Bullet trains

This is definitively my comeback, for the time being. Remember you can check out a selection of my vacation pictures on Flickr at Vacaciones 2008. Since Flickr lets you view only your latest 200 photos (unless you pay for a Pro Account), they'll eventually "fall out" of my photostream, but I have them all linked from a private blog, which I'll reveal eventually.

Remember the "bullet train" that the national government is supposedly going to build to join Buenos Aires and Rosario at 250 km/h? Did you see Presidenta CFK defend the project of a second, Buenos Aires–Mar del Plata bullet train? What do you think of it all? A bit over the top, isn't it? More and more it sounds like the stratospheric planes that the Balding Cuckold pulled out of his ass in one of those memorably incoherent speeches of his, back in the 1990s, only this time it looks as if the trains can and will be actually built. (Whether they'll work is another matter.)

Although the official version is that everyone's happy about the trains, some are not. I have here an open letter to Cristina K about the trains by writer and journalist Mempo Giardinelli, published in Página/12, and an article about the government's intent to create two state companies to handle the railway system. I've also got an article from La Nación, "Without power, but with bullet trains", and dozens of links to other opinion articles. Now, when Página/12 and La Nación agree that something is horribly wrong, it's usually a sign that it is, indeed, wrong.

I'll translate parts of what Giardinelli says to la Presidenta after she criticized the press harshly for their comments about the latest train project.

Madam President: Speaking as an Argentine intellectual who lives in the interior of the country, I address you as one among the million of Argentinians who voted for you last October, but also because I was one of the first to doubt, publicly, the construction of the so-called Bullet Train. […] I was one of the first journalists to emphasize the gross contradiction that such a work entails in a country as devastated, railway-wise, as ours.

… [I]n a country where railways were destroyed in a vile fashion, and where the transport system is overwhelmed, it makes no sense to execute works that will benefit only a few passengers, the wealthiest of the three largest Argentine cities. In the Spanish AVE trains, for example, the maximum capacity is 329 passengers […] and the Madrid–Sevilla ticket costs between 115 and 174 euro, […] [which] implies a cost of €0.25 per kilometer. At 4.50 pesos per euro, a trip to Rosario (300 km) [from Buenos Aires] will cost AR$324. And to Mar del Plata (400 km) AR$432.

These prices only an elite will be able to afford. And if by any chance they might be lowered, it will be through subsidies, which means we, all Argentinians, will end up paying for the trips of that small privileged elite.

… [T]he original announcement that the Retiro–Rosario bullet train would cost 1.32 billion dollars (some 4 billion pesos) led to the inevitable thought that such a massive amount of money would be invested, with advantage, in the re-enabling of branches […] with renewed railways and better regular [non-high-speed] trains…

… Right now you have announced the Buenos Aires–Mar del Plata bullet train, at a cost of US$600 million, for 300 passengers to travel in little more than 2 hours, at 250 km/h. I ask myself: wouldn't it be more reasonable and cheaper to support air transport, which as of today is in a terminal status, there being barely one or two daily flights to Mar del Plata, when years ago there were tens of them?

Respectfully, Madam, I think you're being wrongly advised. And this is because the head of your Secretariat of Transport is still Mr. Ricardo Jaime, which in my opinion and that of millions of Argentinians is the most inept official to have had a place in the administrations of your husband and your own. His work can be readily appreciated: the collapse of commercial flights, the absurd subsidies to the appalling train services, and the deficient road system that keeps this country from having transversal highways.

As much as, or even more so than the energy crisis, [the issue of] transportation is the heaviest burden on Argentina's development. It is impossible [to conduct] a serious policy of industrialization, full employment and social inclusion in a disconnected country like ours. It is impossible to fight persistent poverty when entire provinces have been and are deprived of railways and airlines, and when their roads are decrepit.

It's difficult to add something to this. Giardinelli, and he makes sure we all know it, voted for Cristina, in large part because he supports the Kirchners' policy on human rights. His letter is all the more valuable for that reason. If Néstor Kirchner hadn't shown his true colours as he ended his second year in office, I'd be agreeing in all respects with Giardinelli. As it is, it's painfully obvious that Cristina is just like her husband — she won't listen to sensible criticism, she'll react with vitriol to any accusations, and she'll stand by her cronies no matter how inefficient or corrupt they might be.

The bullet trains are not, cannot be, anything but the fruit of collusion between government and big business. The exact price of the ticket is not important; the common citizen won't be able to afford it if it's more than twice that of an interurban bus, which is sure to be the case, and that's only a third of what Giardinelli calculated. But the main point is, like he says, that all that money is a waste. It's not a question of wondering whether Argentina can support a comprehensive, well-connected national railway system — this was done before, and it worked fine, but we let it decay and crumble.

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...

Two villas miseria

This is a followup on yesterday's post about the Toba tribe and how they came from Chaco to Rosario.

I live 10 blocks from a railway track around which a large Toba settlement grew in the 1990s. If you're wondering why they put it there, it's because the areas on the side of the rails have been jurisdictional "no man's land" for a long time, since the railway system started to decline. When the stations were shut down, the state-owned companies that ran them stopped caring about keeping people away from the tracks. The municipal and provincial government couldn't take care of them either.

Nowadays, with many trains transporting cereal and other types of cargo from the interior to the ports, the situation is a bit different. Private companies keep their land from being occupied. However, the rest of the former railway property is managed by the national state through an office called ONABE, which is powerless to stop people from taking residence beside the tracks.

So these Toba came, I don't remember when exactly — surely in the 1990s, but also before. Then a government housing programme built homes for them in a different part of the city and they moved there. But the settlement, though much reduced, is still there. A couple of years ago, after many requests, the provincial government built a police post near it, because people were scared of walking or driving along the street and being stuck right beside the villa miseria, on the level crossing, when a train had to pass.

I myself have never had a problem with the people of the villa. They've been there for ages and they're mostly decent fellows who happen to be very poor. But I still know better than to walk past the villa when it's dark, because if I'm robbed there, the thief can easily run into the villa and nobody there's going to tell on him.

There's another settlement, about 8 blocks in a different direction, where a Catholic nun started a "mission". It was built too near the Ludueña Stream, in a floodable area, without proper streets or sanitation. Nevertheless, word-of-mouth (especially along extended families) reached Chaco and the "mission" attracted more settlers. The lands around the Ludueña are another preferred place for villas, because until recently nobody has wanted them. The public works needed to make them safe are only being done now.

The "mission" was a bad idea, the grandiose scheme of an attention-hungry woman to become the benefactor and spiritual leader of the poor. María Jordán had charisma; she talked to politicians and the media and got donations, which her collaborators in good faith distributed following her will. She organized a couple of fund-raising events, got benefactors to pay trips for her, and even (I was told) a car and an apartment (to better conduct her charity work, of course).

She did do some missionary work in the villa: she enshrined a Virgin Mary whom she called "Mary the Mother of Hope", and even had stamps printed — the Mother of Hope looking suspiciously like her inventor. I don't know what became of that; the poorer segments of the population are nowadays overwhelmingly attracted to other sects, usually very active evangelical ones that get funds from the United States, and local upstarts.

She had no idea how to run the place. I don't know how many poor people came from Chaco to live in her ridiculous mission, but they were a major problem — they were quite literally refugees, and the city wasn't prepared to receive them. In my experience, religious initiatives tend to rely on good intentions alone (cf Mother Teresa's "Come Here To Die As We Pray For You" shelter franchise), and this was no exception.

Jordán was soon eclipsed by the exotic miracle healer Father Ignacio Peries, but she still appears now and then in the news, invariably referred to as "Sister María Jordán", and wearing a habit... even though she was forced to leave her order years ago, when she refused to obey her superiors and stop her lone "missionary" adventure.

I know all of this because I worked for this self-centered woman for six months (don't ask), and I saw other people being trapped by her deceivingly charming manners. The last time I heard of her was on the occasion of an art exhibition by the controversial León Ferrari, when she said publicly that, if she had the money, she'd buy up Ferrari's works and burn them all. Yeah, that'll help the poor and sick.

Return of the train

Rosario Norte Station

The train's coming back!

There's currently a weekly train service between Rosario Norte Station and Retiro, operated by Trenes de Buenos Aires (TBA). I've never seen it (not strange, given its frequency) but I've been told it's not only slow (7 hours to do 300 km) but also not in good condition, and rather dirty. However, a ticket is only AR$17 in "first class" (do note the quotes!) and thus extremely cheap, compared to the luxurious, fast, comfortable, but pricey bus services given by a number of companies, notably the AR$39 service of El Rosarino.

The national government has just bought a convoy from Spain, as part of the National Railway Recovery Plan (sounds like a good plan, but this is the first time I've ever heard of it, so it mustn't be doing lots of things around here — how odd is that!). Starting in mid-September, it'll be doing the Rosario–Buenos Aires route daily. It's a three-coach train with a diesel locomotive, with a capacity of 228 passengers. It has air conditioning and reclining seats. Since the railways are not well-maintained outside Buenos Aires, after Zárate (they're prepared for cargo traffic only), the train can only reach its maximum speed of 120 km/h within a small segment of the route, and the trip will take about 6 hours (depart from Rosario at 6 AM, reach Retiro at noon, depart from there at 6:30 PM and return to Rosario Norte around midnight).

Six hours in a luxury train seems fine to me. Quite logically the ticket "will be raised somewhat", according to the diplomatic language of TBA's authorities. Considering, however, that the bus ticket will go up soon as well (to AR$44 pesos as announced), and that the train is much safer and more comfortable (and romantic, if you're into that), the price would have to triple in order not to be attractive and competitive.

I'm looking forward to travelling on this train, as I last did when I was a child, in better times.

Revolution Day weekend

The long weekend was fairly quiet. I got out with the gang on Thursday for some unhealthy fun and slept through all the glorious morning of Revolution Day. Patriotic celebrations don't really do much for me anyway, and after watching how President K turned the commemoration of the (bloodless, burgeois and porteño-centered) revolution of 25 May 1810 into a political meeting, busloads of hired voters included, I was pretty much satisfied that I didn't get up earlier. K went to Mendoza this year, ostensibly to reinforce his pro-federalist stance again, though as before, there were many who guessed he didn't want to go to the Te Deum at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Buenos Aires, where he would've had to listen to the de facto intellectual leader of the opposition, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio; and then Julio Cobos, governor of Mendoza and K Radical, is a likely candidate for the vice-presidency along with First Lady Senator Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, or, as some like to abbreviate her, CFK.

Enough of politics... After a few much-needed glasses of water and an aspirin, I sat down with my folks to eat some extremely heavy empanadas, as tradition demands, and then set out to my next task — going to the movies. Pirates of the Caribbean III was a very good movie. Mind you, I liked the first two issues, but they weren't exactly earth-shaking for me. I don't quite understand the fanatic devotion of many people for these picturesque characters. But PotC3 was different: much darker, more dramatic, longer, and more complicated and complex (those two are not the same). The characters were less cartoonish, more developed, more troubled, and at the same time they didn't lose their freshness; the movie was still clearly an adventure-comedy, not a depressing personal drama. If you haven't seen I and II, go get them and then see this one (you won't get a thing if you don't).

Well, a couple of misunderstandings later, I was left without suitable plans for the Saturday and Sunday, so paradoxically, I took the greatest advantage of the long weekend on Thursday night and Friday afternoon... Saturday afternoon, however, was not a complete loss. The sun again came out in full glory and the freezing cold abated a little. I took my bike and went first east, then north, then a bit west, to reach an old train station I was determined to photograph, the last one: Sarratea Station.


Sarratea Station is in the north of Rosario, in what I think is still Barrio Alberdi (though the area looks definitely poorer than the typical middle-upper-class Alberdi), about 1.5 km west of the river's shore. The railway was part of the Ferrocarril Mitre company, back when the state-owned railway covered all of Argentina. This line ran north–south. Sarratea was closed down and more-or-less abandoned in 1977, like most other passenger stations. After talking to a lady who was doing her sobremesa (post-lunch relax time) inside, and who came out to see what I was doing (possibly), I learned the building is now the home of railway personnel of the Nuevo Central Argentino. I'm not sure if any trains are still going down this line, but it looks well-maintained. Of course the train, if there's one, doesn't stop here anymore. The old station sign is still there, but rust and the trees' shade make it very difficult to spot:


I've been reading up a lot on railway history, as I told you once already, and I tell you the nostalgic, bittersweet feeling that I get from unearthing these old stations is very special. If this country needs something, it's a renewed railway system. Cheap, safe, spacious, comfortable trains — not bullet trains that plunder your pockets and blur the landscape and seem a bit ridiculous in a country where millions are starving, and not buses, no matter how luxurious. It's very difficult to explain where this feeling of mine comes from, since I've never travelled by train that I can remember. Sure, I went on the Rosario–Buenos Aires line several times with my grandpa, but that was ages ago and I have no recollection of it. I don't live near a train station either; I have never had the rhythm of my activities marked by the noisy arrivals or departures of trains. Must be some sort of preternatural memory, even though I don't believe that's even possible.

History around us

This year is the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of the National Flag Memorial (Monumento Nacional a la Bandera), so there will be lots of cultural activities related to it, peaking at the official celebration of Flag Day (20 June). One of those activities is the exhibition of the original plans of the Memorial by architect Ángel Guido, which were found along with many other buildings' blueprints, abandoned in a wet hidden room at the National Direction of Architecture, Littoral Region, among furniture 70 years old, beside the old Customs Office building. Researchers and restorers have been at it for two years, cataloging and filming.

History and historical landmarks are getting popular lately. Tonight at 9 PM there's a documentary about Rosario on History Channel (Historia Secreta: Rosario). This must be a first — HC has been doing localized documentaries for its Latin American division, but I don't remember Rosario being featured anywhere in world TV. This is supposed to be broadcast to the whole continent. If you can record it, I'd be grateful.

I've always loved history myself, though I didn't have the chance to study it formally (that might happen in the future, though). The history of Argentine railways and of Rosario's railways, in particular, and their tragic decline, is one of my special interests. It's difficult to ignore the influence of the train when you walk around certain areas of the city. At the most unsuspected spots you see half-covered old rails embedded in the streets. The old stations are still there, abandoned, restored or modified; there are people who still remember the time when it was easy to cross the whole city in less than 20 minutes by train, comfortable and safer than today's bus, reaching stations that helped whole populous neighbourhoods prosper and grow.

The trains continue to come only to Rosario Norte, at long intervals; the short-distance interurban system was destroyed by decades of bad administration, negligence, union corruption, and ill-advised privatization (the Former Presidential Cuckold was not guilty of the whole mess, but he did finish off the railways).

I've been reading up on railway history (follow the links above) and working on the Wikipedia articles that cover the stations, so I'll keep inflicting the subject on my readers for a while. Moreover, history is something to be told, and I have a possibly interested partner for that. We're talking about a student of European history and culture who happens to be young and quite easy on the eye..., but she's Japanese! She's the daughter of my calligraphy teacher in Japanese school and understands almost no Spanish or English. She lives, coincidentally, almost across the street from the former Rosario Central Station. Myself, logically, haven't devoted my time to study expressions such as "nationalization", "right-wing nationalist government", or "Italian-style neo-Gothic clock tower", so last Saturday (as we went along the Flickr photographers' group Rosarigasinos doing a photo safari), I had a hard time conveying all these interesting data to her...

Interestingly enough, Europeans brought railways to Japan as well as to Argentina, and they did it at about the same time. Japan made the best out of them; we lost them over the years. There are plans to revitalize the system, but that still seems a dream.

Urban safari: into the West

What a title, huh? I had the day off work yesterday, thanks to governor Obeid's demagoginsistence that public employees should be happy and free of stress in the days before Christmas, even if that means paralyzing half the public healthcare system (and following Kirchner's similar measure on the national level), so I woke up late (that would be around 9 AM for me), had a very lazy, drawn-out breakfast, and decided that I'd go on a photo safari to one of the places in Rosario that I hadn't visited yet: the northwest of the city, which is west from my home, and particularly Barrio Fisherton. I was especially interested in getting to Estación Antártida Argentina, one of the several old train stations scattered throughout Rosario, often in places that are not so very populated today. I won't go into details about the history of the Argentine railways, which is like a summary of Argentine history in general -- enthusiasm, rapid development, faltering, abandon, and timid recovery. Our Amigos del Riel have written a lot about that.

The logistics of the safari was troublesome, since I don't have a car, my bicycle is awaiting repairs, and no single bus was good for the trip, even as Fisherton is no more than 10 minutes away from my barrio. I don't know all the lines, anyway, so making a combination was risky -- I could end up anywhere. Walking was viable, but tiresome, and I didn't want to be caught walking under the sun after 11 AM if possible. Eventually I took my little map (a clipped version of the one available at www.rosario.gov.ar), got a bus to take me to Provincias Unidas & Córdoba, and then headed west, admiring the... hmm... well, there's nothing to admire over there. As you cross Circunvalación Avenue (see above), you enter Fisherton and things start getting fancier. Along Córdoba Ave. (which is called Eva Perón Ave. in this part of town) nice bars and restaurants start to appear, along with businesses selling typically tasteless upper middle-class home decoration and quality furniture, brand clothing, and the like.

But the real Fisherton is farther west and far from the avenues: nice small houses and more than a few larger estates, silent streets lined with tall trees, sidewalks with well-groomed, intensely green grass, squeaky clean brand-new cars here and there, and nobody in sight except maybe someone walking their dog and the occasional door-to-door salesman of cheap items (those things that la señora can't be bothered to go to the super for). In Fisherton, as in the even wealthier Barrio Alberdi, common courtesy is extended only once you're ushered inside your host's home, since while you're outside walking beside those mansions you're invariably greeted by the mad howling of packs and packs of seemingly starving guard dogs (and nobody bothers with a CAVE CANEM). An adult knows enough not to approach gates and fences patrolled by such monsters, but a kid who doesn't fear the doggies appropriately will end up with one hand less should s/he try to pet them.

So I walked and walked and got to the train station. The place was abandoned for ages, but it was then restored and preserved (our Municipality likes to do that), and now there's something going on in there. From the outside, though, it looks like a British-style station transplanted into the American Wild West; the dusty solitude and the almost vertical sunlight at the time I got there reinforced that feeling.


I've grown to love old train stations; in Argentina, they encapsulate many aspects of our history in a unique way. The railways were built for the port of Buenos Aires to receive the meat, cow hides and grain coming from the Pampas and beyond, so they could be exported; that model of development defined the country and continues mostly unchanged. British companies brought the trains, inaugurating a period of dependency on foreign investment for our infrastructure, which again, remains like that today. The trains took the immigrants disembarking in Buenos Aires City to the interior of the country. In many cases, towns sprang up spontaneously around train stations and received their name; how the stations were laid out thus defined the distribution of large populations. The south of Santa Fe was (except for Rosario of course) almost completely rural up to the 1880s, and then there was an explosion of dozens of new towns around train stations, as the lines reached farther and farther west. After that there were a few decades of good economy... and then Argentina did its usual thing... and of course, when the 1990s came, what little useful infrastructure remained was swept away by the "modernization" conducted by the Predator-in-Chief and his evil bald minion. That trend can be reversed, maybe, but in the meantime the charm of the old stations remains, even as they lie dark and silent.