to be paid, least of all if the negotiators and overseers of the loans were well aware of that corruption. Moreover, anything done under the pretense of legality during a dictatorship shouldn't be, in principle, considered legally binding. (Laws and other regulations passed by a dictatorial government should be voided ipso facto, though this hasn't been done for practical reasons.)

In 2000, Judge Jorge Ballesteros ruled that the part of Argentina's external debt contracted during the 1976–1982 dictatorship was fraudulent, due to more than 470 irregular operations detected in the loans' proceedings. The debt went from 7 to 45 billion dollars, including formerly private debt that was nationalized by then-minister Domingo Cavallo (a specialist in this matter, judging by his career). Ballesteros left it in the hands of Congress to take action. Nothing happened.

Argentina has much to learn, even from Ecuador — most people don't even question the legality of the debt, but only complain about the politicians who took the money. Would it be impossible to repeal the illegal debt and take the responsible people to court? Even in those cases where 30 years have passed, an argument could be made that Argentina's indebtedness has caused more misery and death than all our dictators. Of course, the reason is political: most of those who benefited from bankrupting the state repeatedly are still Senators, Deputies, ministers, government secretaries, prominent lawyers, presidents of corporations, respected bankers, or family or relatives thereof. In politics and big money, these dynasties and mafia-like networks, essentially the country's owners and managers, haven't changed in decades.

PS: More reading material: Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt.

Nationalizing pension funds: more money for the Kirchners?

It's time again for a depressing anti-government post! This time, about the nationalization of AFJPs (private retirement funds). I strongly feel it's a good idea, and as strongly as that I also feel we must keep it from happening as intended by president Néstor Kirchner. (If you think Cristina's the one in charge, you must be living inside a jar, as we say over here. For months she's been devoting her time exclusively to cutting ribbons to [unfinished] public works and, lately, to writing newspaper articles in praise of her husband's ideas. Néstor is de facto big guy.)

Now you mustn't believe I do this because I like destructive criticism. I'm absolutely for "big government" as Americans call it, and I believe important stuff should never be left fully in the hands of private corporate interests whose creed is "make money fast whatever way you can". Kirchner's government has taken us far in this sense, and that's OK.

The problem with the Kirchner administration is that they always, somehow, manage to turn good theory into bad practice, and for a long while now (and not because the media or the far right are trying to make it look so, as C&K passionately believe) everything they've proposed has been born tainted by association. Or, as in this case, destined to fail before (a good part of) public opinion because common sense and the typical Argentine paranoia will kick in, and all alarms will go off, as soon as the state gets close to our pockets.

About 15 years ago, the law that allowed the creation of the AFJP system was drafted and passed, accompanied with a heartfelt defense of private capital accumulation (the so-called "capitalization scheme") by many who now profess to be old-time fans of the old-fashioned state-regulated collective saving scheme, including many faithful Kirchnerists (flip-flopping is another word for pragmatism — the only thing that can be truly called "Peronist doctrine"). Gobs of money were transferred to private capitalization accounts from the state's coffers, and the AFJPs (Administradoras de Fondos de Jubilaciones y Pensiones) started recruiting associates. The law said if you didn't choose where your retirement funds should go, then it would be automatically assigned to an AFJP; thus millions of distracted workers were signed up for a massive speculative operation. The AFJPs invested money in assets of various kinds and for a while they actually increased their clients' funds, although they charged huge commissions.

Pensions were frozen for ten years, as the economy entered into a low-growth phase, unemployment rose steadily, and finally recession entered the picture. After president Carlos Menem (cursed be his name) got away with murder, president Fernando de la Rúa found the dying economy and, instead of trying to resuscitate it, he finished it off with such nice measures as cutting 13% of pension payments. We all know what happened then... so fast forward to 2003.

Néstor Kirchner passed a series of decrees increasing both salaries and pensions, which were well-received, even as employers complained. The economy took off and pensions did as well. There was a small problem, though: the private pension funds couldn't keep up. They started losing money. The law said that the state must guarantee pension payments, if necessary by compensating (subsidizing) the private funds. So the state poured money into the AFJPs, whose risky investments had proven disastrous (does that sound familiar?), and when the companies began accumulating too much debt, the government forced them to buy national debt bonds. Yes, that's right: the government forced the guarantors of retirement funds for millions of Argentinians to accept what amounted to wet paper in order to rid itself of them (the only other feasible destination for those bonds was Hugo Chávez).

In January 2008, after the scarce enthusiasm that followed Cristina's election had faded, someone near her came up with the idea of "letting people choose" where to place their retirement savings. The Kirchnerists hastily passed a law opening up the choice for everyone: 180 days to take your money away from the private box to the state's bag (or the other way round). And the law also established that, if newcomers to the labor market didn't explicitly choose which way, their funds would go to the state system, not some AFJP. The AFJPs understandably lost a lot of clients, but in all fairness they deserved to, and the law didn't force anyone to accept anything against their interest. It had some other very good points as well, so good in fact that, "better late than never" aside, some of us wondered why it hadn't been passed before. Like four years before.

The answer came easily. Why indeed? Because it was only now that the economy had begun slowing down, while debt payments were looming closer and the whole economic structure was showing the strain. High inflation, high interest rates, no way to get fresh funding for things like the bullet train, and the need to pump more and more money into subsidies for electric power, drinking water, fuel, natural gas and everything else. Néstor Kirchner had always ruled with a big wallet of state money freely available to him, but Cristina's future was uncertain. The fresh funds from the AFJPs, of course, should have never been used to fund the state in any respect other than pension payments, but the new law didn't say anything about that. Already in 2007, his last year, Kirchner had signed a decree allowing the government to divert funds from ANSeS (the social security agency) to expenses such as public works.

After the fiasco of Resolution 125 (another, more desperate attempt to get money for the state) came the worldwide financial crisis. After being deprived of juicy taxes on exports of soybean, both exporters and the government have seen the prices of soybean plummet to half the levels of the first quarter: less and less money! Subsidies on buses, natural gas and power were reduced, but that's not enough; with a world recession looming, and the economy visibly decelerating, it would be economic suicide to raise the prices of basic services. On top of that, 2009 is an electoral year, and that means a lot of wills and votes must be bought. Back then, Néstor and Cristina could campaign all year round, visiting one town after another in provinces with "loyal" governors, handing out multimillion checks without any real oversight, and making sure crowds of bussed-in "supporters" would be ready to applaud their presence; but all that costs money.

The national state keeps about 70% of what the provinces contribute, and what it shares, it does so rather unfairly. Most provincial governments are strapped for cash right now, and more than a few are absolutely dependent, on a short-term basis, on presidential whims when it comes to distribution.

Kirchner's desperation is now becoming noticeable. Initially he ordered the bill that nationalizes AFJPs to be approved and turned into law at once, without any changes. His parliamentary bulldog, deputy Agustín Rossi, first attempted this, then saw it was impossible, and timidly conceded that the government's bloc would accept discussion of the finer points.

Now, the bill seeks to overturn a 15-year-old system with millions of associates, in a context of financial turbulence, and to do so in a matter of weeks, so that all the money from the private pensions can be transferred to the state's social security before the end of the year. Not only does this negate the choice of millions of people who decided to stay in the private companies earlier this year, but it also looks rather suspicious.

Why the hurry? True, the assets of the AFJPs are taking heavy hits from the world's financial meltdown. But those things come and go. It's also true that the AFJPs haven't given their associates what they promised, and that they've engaged in some dubious practices. That's something to be settled with general audits. If you have a critical system that doesn't seem to work as intended, you don't decide to break it. You fix it and keep it going while you prepare the transition. The president can count on ample powers, a Congress controlled by overwhelming margins, and a social consensus that private pension funds aren't a good idea for most of us. I repeat, why the hurry? Cristina still has three years to go.

This administration has frustrated me time after time. I'm really tired of seeing great ideas given such bad names by the Kirchnerist gang. I'm fed up with having to agree with certain people... being forced to be on the same side as some who hold principles completely opposite from mine.

Yet I have no alternative. It's just plain common sense that the Kirchners want the private pensions' money to continue their incessant campaigning for their own permanence. They have no new ideas, no plan, no policies, nothing but a hunger for power that sometimes translates into seemingly brilliant developments, soon marred by corruption and negligence. Are we as a nation doomed to go from one rotten set of politicians to another?

25 years of democracy

Today it's been 25 years since the formal return of democracy in Argentina. On October 20, 1983 a democratically elected president, Raúl Alfonsín, took office after more than seven years of dictatorship and over half a century of erratic shifts between legal presidents and military usurpers.

My personal reckoning is that, although I was born exactly six months after the coup d'état, I have so far spent four fifths of my life under democratic rule. During that time I've voted quite a few times: three times for president (1999, 2003, 2007), four for governor (1995, 1999, 2003, 2007) and many more, at least once every two years to elect national and provincial legislators, and once every four years to elect city mayors and councilmembers, plus a couple of primaries. My generation is possibly the one that has voted the most times during the entire history of this country.

On the national level I've always either voted for the loser... or later regretted not voting for him. During all this time, this thing that gets called "the democratic process" hasn't offered me much satisfaction. But I don't want to despair. Never has Argentina experienced so many years (a quarter of a century!) of uninterrupted free elections on all the levels of government. We move on and crises hit us and sometimes we'd rather have everything blow apart, but in our heart of hearts we know and wish it will go on no matter what.

I have my reservations and my protests in store and readily available, but today I want to end this on a positive note. For 25 years now we've refused, as a people, to be deprived of our right to choose, and even when all our options look bad, we always have one more chance ahead of us. And that counts.

(El texto original de este post, en castellano, está disponible en Sin calma: 25 años de democracia.)

Shadows of the dictatorship

Argentina's last dictatorship ended in 1983, but for several reasons the criminals that took part in it were not punished appropriately. Now that the trials have been resumed, some cases have been re-opened, and new horrible deeds are unearthed every time. It's no wonder that the criminals resist.

Yesterday the guilty sentence was passed for four of five military defendants on a trial for crimes against humanity held in Corrientes. Cecilia Pando, an activist that defends the tactics of state terrorism employed by the dictatorship, was there with a group of supporters; as the sentence was read, she snapped and started yelling insults and threats all around, accusing Human Rights Secretary Luis Eduardo Duhalde of being a "terrorist", sliding her index finger across her neck (the throat-slitting gesture) and shouting "I'm going to kill you with my own hands".

Pando is the wife of a retired major, Rafael Mercado, and her group calls itself the "Association of Friends and Relatives of Political Prisoners of Argentina". They believe the military defended the country against terrorism and the prospect of a leftist dictatorship, and now they're treated as dirt because the current government is made up of former terrorists and their allies. This claim was echoed by the professional torturer and murderer Luciano Benjamín Menéndez — "the terrorists of the '70s are in power" — after his sentence (a life term) was dictated, last July.

There's a small but well-connected group of people who are convinced of the justice of the military cause — who believe the desaparecidos were only a few, that most of them actually fled to Europe and let their families play the victim, that everyone who has testified about the kidnappings, the gruesome torture sessions, the summary executions is lying or deluded or paid by the government that "persecutes" the country's "heroes".

They don't state this out loud all the time, of course. More often, they admit that crimes ("excesses") were committed fighting the terrorists, but justify it by saying "it was a war". They always speak of national reconciliation, unification and peace, which for them means forgetting the past and forgiving the criminals even as they unrepentantly walk down our streets — not incidentally, the usual line of the Catholic Church.

Another usual complaint is that of unfairness — placing themselves on one side of the "theory of the two demons" and claiming that, if the military must be punished, then so must the "subversives". In reality, of course, many who were tortured or killed by the dictatorship were just activists, and the actual terrorist organizations were never even close to subvert (i.e. overthrow) the government. They were used as a convenient argument for the military to seize power and "restore the order", and then as a scapegoat for the dictatorship's own failed policies.

Why am I giving so many details? Well, part of the public opinion has become more receptive of some of these claims because they don't like the Kirchners' idea of human rights. You know I don't like the Kirchners at all, and I don't believe they have the marvelous "human rights policy" they often congratulate themselves of. What they have is a desire for revenge. They were leftist militants in the 1970s; Néstor Kirchner has a background of closeness to the leftist-Catholic-Peronist terrorists of Montoneros, though he wasn't in the organization himself; there's plenty of evidence he views the world as a battleground, with him on the "good" side; his words when he speaks of the past show his deep (and broad, and therefore often misguided) resentment and intolerance against those who are not of his own ideological flavour. One can understand and sympathize with that up to a certain point, but a president or the leader of an influential majority should be above that, for the good of the people.

Kirchner's desire for revenge turned out to be a catalyzer for better things: by fighting the conservative Supreme Court he was stuck with at the beginning of his term, he allowed for an independent Court to be assembled; by fighting the laws and pardons that kept the dictatorship's criminals from being investigated, he let justice work as it should. That removal of obstacles was about the extent of Néstor Kirchner's policy on human rights, and if he had stepped down as soon as his work was done (about three years into his term), he would've been remembered as a great president by most Argentinians, including myself. But because he showed his true colours, he gave the dictatorship's sympathizers a measure of credibility. Ah, I suppose it's too much to ask for a human being in such a high place to be OK on all accounts.

Cacerolazo, and then?

I had a tiring, satisfactory long weekend. Friday night, Marisa and I went to see a series of five episodes filmed by a local producer. On Saturday, I attended the unveiling of Che Guevara's statue (Marisa stayed home because she wasn't feeling well). Sunday was Father's Day, so we went to my place to have lunch with my parents, then we left for a recital that served as the closing for Guevara's 80th birthday celebrations, and after that, we marched on to Marisa's folks' home to have dinner with her parents and the families of her brother and one of her cousins. Monday morning, we woke up early to do an architectonic photo tour downtown; right after noon I left for a friend's house to have an asado.

I was still there when, at 5:30 PM, I received a mass SMS calling people to turn off the lights for 15 minutes at 8 PM and then start a cacerolazo against the government. I didn't pay attention to it. I was too tired to think of protesting anything, I was stuffed full and it was cold. Besides, I didn't think anybody would attend. I got back home at around 7 PM, and one hour later I was proven terribly wrong.

I was exhilarated. On edge. Finally! I only wished I could've been there. People were banging pots and pans or honking their horns or simply out on the streets singing or waving flags, disorganized but not incoherent. Thousands (some say 10,000, some say 40,000 or more) in Rosario around the Flag Memorial, many thousands also in several parts of Córdoba City, thousands in Buenos Aires near the Obelisk and also in Olivos, in front of the presidential residence, where the previous night a small group of demonstrators had been forced to leave by a group of government-paid thugs. And in La Plata, Posadas, Catamarca, Santa Cruz, San Rafael and Mendoza City, Chaco, in the larger cities and the towns of the deep countryside and even the places dominated by Kirchnerist administrations. Some were asking for the President to leave; most demanded that she act — do what must be done to put the country back on track, and send the First Gentleman back to where he belongs.

The hardcore Kirchnerists are in the latest stages of paranoia and denial, seeing coups and destabilization and conspiracies everywhere. Luis D'Elía even called people to take up arms in defence of the government. But the rest of the K people are cautiously stepping back from the mad leader.

Yesterday, vice-president Julio Cobos asked for Congress to intervene and discuss, exactly what should've been done to begin with, and just the kind of consensus-based, non-coercive process Néstor K abhors. Several loyal governors suddenly announced they wouldn't attend the government rally planned for Wednesday at Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Many long-time Peronists showed their disgust for D'Elía's manners. The K Radicals supported their leader, the vice-president. Here in Santa Fe, governor Hermes Binner put it succintly: "This way of governing is coming to an end."

Today the President broadcast one more of her venom-filled speeches, comparing the downfall of Perón in 1955 to what is supposedly being done to her..., and then, she said that, just to please the ungrateful and the ever-discontent and show her respect for the law, she would submit the export taxes to the approval of Congress. It took her 45 minutes of badly doctored speech to acknowledge that she'd been forced to take a step back.

Now Kirchnerism has an automatic majority in Congress. But it's not the monolithic front it used to be. Even if the retenciones pass the legislative filter, it will cost (we hope) several politicians their post in the near future. You'll have to think for yourself and decide, ladies and gentlemen — and then face the consequences when you go back home to your constituencies asking for their vote.

Martín Lousteau's fall, a sign of the times?

Martín Lousteau resigned from the Ministry of Economy yesterday. This looks like one more step towards a catastrophic failure of the economy. It's not that Lousteau was our last hope, but he seemed at least flexible enough to admit his mistakes and propose alternatives. His resignation, after he spoke publicly of the inflation problem and supposedly presented the president with a set of proposals to cool the economy, followed a vitriolic speech by Néstor Kirchner as the new chairman of the Justicialist Party. What happens confirms the generalized suspicion that Néstor K continues to pull all the strings in the government.

The new minister is Carlos Fernández, a pure technician whose only political cachet is that he's very close to Néstor Kirchner. One has to guess that he'll be as weak as all the Kirchnerist economy ministers have been after Lavagna. Miceli, Peirano and Lousteau never did anything without presidential prompt; Peirano's suggestion that the INDEC's figures shouldn't be tampered with earned him his exclusion from Cristina's cabinet, and Lousteau was practically stillborn, excluded from important matters, a dummy doll used to fill in a position.

Guillermo Moreno, Secretary of Domestic Commerce, is as powerful as, or more than, the economy minister. Moreno is a brute, a blunt instrument who may have been useful to deal with an emergency situation, but who is now an obstacle to the negotiations with the agricultural producers, and a liability. He won't be fired, because Néstor Kirchner wants him there — he needs enemies, and Moreno is ideal to induce conflict.

Regrettably, outside of Néstor Kirchner's partisan island, Argentina has problems. A sensible government must avoid turning serious technical issues into politico-ideological wars. The Kirchners are political warmongers, and stubborn to boot. They refuse to hear their own subordinates' warnings, and they're alienating their allies. And they're losing this war, bringing all of us down with them.

Inflation is clearly out of control; it's not the ten or twelve percent that you can expect from a burst of economic expansion and which most businesses can manage, but more like thirty or forty percent, enough to set off all the alarms on the Argentine psyche, more than enough to make long-term planning impossible. With high inflation and a government that seems lost and in denial, you don't save; you spend your money as quickly as possible before it loses its value, or else you rush to the exchange house and buy dollars or euros. Every Argentinian above a certain age has seen this happen before; it's terrifyingly familiar to us. I'm old enough to remember the end of the 1980s, when prices started to climb at a steady pace, then accelerating, and then it came to a point when supermarkets rewrote the prices two or three times in one day. Things like that eventually resolve themselves in a catastrophe; and after the crisis, even after things have quieted down and some form of economy recovery has reached us, we are a bit worse than before.

Insisting on an expansive policy and branding everyone who opposes it as the enemy while inflation eats away all the economic achievements of the last four years, while basic items become unaffordable to the poor, while a food crisis looms over the whole world, while oil prices break records every day and you have no way to supply yourself, while your farmers are ready to stop delivering food to your big cities, and refuse to acknowledge you need to change — it's madness.

The neoliberal governments of the 1990s insisted on the orthodox economic recipe of "adjustment": cooling the economy, removing money from circulation, increasing interest rates, and (in the background) "shrinking the state". Not only did their policies harm the poor and bring more inequality to Argentina; they wrecked the whole economy, and yet they continued to apply them with almost religious zeal. They even ruined their political careers! The Kirchners have an equal and opposite ideological bias — they have an ideal structure of power in their heads, and they'll fight to impose it on reality even as the whole country is crumbling around them. Do they stop to think, "maybe we're doing something wrong and that's why so many people are angry at us?" Do they ever wonder, "what will people in the future think about our government?". I don't think so.

Well, Lousteau and the question of whatever will become of Argentina's economy is all over the news today, so I'll say no more for now. For my own good I should stick to reviewing books... but I couldn't pass this up.

Another villa miseria (followup)

Last October I wrote a couple of posts about the Qom ethnic group (also known as the Toba) and their migration from Chaco to Santa Fe and Rosario, where they ended up in villas miseria (slums), marginalized from the rest of society and subject to discrimination. A blogger called mdiana found those posts and left a comment asking about Father Arturo Paoli and his work among the woodchoppers of the La Forestal logging company (the British-owned company which felled most of the quebracho trees of the Chaco, where the Qom tribe lived, and turned it into a desert).

Paoli, a missionary priest, came and settled in Fortín Olmos, in the north of Santa Fe, and organized a fraternity and cooperative with the woodchoppers and small local producers who were left without a job when La Forestal closed down in 1960. In November 2007 a section of Santa Fe's Provincial Route 40 was named after him in homage, and then-governor Jorge Obeid noted he had known Paoli when he was a young man, in the 1960s. At that time Paoli was over 90 years old and living in Italy, from where he sent a letter speaking of the strength of those woodchoppers as a symbol of Latin American endurance.

Well, I just learned that. My original intent was to post a video I took a few days ago, from the bus. It shows the expansion of the villa miseria I mentioned back then in those posts. The settlers have decided to occupy the neighbouring terrain, a large lot that was mostly vacant, though parts of it were devoted to vegetable gardens. The owner has never done anything with the lot, and the municipality, which long ago should have expropriated it for some purpose, looked the other way. Now a sprawling slum is forming, the neighbours are upset, and that's all for nothing, because the poor people who've illegally settled on the land will eventually be pushed away later, when the tortuous bureaucracy of the judicial system decides to command their eviction. This is a sad way for a free people to end.

The video is bumpy and the sound is that of the bus; you can turn it off if you want to. It's only a short stretch, maybe two blocks, along the street where I live (but 10 or 12 blocks from my house), just before and after the railway tracks. On the first part you can see precarious homes that were already there years ago; the rest is all new, a small shanty town assembled almost overnight.

I don't know how this can be solved. You can't let those people set up their huts anywhere; you can't build them houses in the short term; you can't bulldoze them; you can't send them back to their ancestral lands; but the thing you absolutely can't do is ignore them.

Juan Domingo Perón according to The Simpsons

There's an outrage here over the 10th episode of the 19th season of The Simpsons. It seems Homer's friend and drinking buddy at Moe's, Carl Carlson, thinks Juan Perón was a military dictator and his government "disappeared" people. So far the episode has aired only in the original English version in the United States, but already a Peronist representative wants it censored in Argentina. Clarín (posing as anti-government these days) throws an oblique dart at Peronism, misleadingly titling their coverage of this news "They want to ban The Simpsons", which was probably intended to match the censorship request with what Venezuela did (banning the whole series, and replacing it with the moronic Baywatch). The 30-second video segment was posted by Perfil.com on YouTube, but it was promptly removed as a copyright violation.

I think this is all very stupid, though I can understand the concern. Just to clarify the debate, Juan Domingo Perón was democratically elected president on three occasions. True, the second time he ran for re-election after having the constitution reformed specifically for that purpose by a fanatically loyal Congress, but it was all legal. And it's also true he wasn't really a fan of tolerance or a champion of free speech, and he was a fan of Mussolini's administration, and didn't show any great dislike for the German Nazis until they lost the war.

Under Perón, dissidents were harassed, intellectuals were forced to exile, and people lost their jobs if they were outspoken in their opposition. The media were censored. The government's bullies were free to manage the streets. Nothing unusual in that time and age, or even today in many places.

And, as far as we know, Perón's administration didn't have people abducted and nullified. Harassed, beaten, incarcerated, even incidentally tortured, but not in great numbers, not by explicit orders from the top, not systematically. Comparing Perón with even the "softer" dictatorial governments we've had in Argentina is misleading, and suggesting a similarity with the latest (and internationally best known) dictatorship is a gross exaggeration.

Still, what's the problem here? Americans are notorious for their ignorance of international issues, and the history of their neighbours in Latin America is just one of those issues, even when the U.S. helped shape it by their constant interference. The Simpsons only reflect that real fact. After Carl displays his crude ignorance of Argentine history by commenting on the "disappeared" of Perón's time, Lenny tops it off noting that, besides that, Perón's wife was Madonna! And Carl and Lenny are two drunks, for Jeebus' sake! Two ignorant drunks in an animated series that mocks American culture. Remember the episode when Carl and Lenny are Buddhists, Richard Gere is meditating with them, and Lenny doesn't know who the Dalai Lama is, or indeed, who Buddha himself is?

Censoring the Perón episode would be ridiculous. If Peronists don't want the name of their leader smeared, let them fight for education, so that children learn unbiased history from books and not from TV series. It's not like Perón had a terrific record on that respect — when he was president, textbooks were filled with hagiographic views of him and his wife, and nothing else could reach the public. When he was toppled by the military, this cult of personality was abolished and even the possession of pictures of Perón and Evita was forbidden.

Censorship of any kind is wrong, and ridiculous: it didn't stop Perón from falling, and didn't stop the military from being toppled in turn. Our representatives should be doing much more important things than watching The Simpsons for historical accuracy.

Vacations in Córdoba: Day 1

(As of this time, I'm neither ready nor willing to write a definitive statement about the situation in the countryside. So I'll begin with the story of my vacations.)

We arrived in Córdoba City after a six-hour trip from Rosario. It was a very good thing that we'd booked a room in a hostel located only two blocks from the bus station, although it was partly uphill (Córdoba is like that). We settled there and went to Parque Sarmiento, a large stretch of urban park zone nearby.

It wasn't a pretty sight. Compared to the exuberant foliage one can find in Rosario's parks, this one was rather sparse. There were many stretches of dirt, rather than grass. We took a winding stone path and found it stank of urine and was blocked by garbage. There was no signage for the visitors. In general it seemed like a picture of lack of care. We finally came to a less depressing view, an artificial lake with nice white bridges and balconies. On the shore were a group of bullyish, hungry ducks, and some biguás (Neotropic Cormorants) on the stones in the middle of the lake.

The birds were the only highlights of this visit to the park, which, I admit, is much larger than that and must have better views... somewhere else.

That was the morning. Later, and after a nap, we walked down (actually it was up) to the historical core of the city. Córdoba was founded in the 16th century and has some stunning colonial buildings left, mostly religious, mostly built by the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits were everywhere at the time (it isn't difficult to see why they were ultimately expelled by the Spanish Crown — they had too much power).

They built for eternity back then — one-meter-thick walls, no mortar.

It was Maundy Thursday, so special masses were being held in some of the churches. We couldn't enter the Cathedral, but we stole into the ceremony at the pink-and-yellow church of St. Therese [pictured above] and stood there, a drop of godlessness in a pool of... well, mostly incense. Now seriously — it was truly mesmerizing, and I mean it in more than the anthropologically detached way, to watch the ceremony. Incense, candles, slow chanting, the subdued atmosphere inside the temple was effective; I could feel it, so I imagine for someone that considers this betrayal-death-resurrection stuff more than a myth it must have been powerful, overwhelming.

At the other side of the same block, along a narrow street/passage, people were beginning to prepare for the commemoration of a much less mythic, much more painful story: the 32nd anniversary of the last coup d'état, which brought to power the bloodiest dictatorship in our history, the perfidly self-styled National Reorganization Process. There was a large board with copies of newspaper clippings leading up to the coup — news bits that for the most part must have been considered mere incidents back then, rather than the ominous preparation for a dark era.

There were also tens of pictures hanging among the old-fashioned lamps in the passage, showing the faces and personal data of local desaparecidos. Against the background of the imposing towers of the Cathedral, I couldn't help feeling the contradiction. The Catholic Church for the most part either stayed silent, and often supported and even encouraged, the military's criminal plans; the archbishop of Córdoba, Raúl Primatesta, played an instrumental role in suppressing ecclesiastical criticism of the government. To this day, human rights organizations don't forget this, as attested by several graffiti.

And that was our first day in Córdoba.

What, vacations again?

Folks, I'm going to Córdoba for the long weekend, so you won't be hearing from me until next Wednesday (at least). I leave this evening at 2 AM, and should be arriving in Córdoba at 8:30.

On principle, I oppose the commemoration of the Easter weekend, a religious holiday, as a public national holiday. But this is a minor issue, really, and I don't mind taking advantage of it for a short trip. What else am I going to do, stay home and medidate on my sins while I watch the two hours of torture of The Passion of the Christ? I'd rather relax somewhere else.

Monday, March 24, is the Day of Memory: the 32nd anniversary of the last coup d'état. This is a serious holiday. Right after Easter, no less!

Córdoba City was founded by Jesuits, and the shadow of the Church are everywhere. Two years ago I went to this same city on Easter weekend, and saw the swarms of priests, monks and nuns in old-style garb, and the flocks of the faithful, going about the imposing building of the Cathedral at the time of mass. This is the seat of the oldest diocese in the country, the same Cathedral where people heard the sermons of Cardinal Raúl Primatesta, Primate of Argentina at the time of the coup, who blessed the military, made a list of domiciles of Catholic teachers and workers available to military intelligence, and delivered "Marxist" priests (who worked with the poor) into the hands of the terrorist state. So it will be interesting to see what events are planned in Córdoba, and whether the two celebrations — the myth of death and resurrection, the true story of hopelessness and ruin of a whole country — interact and influence each other.

Besides Córdoba City, where Marisa and I are going to be greeted by a group of local photographers, I'll be visiting Alta Gracia, the childhood home of Ernesto Che Guevara, and Quebrada del Condorito National Park, where we're told you can have condors fly within reach of your hand.

I'm off now. See you next week!

Rain all over

The weather has become unstable as of late, maybe a sign that the tranquil workings of summer's furnace are finally being disturbed by the proximity of the equinox (still more than three weeks away). In simpler terms, it's hot, but it's not sunny and hot all the time — sometimes it's just clammy.

It's softly raining as I write this. Right now I should've been at the Flag Memorial, preparing to watch the reenactment of the first hoisting of the Argentine flag, which took place on the banks of the Paraná River exactly 196 years ago. But it rained cats and dogs right after noon, and then it started again a couple of hours ago, so they called it off, together with other outdoors activities planned for tonight. Of course, the rain did not bring any relief to the heat — it's the same steam-bath as yesterday. With a little more steam.

Like most people I know, I'm a bit sick of this summer. I'm overwhelmed by the heat, the low pressure, the humidity. I don't have the strength to go out and walk and take pictures, or to try resuming outdoors exercise. I spend way too much time sitting before the computer, but I can't think. So I don't have much to tell, and I don't feel like sitting down to write it down, plus I'm having real heavy work at the office. All of this is why I'm blogging intermitently, instead of every day.

The office — that's a real mess. For obvious reasons I can't reveal too much about that here, but let's say conflict is bubbling just below the surface of the provincial administration — the bitter underground conflict between those who want to get to work and finally see there's someone paying attention to their work, and those who have never worked or wanted anything but to suck the state's tit and devote office days to gossip over coffee, and now feel threatened but can't express it openly for fear of being discovered, even though everybody knows what they are. Yes, folks, such are the deep human dramas you find in our public offices.

I intend to wait for more cheerful topics, or at least interesting ones, before I write one more blog post. Let us hope together...

A museum for our memory

When the international media, or even the national Buenos Aires-based ones, speak of the last military coup and its executors, most actually speak of the junta and its top officials, of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, of the Navy Mechanics School. But of course, the dictatorship took power all throughout Argentina.

Right now several represores are being judged in a high-profile trial in Corrientes. Another group of criminals, the presumed authors of a massacre of prisoners, are to be tried in Trelew, Chubut.

No such trials are in progress in Rosario. Yet here were the headquarters of Second Army Corps, responsible for hundreds of forced disappearances — kidnappings followed by torture and murder, usually. Prisoners were held in a massive building that takes up a whole downtown block. The building was the police headquarters, until in 2001 the provincial government turned it into a local delegation for the southern region of Santa Fe. The municipality of Rosario also got a space. Then an enclosed square was built inside, and after the fire that burned down most of the Natural History Museum, the rest of it was moved to a section of this building as well.

The place where the prisoners were kept is now called Centro Popular de la Memoria. When Boston Review did a coverage of the 30th anniversary of the coup, in 2006, they used one of my pictures to illustrate it... but although the article spoke about illegal detention centers, the main focus was on ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School in Buenos Aires.

Now it seems we'll be recovering another space for the memory of those days. It's a lovely house on a corner, a block away from the CPM, and it's occupied by a bar. The current owners paid a lot for it, and the ones who run the bar would have it forever. It's a prime spot and a beautiful building. But it's also where the orders for the kidnappers and torturers came from.

The place was embargoed, and the municipality paid a sum of money to expropriate it, but the owners would have none of it. Moreover, the ones managing the bar said they had renewed the contract until 2009. The municipality threatened to deny the bar its license, but didn't. And then a judge said the municipality had paid incorrectly — to the federal court that had embargoed the building, instead of to a provincial court.

Days ago, another judge reversed the ruling, so after this ridiculously long legal battle, the bar will have to close and the building will become property of the municipal state, which will install a Museum of Memory there, moving some things (such as photos and documents) from the former site at the CPM. It will open in May 2009.

Vacations: A view of Junín de los Andes

As promised, I'll summarize the rest of my vacations in Junín de los Andes, and then on a different post I'll try and do the same with San Martín de los Andes, and be done with it (I kinda want to start writing about local news again!).

After our visit Lake Huechulafquen, the only other thing we did outside Junín was a couple of visits to San Martín. There are buses every other hour that take you there in about 50 minutes. We walked around the city a lot, and I visited Cerro Chapelco and its ski resort (obviously in the low season), but I'll speak of San Martín's main features later.

In Junín we took advantage of the river, which runs only a block and a half from Marita's. There's a little bridge that spans the river and takes you to the banks on the other shore.

The Chimehuin, as expected of Patagonian rivers, is shallow, with a pebbly bottom, very cold, and very fast. I tried to swim in it — but to my dismay I caught a strong current and had to surrender to it, until I was left on a bed of pebbles about 30 meters away.

My embarrassment was compounded by the sight of many children and teenagers who repeatedly jumped into the river, ignoring the certain danger of hitting the bottom, and then proceeded to maneuver easily following the swirls and eddies of the river, and getting (it seemed to me) exactly where they wanted. Needless to say I didn't try swimming again. Of course, these guys were all local people, so they knew the river from long experience; and being young and restless, they weren't afraid of anything.

The other thing we did in Junín was visiting the Via Christi, which is a kind of Via Crucis with sculptures and plaques representing and describing Jesus Christ's path to the place where he was crucified according to the Christian myth.

The special thing about this Via Christi is that it combines images and motifs of the Passion with local spirituality, focused on the Blessed Laura Vicuña and the (also recently Blessed) Ceferino Namuncurá, the latter being the first member of a native Argentine tribe to be on the road to Catholic Church-declared sanctity... plus a lot of ecumenical, or syncretic, references to aboriginal spirituality, a vindication of the indigenous tribes, and a retelling of the Spanish Conquest (which didn't reach Patagonia) and the so-called Conquest of the Desert in the late 19th century. The "desert" was Patagonia, which was indeed the frontier of European-Argentine civilization at the time, although it was by no means uninhabited. The Argentine Army, under the command of a typical plutocratic government, advanced over Patagonia and systematically drove away or slaughtered the native tribes it found, or turned the natives into virtual slaves, who were forced into military conscription or sent to work as servants of wealthy families of Buenos Aires; after the land was cleared of its original inhabitants, it was divided in huge fiefdoms and given away to ranchers belonging to the oligarchy who (directly or indirectly) ruled the country.

The Via Christi had elements of this story, as seen from the point of view of modern revisionist history and by recent popular Catholic leaders such as Bishop Jaime de Nevares (1915–1995). I found the whole mix quite funny in its heterogeneity, not because the story was funny in any sense, but because the story of liberation theology is so pathetic — educated folks, with the best of intentions, trying to reconcile modern views about human rights and the struggle of oppressed peoples with the teachings of a church that is fiercely hierarchical and misogynistic, that has supported oppressive governments and countless massacres in the name of its god, and is even today a major obstacle to certain basic human rights in large parts of the world. You have to admire and pity these people for the effort of weaving their version of history into Christian doctrine, even as their own Church stops short of calling them heretics.

The Via Christi also had certain obvious, and to me, rather distasteful hints of anti-abortion propaganda, with abortion compared to the genocide of the natives, and figures looking like small children or late-term fetuses embedded into the beam of Christ's cross.

This funny/creepy tour was very well kept, anyway, and it served as good exercise. When we reached the top of the hill, we could see most of the urban area of Junín de los Andes. The pictures were no good, unfortunately, due to the harsh lighting, but I managed to rescue some.

Our last days in Junín de los Andes were relaxed and festive. We had asado once, and the last night, after spending the afternoon by the river, my friend Gabriel pulled out his finest tricks and made us matambre a la pizza, which is a massive slab of flank steak with cheese and tomate sauce on top, cooked on a grill over charcoal embers (like asado, but not for so long). After that we went out to a noisy bar, and drank just enough to make fools of, but not so much as to endanger, ourselves. No pictures of that, thank you.

Sunday came. Mauro and Gabriel had bought tickets for a direct trip back to Rosario, a bit tired of vacations. I decided to make the most of my time and booked a place in a hostel in San Martín de los Andes. Somehow we woke up after 4 hours of sleep, and after some light breakfast, the guys escorted me to the bus terminal and waited until I left. Their bus departed later that day, at 2 PM — but by that time I was already in my next, and last, destination.

Justice being served

The long-unpunished murderers are finally getting what they deserve. Better late than never, as the saying goes, eight people who worked at the infamous Intelligence Battalion 601 during the dictatorship finally got their crimes and their sentences read aloud by a judge, after being granted the due process of law that their victims were denied. Seven military, one police officer and intelligence agent — including IB601's head, general Cristino Nicolaides, who got 25 years, the longest prison term in the lenient Argentine legal system, for kidnapping and torture.

In the early 1970s, the leftist Peronist guerrilla group Montoneros conducted bombings, kidnappings and assassinations. They (along with others) provided an excuse for the horrific dictatorship that came after them. In truth, the guerrillas were hardly a threat on the national level, and many were exterminated even before the military seized power in 1976. Montoneros was basically dead by 1977, their leaders in exile, but in 1980 they decided to return in secret for a "counteroffensive" on the military government. Somebody told on them. They were captured, taken to military facilities, tortured, then presumably killed.

Montoneros were terrorists, no discussion about that. There's no excuse for them. Yet they were citizens and human beings, and they should've been punished by the law. The dictatorship, however, didn't want legal punishment of crime; what they sought was suppressing opposition for good. They could've publicly displayed the captured terrorists as prizes, enacted a mock trial, executed them. But that wasn't the Argentine dictatorship's style: their leaders were torturers, sadistic killers, and yet also cowards. They kept little or no records (and they destroyed what they could); they denied everything; they justified themselves but refused to name what they were really doing for what it was; many have taken the secret of the location of their victims' bodies to their own graves.

This is the first trial involving a high military officer of the dictatorship after the repeal of the amnesty laws. Soon it will be one among many. The wounds are still fresh, and the criminals still walk among us.

Barrio de los Ingleses

Yesterday I told you about the photo exhibition. Well, after we finished setting it up, it was noon, so we decided to congratulate ourselves a bit and go celebrate. We went to a bodegón — one of those old-style, un-fancy restaurants that prepare great home-made-like meals. It was comparatively cheap, but very good (and abundant!). Our embedded storyteller and historian/anthropologist suggested (guess!) that we should go and take pictures.

A few blocks from the restaurant there's a group of old British-style houses that used to be the home of railway personnel one century ago. It's informally called Barrio de los Ingleses, and it's opposite the old company storehouses, nowadays recycled as the headquarters of the Nuevo Central Argentino. In fact it's just a couple of housing blocks only, outside the normal street grid, and seemingly outside of time — and location.

The place is called Batten Cottage. There's a string of nice small houses which were built for the VIP of the company, and a group of apartments for the common personnel, both temporary (passing by) and permanent. The apartments still keep their original number plates, and though the place is not exactly crumbling down in slow motion, most of it looks rather 19th-centuryish as well.

I'd passed by the Barrio de los Ingleses a million times, but I never dared get in and look around, least of all with my camera. There are people living there after all, and it's not exactly an upscale area, even though it's right beside a new park and near the shiny Alto Rosario shopping mall. Being with a group of half a dozen or so, however, I felt safe — we had enough cameras and the inquisitive attitude to convince anyone that we were curious tourists off the beaten track.

More pictures for your enjoyment right after this...

The Toba, from Chaco to Rosario

The other day I was visiting Rob's blog and I saw he'd posted a video about poverty in the province of Chaco. It was really strange to watch this report of something that's happening quite literally in our backyard... in English, by an Argentine journalist, via Al-Jazeera. I knew the reporter, Teresa Bo — I think I saw her once before but I didn't remember who she worked for.

Rob subtitled his post "Another thing I had no idea about", which is not surprising given he's just gotten here from a different country and he hasn't left Buenos Aires (that I know of). What is surprising and disappointing is how Argentinians themselves seem to ignore this as well.

Chaco is a province located north of Santa Fe. It belongs in a larger biogeographic zone called the Gran Chaco, and within it, in the Humid (or Low) Chaco, which is humid only relative to the arid High Chaco.

Red quebracho (Schinopsis balansae)

Chaco is a very poor province. At the turn of the 19th century, its land was exploited for quebracho trees. Quebracho produces a lot of tannin and has an extremely heavy and resistant wood. Developing the country, for the rulers of that time, meant driving away the Indians, occupying the fertile lands with European colonists, and selling the rest of the country to foreign companies, along with carte blanche to deal with the locals. So Chaco and the north of Santa Fe were given to a British company called Compañía Forestal del Chaco (later Compañía de Tierras, Maderas y Ferrocarriles La Forestal Ltda.). La Forestal started as a timber-and-tannin company and then became basically a private government, building new towns, railways and roads, hospitals and schools. Of course, the workers were not free to do anything but work on the company. They got paid in company bills and bought their stuff in company stores. The company wasn't very tolerant of strikes or anything of the sort.

Without government control, and given the lack of knowledge of basic ecological facts at the time, La Forestal destroyed the Chaco forest. When it left, in 1960, the quebracho trees were gone, the soil was absolutely degraded, the land had become a desert, and the population was desperately poor.

The main aboriginal group in Chaco are the Qom tribe, who are known as Toba — a derogatory term imposed by the technological more advanced and aggresive Guaraní. The Qom started migrating south as economic conditions worsened in the 1950s, establishing themselves in the outskirts of larger cities. There's evidence that, in the 1980s and 1990s, the government of Chaco encouraged them to abandon their lands and went as far as paying them a one-way ticket to Santa Fe and Rosario, where they joined their previously settled relatives in villas miseria (shanty towns). It was better for them to live in precarious homes made of corrugated iron and cardboard, scavenge for food in someone else's garbaga and work long hours in unqualified jobs in the big city than starving without hope of assistance or enduring alternating drought and floods in the middle of their desertified forest. In Rosario they found a robust public health system, an abundance of free schools for their children, and jobs.

Villa miseria (shanty town) in Rosario, originally a Toba settlement

What they didn't find was a return to their ancestral ways, which worked fine for them before their lands were ravaged. Like most of the rural poor that migrated to the cities, they fell prey to the political clientele system, and their children became accustomed to beg in the streets, to use alcohol and illegal drugs, and to expect nothing from the future.

This post is getting too long and sad, so I'll reserve the rest of what I'd written for tomorrow or the day after that. It concerns the local Qom and their involvement with one of those power-hungry religious characters that seem to be attracted to poverty and despair (not, not Padre Ignacio).

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.

Rosario City

Rosario has no foundation date, and no founder. Somebody just got the lands and settled here and somehow, slowly, a village grew. But the city of Rosario does have a birthday... although it's not clear when. On 3 August 1852 the town council decided to proclaim it a city; on 5 August the governor made it official. If we accept the latter date, then we can say tomorrow Rosario City is 155 years old. But nobody seems to remember the date, or care about it.

We celebrate the day of the Virgin of the Rosary on 7 October, which I half agree with because it was around the chapel of the virgin that the town was established and got its name from, but then that was ages ago and of course every Spanish town in the Americas started like that — a main square or plaza surrounded by the seats of secular and religious power, the town hall and the church, all of it often called Villa de Nuestra Señora de Whatever.

There was some official recognition of the date, I seem to recall, in 2002, when the city turned 150, but not this year. There should be. Rosario was not simply proclaimed a city when some politician had nothing better to do and signed a declaration to that effect, or when it reached a certain population through natural growth. Rosario was a large village or town in the second quarter of the 19th century, and it was supposed to be much more than that, but in 1841 Juan Manuel de Rosas, the caudillo/dictator/governor of Buenos Aires, decided that he wanted all overseas traffic for his own place and forbade foreign trade ships to go up the Paraná River. In 1852, however, the caudillo of Entre Ríos, Justo José de Urquiza, got tired and rebelled against Rosas, and the people of Rosario supported him. Once in power, Urquiza, who had a good eye for business, opened up the traffic again, and granted Rosario the title of city. It was a good move and it was what the city needed — the port starting working like crazy, and the population went from about 3,000 to more than 50,000 in less than 40 years.

Well, many of the good things that enter Argentina still end up staying in Buenos Aires, from tourism to electronics, but today no dictator can shut us off from down there.

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...

Monsignor my ass

The guy you see on the picture is called José Luis Mollaghan. Now ask yourself (and reply to yourself, of course), what makes it different from you, me or anyone else on this planet? I mean, besides the fact that he's wearing a weird purple hat and speaking on a microphone very close to the top authorities of Argentina.

Well, this guy Mollaghan is called an archbishop, a word which etymology tells us means "chief overseer", or maybe "top-grade supervisor". He's in charge of checking on the local community of Catholics, an arduous job for which he was appointed by the Pope himself. The Pope is in charge of checking on us all, and I mean all the world, since he's the vicar of Christ, and he must not let us sin — since Christ was nailed to a cross 2000 years ago precisely to save us from sin, and apparently we didn't pay attention.

The Pope was found to be OK for this demanding job by an assembly of other notable Catholics called cardinals, in turn appointed by a previous Pope, under the inspiration of someone or something called the Holy Spirit, an invisible, inaudible, inodorous... thing which is one part of the three that make up the entity known as the Holy Trinity, aka the Roman Catholic God, or just "God". Who created the universe and loves us all, forever and ever, and will not let us be tortured in a lake of fire as long as we go to Mass every Sunday, et cetera.

Now it makes sense that the archbishop sits next to the president and tells us what to do, right?

If you, like me, think all of the above is farfetched, absurd and outrageously ridiculous, you'll answer "no". But then you'll be in the minority.

You're also supposed to address Mr. Mollaghan as "Monsignor", that is, "my lord" (or "milord"). Sorry, I thought all titles of nobility in Argentina had been abolished in 1813. This seems unfair to secular nobles.

Mollaghan gave a speech to the troops amassed on the celebration of Flag Day, before anyone else, even the governor or the Commander-in-Chief (that would be the President). The speech had little to do with the occasion; Flag Day was only an easy plug for a religious rant about how Argentina is a Catholic country, how the Virgin Mary wants us all to worship her 24/7, and how it should always be illegal to prefer a poor woman's life over a handful of barely differentiated cells. The authorities (a Socialist mayor, a left-leaning Peronist governor who professes to be a great friend of Fidel Castro, and other officials of a country supposedly governed by a secular Constitution) listened attently and (I guess) tried to ignore a group of women with a green banner set up before the stand who demanded free access to their reproductive rights. I was exposed to religious indoctrination and to this kind of oblivious, matter-of-factly intolerance for such a long time, this shouldn't bother me by now, but it did.

So Monsignor got to advertise his beliefs from a privileged spot during a public secular holiday, and nobody said a thing. But wait: the princes of the Church have other advantages over their secular counterparts: they get paid by the state (a bishop gets 70% of the salary of a federal judge) and their titles and other entitlements are not subject to the legal framework of Argentina — they're in fact representatives of another country, the Vatican, the only modern theocracy in the Western hemisphere, by virtue of a Concordat... signed between the Holy See and the dictatorial (i.e. illegal) government of Juan Carlos Onganía, in 1966.