The flu

I haven't written about the influenza A(H1N1) epidemic in Argentina. Everyone else has, though, so I'll leave it at that. For me, it had its good and bad sides. The good side was that children and teenagers cleared the streets, buses, and other public venues for us grownups, leaving us room to enjoy our city without being bumped into,  or bombarded with trashy music out of MP3 players. Oh, some people died. Not many, certainly an insignificant number compared to the people who die of other preventable diseases or in traffic accidents caused by drivers' carelessness. Several acquaintances of mine fell with the flu, but it was nothing serious.

The bad side was the hysteria and the paranoia. I'm sure you've seen your share of this. What happens here is that as soon as, let's say, an outbreak of a disease is announced, society divides itself into two main groups: those who panic, go to ridiculous extremes to protect themselves, and generally bother the rest of us, and those who just dismiss it all as an invention of the government, the media, or both to make us forget of the really important matters, and place the rest of us at risk because of their carelessness. You may have noticed there's a third group, what I've called "the rest of us" — make of that what you want.

As the first wave of the flu subsided, many people have started to forget the cautionary measures against contagion. This may or may not be OK. Others continue to be hysterical, in both the usual and the figurative meaning: they remain fearful and paranoid, and they're very funny — tending towards the "pathetic" kind of funny. At work, I've had perfectly healthy people, who usually offered me their cheek to kiss every morning, refuse to come even close to me. During the initial phase of the epidemic, one of my co-workers first became very agitated, then tried to force her daughter's school to shut down, and then basically locked her up at home (this was a few days before the Ministry of Education finally decided to shut down the schools). There's still alcohol gel everywhere, and by the looks of it, some people think it's an all-powerful, virus-proof barrier against the flu.

The cold, and with it the flu, will be gone in less than two months. I can't wait to tell you about the upcoming dengue epidemic...

Rallies in Buenos Aires

Today the Senate is going to start discussing the export tax bill, which, as you will remember, were approved by the Chamber of Deputies by a difference of only seven votes. Although the Peronist majority in the Senate is even greater than in the lower house, senators are much more committed to their local constituencies. A significant number of Peronist senators are voting no to the government-sponsored bill. Only one or two votes decided at the last minute might make all the difference, and it's entirely possible that there's a tie — in which case the president of the Senate, Vice-president Julio Cobos, will have to break it.

Both Kirchners (the formal president, Cristina, and the de facto one, Néstor) and their high-profile ministers have been wooing the senators, pressuring them, threatening them, to get votes. The end result we'll only see later today, or tomorrow.

The farmers' organizations and the national government are organizing parallel rallies for today in Buenos Aires. The farmers want to (but probably won't) repeat the numeric performance of the May 25 meeting in Rosario, and the government wants to do better than the farmers. Néstor Kirchner has the mob-like truck drivers' union on his side, plus the Peronist Youth and a few other useful idiot clubs, to provide him with a lot of screaming fans, and the farmers have received the support of a true Prince of Sleaze, the leader of the Gastronómicos (the bar and restaurant workers' union).

It's all pretty stupid if you ask me. And divisive, and dangerous. The rallies are basically a bragging competition and won't serve any purpose. Néstor Kirchner is simply unable to stay quiet and hope for the best, and his hateful insolence is contagious. And the farmers must know that this is it, that they're not going to change anybody's mind now, because this has long ago ceased to be about taxes. It's all about ideology and people's conceptions of what government must handle power.

I believe that Kirchnerism is fascism, just as old-time Peronism was — corporatist, demagogical, perversely fusing patriotism with partisan loyalty, corrupt to its very dark core by its own nature. It must be brought down, by legitimate means, because it's wrecking the economy and destroying our dignity.

I don't believe for one second that this is the worst government we might have had at this time. Neither do I believe that the wealthy farmers would choose a better government (better for us) if they had the opportunity.

But the thing I believe the least is that we must somehow choose either populism or oligarchy, and violently reject the possibility of alternatives, the possibility of dialogue and compromise. I'd rather have no rival rallies hurling abuse at each other, no passionate masses in the public squares, no more demonstrations. Not for a while, at least. We'll have to do a lot of cleaning up, as a people, after this.

Weekend of tango and photos

The IV Encuentro Metropolitano de Tango ("Fourth Metropolitan Tango Meeting") finished last Saturday. I don't have much to say about tango, but my girlfriend Marisa was in the organizers' group assembled by the Municipality of Rosario, so she had to be there and I took advantage of that to be there with her and take pictures. The closing event was twofold: the first part was an outdoors milonga in a closed-off section of a street downtown, and the second part was a tango show at La Comedia Theater, on the corner of that same street.

A milonga is the name of a tango subgenre and also of the place where people go to dance, and the event itself. In the olden days a milonga was like a disco or bar, i.e. the place where men went to pick up women. Today they're venues for tango bars, known and popular only among fans of tango. Marisa, incidentally, is one of them. I understand she hasn't been to a milonga for quite a while, but that didn't stop her from trying a few pieces.

The afternoon was delightful, sunny and only mildly cold. There was an introduction with a group of very bad actors representing a typical old-style milonga scene, an older man having fun with a younger tango companion and chased by his outraged wife. Although the acting was flaky, the script and the feathered hat were funny.

After that came the dancing. A lot of couples old and new went out on the street and showed their abilities (or lack thereof — it wasn't really important) while the music played. There was an interlude with a "tango" exhibition — not real tango but tango-inspired choreography, and then the milonga resumed. My photo buddies and I took a lot of pictures and then left. Marisa had to stay there and then hurry to work on the theater, until the grand finale at around midnight, so it didn't make much sense for me to stay.

On Sunday I met another photographer friend of mine and her friends, and after some chat we went out to get some more pictures... nothing fancy, since we didn't want to walk that much, and it was getting dark (it's only 12 days till winter after all). Luckily I'd brought the tripod I recently bought. I took some unremarkable pictures, then we went to a café, and then I returned home.

All in all the weekend was satisfactory — I was hungry for pictures, and I took a lot of them. Photography, I've noticed, calms me down. I don't know exactly why that is. Taking a walk along a nice street also helps, of course, but since I have a camera, 90% of the times I feel as if I'm missing something when I don't carry it along for the walk. That can't be good, for sure. But as long as I can get away with it...

Gente bien, or, crazy Argentina, take 3

Today's annoying news. In Rosario/12, some member of a palaeo-leftist Kirchnerist movement (what do you call that, a reverse useful idiot?) writes that the May 25 meeting in Rosario was "the birth of a new political coalition for the upper class",¹ who "without any inhibitions paraded their luxury and waste" around the city, and whose real goal (now acknowledged) is "to change Argentina's [political] model."²

¹ He actually wrote gente bien — it's untranslatable, but it has elements of the traditional "decent hard-working people" plus enough money to stay comfortably at the top of the middle-class, or above.

² Here it was modelo de país, that is, the way the country conceives itself and is structured politically and socio-economically. The Kirchnerist model's goal claims to be accumulation and redistribution of wealth — though so far we've mostly seen the former.

Well duh! Yes, we do want a regime change. It doesn't have to come from elections — the president herself could lead it if she took real power away from her husband and his gang. Only she doesn't want to.

And no, you stupid sheep, we weren't all gente bien over there at the Flag Memorial. For one I'm clinging to the bottom of the middle class, and I was there by my own will (unless the tens of thousands that the Peronist Party had to round up and ship to Salta to fill the space around Cristina).

True, most people in the meeting in Rosario were gente bien. But it would take so little effort to please them, it's impossible to understand why your government is so eager to piss them off. It's the poor who have the most problems — maybe you should be asking your beloved president where all that wealth she wants to redistribute is right now, since the Argentine poor are as poor as they were ten years ago, and it's not the gente bien who's using taxpayers' money for "luxury and waste" such as, I don't know, a four-billion-dollar bullet train!

Eye of the storm III: Powers that be

Still more about the campo crisis, farmers' strike, agricultural lockout, or whatever your choice of words.

Once I said that Cristina's first speech (the one I heard while I was held in Villa María, back from vacations, by a road block) was the worst piece of diplomacy I'd ever heard. I need to correct — Cristina's last speech at Plaza de Mayo, surrounded by the dreadful camarilla his husband assembled, and facing the crowd of vociferous supporters herded like cattle to applaud her, was the worst piece of diplomacy, the one thing anyone seeking to solve a conflict should never do. Intended as a show of strength, it enraged everyone and ended up having the opposite effect. Most analyzed it as a show of weakness and insecurity. I think it was a knee-jerk reaction, triggered by a mentality that equals adulation with approval.

Decisions in the national government are taken within a circle of four or five people, with occasional nods to a few more. Orders for the rest of the administration come from the top, from those few people. No experts are consulted. Past experience and history are ignored. Congress is bypassed. The press is informed by leaks or learns about new government measures when the president starts ranting about them in partisan meetings. So are the governors, even those that identify as Kirchnerist, and the public. That's what everybody saw these days, and what angered many, I think. Myself, I'm sick and tired of my representatives being silent.

Agustín Rossi, deputy for Santa Fe, has been verbally punishing or threatening dissidence and opposition, and no-one has approached him to tell him that he should be lobbying for his province's interests in Congress, instead of campaigning (unsurprisingly, there are already signs reading "A BETTER COUNTRY WITH CRISTINA & AGUSTIN" painted all over Rosario). Carlos Reutemann, senator for Santa Fe, a man I have no love for whatsoever, surprised many by signing a statement next to governor Hermes Binner, asking the national government to turn back the export tax increase and sit down to discuss properly. Rossi promptly notified Reutemann in public that his candidacy for the 2009 legislative elections "is no more". Reutemann's sin was putting the interests of his constituency (and his own political interests tied to them, of course) before the loyalty to this Kirchnerist "project" no-one can exactly describe, but which seems to reduce to "say yes to whatever Cristina woke up this morning thinking of".

This was just one example. Here's another: the governor of Chubut, Mario Das Neves, sharply criticized Chief of Cabinet Alberto Fernández for his rough handling of the crisis. Two Kirchnerist governors quickly and bitterly responded, and Néstor Kirchner ordered public works and fund grants for Chubut to be suspended as punishment. Das Neves is now a pariah, as is Juan Schiaretti, the governor of Córdoba who belatedly and half-heartedly aligned with some of the farmers' demands, and is now shunned by both the farmers and the national government.

The message is clear: one either accepts the Kirchners micromanaging our resources to achieve their goal of "income redistribution" (a goal that is as far today as it was in the 1990s), or opposes them and therefore turns into an enemy of the poor, or worse. This is how most people interpret the government discourse now, and that's why (regardless of what they said) the cacerolazos were not about the agricultural producers, but about government policies. And the reason why no-one wants to acknowledge that is, simply, that the pro-government folks were right in more than a few cases when they pointed out that people hate the Kirchners due to socioeconomic class issues. I know this — I've heard it said to my face — many people hate the fact that the police aren't sent to beat up those dirty piqueteros, and that the government spends a lot of tax money on welfare for the poor, while taxes and inflation eat away the money that the middle class deserves to have so as to spend it in SUVs and vacations abroad. Today it's not politically correct to demonstrate against a government for those reasons — so many people used the campo strike as an excuse.

The bad thing is, aside from that, why should it be wrong to admit that you don't like your government because it uses the poor as an excuse for their real plans? I don't like this government. I would like it to be straightened by a strong opposition in Congress, and by strong independent leaders of the same party who look after their constituents' interests, rather then the Kirchners'. But no-one wanted to say that. Most people restrained themselves; some, obliquely, attacked Cristina's stereotypically feminine spending habits; others reacted to Luis D'Elía's attack on the Plaza de Mayo demonstrators; many blamed the strike and the crisis on Cristina's arrogance. Yet what if the president wants to have a collection of expensive shoes? It's her money. It's not like she's spending millions. What about D'Elía? A more serious matter, no doubt: a hateful bigot with a band of thugs at his disposal, encouraged by the government. But then the Kirchners distanced themselves from him and can do it again at any time, and it only takes the police to do their work. The real cause of the urban cacelorazos is, by and large, the hate of the middle class for the emergence of this political model.

Argentina had more than enough of this sixty years ago. Back then it ended with a coup d'état — a few hundreds dead, a few hundred exiled, and then it was "back to business" and no trouble for anyone... except if you wanted to criticize the new powers. That kind of thing fortunately won't happen now. For good or bad, there's no easy way out.

Eye of the storm

Now that the farmers are off the roads and the president is off her soapbox (the farmers are hastily harvesting; the president is busy in Paris — see, I can even alliterate parenthetically!) I'll say some things I've been holding up about this mess we've all gotten into.

I say all of us, because countryside or town or big city, rich or poor, oligarch or proletarian, tax-burdened or welfare-assisted, we can't escape one another. Even Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has to come back from Paris and face the country she was elected to govern.

I'm not going to discuss the illegality of blocking roads. That's ridiculous, in a country where everybody has been blocking roads to ask for whatever they felt was their right since 2002. It may be a nuisance or a huge inconvenience, but the farmers did it and they had reasons.

What political analysts say, and they must be right, is that people block roads (an extreme, disruptive form of protest) because they've found that's the only way to get the attention of those who can solve their problems. And that's because those who are supposed to represent them (us) aren't doing their job. Not a single governor, deputy or senator reacted to the strike of the campo to understand what their constituencies were telling them. Politicians are supposed to have quick reflexes in this field. Our politicians, however, have had it easy. That's bound to change soon, I expect.

Cristina, for example, delivered an aggressive speech when she had to go for appeasement and dialogue. She was met with rage in the countryside, and banging pots and pans in some of the big cities. Her answer was to organize a show of strength, bringing thousands to applaud her, not without first letting that rabid classist bigot Luis D'Elía loose with his band of thugs. Her ministers publicly defended D'Elía's mob tactics. Deputy Agustín Rossi, instead of representing his district (Santa Fe), turned into the de facto Kirchnerist Political Commissar and went around attacking the critics. The president gave another speech where, after insulting the farmers and the cities' protesters in several ways, she invited the farmers to dialogue in the most affected way.

All this time, nobody tried to, or was able to, get close enough to Cristina or the members of the Cabinet to explain them that this is no way to handle a country in flames. Cristina continued to believe that she, her husband, that filthy rat Alberto Fernández, and that pathetical rag doll of an economy minister Martín Lousteau, were basically right.

The Kirchners don't know how to deal with a normal country. In the crisis, Néstor Kirchner fared well because he was stubborn and didn't fear bending the rules. He started making mistakes when the waters quieted down and the "normal" troubles began creeping in, such as inflation. Cristina received an isolationist government, and eagerly embraced it. She's aware of her surroundings, of the typical urban politics of Buenos Aires, of his allied robber barons encroaching on the metropolitan area, of large-scale political ties with the quasi-feudal governments of the outer provinces. Nothing else. And yet she and her team seem to think they can micromanage a country like Argentina just by tweaking inflation figures, paying or pressuring the media to publish their version of the truth, keeping hold of a few governors of provinces chronically dependent on federal relief, and periodically forcing busloads of unionized workers and squadrons of welfare slaves* to attend meetings with banners inscribed "VIVA CRISTINA" to show the rest of us how powerful she is.

* If a strong union has a presence in your company, and said union is allied with (or bought by) the government, your union delegates will come to you and suggest that you should march with the guys and cheer for Cristina in the upcoming rally, for which they'll supply transportation to and from, as well as drinks, some food, and maybe complimentary hats. If you're a poor person enrolled in one of the many social movements that were born of the 2001 crisis, and which the government controlled by delegating distribution of welfare and favours on their leaders, then said leaders will come to you and suggest that you should go and cheer for Cristina, too, to show your appreciation for the hand that feeds you. That's how it's done. I mean, poor people gathering freely, for free, just to applaud a filthy-rich politician? In Argentina, Land of the Ever-Complaining? Please.

It doesn't work. It can't. A sizable minority of Argentinians hate Cristina's guts because she has a past of leftist militance, because she's a Peronist, because she relies on the strength of the "insolent poor". Peronism is divisive — not a topic I can deal with. A few hate the Kirchners because they interpret their human rights policy as revenge — the revenge of "terrorist sympathizers" against the state terror of the 1970s. Others don't like how the government tolerates the requests of poor people (pickets and disruptive demonstrations) and encourages "laziness" through welfare, while "decent working people" have to bear with increasing inflation and insecurity and feel nobody brings answers to them. Some criticize the fine points, or the whole layout, of the economic policy. The opposition is a complex mix, and though disorganized, it's not an isolated minority that can be scared by hired crowds.

Cristina Kirchner threw them all into a single bloodied bag. I found myself inside that bag, next to really despicable people, and I didn't like it. She still doesn't understand. She's been bringing back a really dangerous cocktail of ideas from the past, mixing in some unsuitable modern ingredients, stirring with liberal doses of misguided rhetoric, and serving it to people unable to resist the punch, or to people who believe that such ideological cocktails are passé — for which she only gets a complaint and loses a few customers, while 30 years before she would've had the whole bar set on fire.

We're now at the eye of the storm. There were the pickets, the roadblocks, the milk being spilt beside the road, the thousands of starving chickens being killed, the empty supermarket aisles, the cacerolazos, the displays of intolerance and exaggerated outrage, the marches and countermarches, the speeches, the awful media coverage. Then came the truce. Thirty days. The government wasted a week already. The opposition is moving together in Congress. Cristina is in Paris, looking all stateswomanly and probably shopping for jewelry in her spare time.

I have so much more to say about this... I'll leave it for another day. It's so complicated, I tell you, I don't want to ramble, and still, just see what huge mess I've just written.

Vaccination or "nature"

Did you know there are people who oppose vaccination (especially compulsory vaccination of children, dictated by the state) on ideological grounds? Yes, it sounds like an American thing — a typical result of the reaction between those traditional values of religious fanaticism, redneck anti-government mistrust, and the more recent libertarian "I have a right to do anything" stance. Or something out of the Amish or Jehovah's Witnesses. In fact it's common in Europe, in their case due to a misguided idea that you must "follow the natural ways". So they don't vaccinate their children and don't use antibiotics.

This was all completely exotic to me at first, and to most of my fellow citizens it must be a shock to learn that there are parents who refuse to vaccinate their children in Rosario. These are the European variety, "naturists", people who recognize the existence of disease but prefer to deal with it through "alternative medicine" (there's a reason for the quotes around that — "alternative medicine" is not real medicine).

The bad part is that you don't know of these children until they end up in hospital in advanced stages of common diseases (such as the whooping cough) that have been eradicated from the general population decades ago. The worse part is that they might spread these diseases around them.

Fortunately for the children, judges tend to disagree with the parents.

Traffic incidents

One always assumes that, barring the very few intentionally planned homicides and "crimes of passion", people who run over other people with their vehicles are not doing it on purpose in any sense, and traffic accidents are exactly that — bad things which just happen. All too human mistakes. Bad luck. Randomness. Things going bad at the wrong time.

In Argentina, things seem to "go bad" all the time, so our traffic accident record is appalling. Each Monday, on TV, we get the tally of the weekend's road casualties alongside the football match scores. The tally is never zero, or even close to it; often it's in the double digits. Sometimes it's so bad it makes the international news.

In our law there are these two main alternative views of death (I guess this must be the case in other places as well, though the names and details are sure to vary) that apply to traffic accidents. If you killed the other person on purpose — e.g. you drove as carelessly as to make certain that you'd eventually hit someone, or else (as in most cases) you killed the other person truly by accident. You're still guilty in the latter case (unless the victim jumped in front of the car or something like that), but the legal consequences aren't as great as in the other scenario.

Most drivers don't want to run over people and kill them in the streets; yet most drivers in Argentina often drive as if they didn't mind killing themselves and as many other human beings in the process. At the very least they bypass traffic laws that they deem unimportant, put too much trust in their driving skills, and justify themselves with the lamest excuse in the book: "everyone else does it". Think about it, and you'll find it very difficult to continue referring to those dead and maimed human beings as victims of "traffic accidents".

At last the law is doing something about this. A prosecutor is asking the court to change the accusation against a driver who hit a motorbiker and killed him, last November, in Casilda (45 km west of Rosario). The driver was being investigated under the charge of homicidio culposo (that's more-or-less involuntary manslaughter), but the prosecutor wants him to be charged with homicidio doloso (which implies a degree of willfulness, and stops short of plain murder). This is a new one — and it might establish a precedent. Jurisprudence is not as important in our system (which is one of civil law, rather than the common law system of Britain and former British colonies), but a precedent like this cannot be dismissed.

And just what did the driver do? He drove his pickup truck, at about 9 AM on Sunday, down an avenue, at over 70 km/h. He hit a motorbike he couldn't not have seen, and dragged it (and its driver) more than 20 meters. He didn't try to dodge, and he didn't brake. He was in a hurry because he had a punctured tire and wanted to get it fixed before it was completely flat. And he was reported to have been under the influence of alcohol at around 7 AM. We don't know if the report was accurate, because he didn't allow the police to test him — which made his troubles worse.

We simply can't allow ourselves to keep this "shit happens" stance regarding traffic. Motor vehicles are potentially lethal weapons; and as with weapons, it holds true that "cars don't kill people; people do". Maybe this guy gets the sentence he deserves. What I really hope, though, is that this serves a purpose. Let careless drivers think twice about what they do, and the rest of us should stop thinking of traffic accidents as something akin to the weather. They're not random, and neither (as many seem to believe) is a tendency to recklessness embedded in our genes. "We Argentinians are like that, plain and simple", "there's nothing to do about it", "this country will never change" is bullshit.

February, on closing

I've had this impression that February has passed too quickly. True, it's only the 25th, and even though this is a leap year it still has four days to go, but that's mostly done.

This February has been a slow photo month, in large part due to the sun and the heat. I just can't bear doing my picture-seeking rounds in 30+ degree heat with humidity almost visible, least of all when that kind of temperature persists after sunset. (For practical reasons, also, on weekdays I can't stay up and far from home hours after sunset — because the sun goes away at 9 PM and I've got to go to bed at 11 PM to wake up for work the next day.) I guess photographers who don't mind the sauna-like weather, or who can sleep during the day, might be OK with this state of affairs and content themselves with fascinating night pictures of the city. I'm not.

Might it be that February is intrinsically slow? There are no public holidays in February, except Carnival. When I was a little child I remember the beginning of the Carnival season was a huge party — you'd get little water balloons and chase your mates around, or launch the balloons at the girls, and play with your friends and your parents, ideally beside the pool, throwing water around with your garden hose or with buckets. Not only was it funny, it was a public holiday — two days off for everyone, if I remember correctly.

That all seems to have vanished. There are huge Carnival celebrations in some places in Argentina, such as Gualeguaychú, but they're local traditions, not official celebrations. I hear that Buenos Aires City public employees get Carnival days off, but no-one else does. Children are still not going to school, but nowadays when children chase one another in the street, it's commonly with rocks or kitchen knives, and if you throw a water balloon at a random child, you'll probably get beaten by one or both parents, no matter how truly festive your Carnival spirit was.

February also seems to be somewhat deprived of interest to the majority of us who, for whatever reason, see it as a "sandwich month". February is short and stays between the excitement of the New Year, vacations, the fullness of the summer, and the coming of the first cooler spells of March and of the "serious" part of the year — when people start showing less skin, everybody deserts the beach, and children begin wearing school uniforms and filling the early buses. As I said, no holidays, even though February 3 is the anniversary of the Battle of San Lorenzo and February 27 should be the true Flag Day. It seems no-one wants to celebrate in February...

... Except the Rosarigasinos, of course! The photo group decided to gather at the door of the Museum of the City in Parque Independencia to hit the amusement park. The idea, proposed by one of the guys, was doing what he dubbed a "Don Fulgencio Tour", Don Fulgencio being an old comic cartoon character known as "the man who had no childhood". Grown-ups enjoying children's games was definitely a good idea... with some reservations.

First I wanted to try the Ferris Wheel, only to learn that the ride was out of service for some unspecified reason. So we went and rode on the Caterpillar (the local version is known as the Gusano Loco, or Crazy Worm), which was a lot of centrifugal-powered simple fun. I remembered it being my favourite ride when I was a child, and realized I must be getting old when I felt the brief, but cold, bite of fear during the first few turns.

Then some wanted to check out the Mambo. Marisa and I decided that the Gusano had gotten us as much adrenaline as we wanted, so we and a few others stayed while the rest took their place in this round platform that revolved and rocked to the rhythm of cumbia and reggaeton, its passengers facing inward and pressed into their seats by centrifugal force, screaming and clinging frantically to the metal bars, a few heroic photographers trying to snatch pictures of the game from the inside.

Next the children wanted the Bumper Cars. I didn't feel like it; the cars were too many and so there was no room for anybody to bump into anybody as it should be done. Finally, we used our remaining tickets to ride the Loco Bus, a small, slow-moving pendulum ride with one big gondola in the shape of a bus with a cute face painted on the front. Harmless, childish even for an amusement park, good for grown-ups who don't really want so much excitement — so we thought. Wrong! The sensation of falling down backwards while your guts obediently stay behind owing to inertia was powerful enough. The swinging only looked slow from the ground. I got away from it unscathed, but others were not so lucky, and let's leave it at that. All I could say was, thank you thank you thank you for leaving the Ferris wheel out of service!

So this was, in a way, my celebration of February, my Carnival. This week is bound to be gray and rainy, and next Saturday begins March. Let's see what the serious part of the year has in store.

Plans for Che Guevara's monument

Last December I wrote about a monument to Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The news now says Che Guevara's monument will be ready and in place in about four months. The place is going to be the same as planned, Parque Yrigoyen, near the old Central Córdoba Station, south of downtown. The date will be June 14, the 80th anniversary of Guevara's birth.

The monument is a four-metre-tall statue depicting el Che in a combative pose, without weapons. It was made from bronze donated by some 14,000 people, often in the form of old keys. The statue will be made in Buenos Aires; a boat will carry it up the Paraná River, departing on May 30 and stopping several times along the way for public events. It will arrive on June 1 or 2, and it'll be installed, I guess, during the intervening fortnight until Guevara's birthday. The unveiling will be attended by people coming on a bus caravan from the Obelisco in BA, some representatives of the Argentine government, and envoys from Cuba.

Rosario, the birthplace of Guevara, has never had anything like this before — not even a museum. There'll be many voices against this monument and all the fuss around it, I know. I'll only repeat what I said in December: Guevara is part of our history and of world history. Ignoring him or refusing to acknowledge his influence would be stupid. Ideological blindness should not lead us to consider him just a revolutionary hero and a fighter for good causes, or just a fanatic and a murderer. The monument will serve everyone to remember that Che Guevara existed and had an effect on his generation, and to make visitors and local residents think about him.

Moreover, the city will profit from this. Tourists are always astonished to hear we have no "Museum of Che Guevara", and often disappointed when they see that Guevara's birth home looks just like any other house and the building is taken over by an insurance company. At least we'll have something to show them now, something big and shiny and three-dimensional that remembers a man no-one can afford to ignore.

Civil unions in Santa Fe... coming soon?

Santa Fe Province is about to join the civilized world, in at least one respect, by passing a law of sex-independent civil unions. You might be familiar with this concept if you live in one of the (still comparatively few) countries that grant special status to couples, no matter whether hetero- or homosexual, who choose to register themselves as such before the state.

In Argentina this matter hasn't been debated seriously, that I know of, on the national level. The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, the province of Río Negro and the city of Villa Carlos Paz in Córdoba recognize civil unions, each with slightly different implications. A draft for a civil union law was presented to the legislature of Santa Fe, but it was cajoneado — figuratively sent to the bottom of someone's drawer, where it expired without anyone ever caring to debate it. The legislature, especially the provincial Senate, was dominated by conservatives.

The new administration has changed this context quite a bit. It's made up mostly by people who worked in connection to past municipal administrations of Rosario, and their progressive ideas are also supported by a majority of the opposition. The homosexual community has renewed its demands for the recognition of same-sex couples, and now they know they're close to reaching one major goal, with a law project designed by two of their own lawyers, which would give even more comprehensive rights to registered couples (regardless of sex) than those acknowledged by the equivalent law in Buenos Aires City, such as a pension when one's partner dies, and family leave when s/he gets sick. This will hold for all municipal and public employees within the province, in principle, but the project says these are rights that must be acknowledged, as well, by all companies and organizations based in Santa Fe.

The law, they say, should be passed about four months from now, in the political fullness of time, once the debate is done and the paperwork is in place. This is good news not only for homosexuals, but for the many heterosexual couples who won't marry just yet, but feel they're serious enough. The best thing, so far, is that none of that "threat to the institution of marriage" crap that is commonly spread around whenever this discussion is opened, in many countries, hasn't flowed from the pulpits or from behind the desks of bigoted politicians. I'll keep you updated on this.

PS: ... And here comes the first update. A male homosexual couple is going to employ an interesting tactic for effect — they're going to Rosario's Registro Civil (that's where people get married and receive the corresponding papers) at the Center District, and they'll ask to be married. Of course they expect to be rejected, since the Civil Code only recognizes man–woman couples. Once the rejection is formally given, they'll go to the courts to denounce the marriage law as discrimination and ask a judge to suspend its application (this is called recurso de amparo). This is all done ostensibly to bring the issue to media and public attention.

Well, the interesting bit is that, to show their commitment to end discrimination and support the law I mentioned above, the witnesses to the ceremony will be the President of the Provincial Chamber of Deputies, the President of the Deliberative Council of Rosario, plus two other provincial legislators and a national one.

The two guys asking to be married are really a committed couple — a graphic designer and a soon-to-be accountant who've lived together for 5 years. I say this because some may think this is all for show, or merely a private interest group allied with some leftist politicians trying to advertise their "perverted" ideas of same-sex marriage. How can it hurt someone or something to have a couple get their partnership confirmed by the law, I can't conceive, and this is what these guys (people with real faces, with real lives) are trying to show.

PPS: The judge correctly told the wannabe husband-and-husband their thing was a no-no according to the law, before authorities of INADI (the National Institute against Discrimination) and the Sexual Diversity Department of the municipality.

Out with the old

You may or may not remember Antonio Baseotto, the last bishop of the institution that grouped the military chaplains. Baseotto, an anti-Semitic, pro-dictatorship right-wing fanatic, used to enjoy a juicy wage paid by the State. Argentina not only pays salaries to the Catholic Church hierarchy, but in addition, Baseotto was deemed to have a job of spiritual assistance to the troops. Long story short, he said something he shouldn't and was fired by the Argentine State, but the Vatican refused to acknowledge the dismissal.

From that moment on, the relationship between Argentina and the Church deteriorated. The very idea of the Military Vicariate was questioned. It was created during the dictatorship of 1957 through a Concordat (the same kind of treaty that saved the Pope from being expelled from his lands by Mussolini, or the one that preserved the privileges of the Church during Germany's Third Reich). It means discrimination in favour of the Roman Catholic Church. It imposes religion on the troops. It's a financial burden for the state, too.

So these days, Congress is deciding what to do with this link to medieval times, and from the looks of it, it's going to be a big no, even though not everyone agrees. Some say spiritual support is absolutely needed by the troops; some say that's OK but they can go to their regular church if they do need it; others say it's OK to have a chaplain in the war front, but not in peaceful times like these.

What I think is, there's a lot of politics here, but aside from that, a lot of confusion, fostered by religion and by our culture. "Spiritual" doesn't mean "religious". In my experience, very religious people are often less, not more, spiritually advanced than the rest. They cling to their little god and their small-minded prejudices under the guise of dogma, and they don't see the big picture. They have a twisted, one-sided view of the world and of human nature. That's for starters.

Secondly, and this is obvious, having a Roman Catholic chaplain in a country where many people aren't Catholics is discrimination, plain and simple. If a soldier really needs spiritual assistance from a religious "professional", we must suppose he needs someone who shares his same religion. One can hardly expect a Jewish soldier to be consoled by references to a Jesus Christ who welcomes heroic soldiers in the heavens. (If you heard somewhere that Argentina is a Catholic country, now hear this. Most Catholics in Argentina are only nominally so. Catholicism is in retreat. Even the Church acknowledges that most baptized people only go to church once or twice a year, or on special occasions such as weddings.)

Third, you might believe that the State, which puts the soldier in a position where he may be killed for his country at any time, should make sure that he gets spiritual assistance, by paying religious institutions to provide priests, rabbis, or whatever, just as it provides for other needs. This is debatable, but consider it from the other side. Religious institutions who are granted the right to embed their preachers into the Armed Forces, like those who work in prisons and asylums, are given a prime opportunity to evangelize and indoctrinate — they get to the people when they're the most vulnerable, the most permeable to suggestion. Why should we pay religions to indoctrinate our soldiers?

I'd pay if soldiers got real help. But since I don't believe that praying with the troops or sprinkling them with "holy" water is of any value, I won't pay. Let the religious institutions fight for their place, and support themselves. By paying bishops and chaplains, we're in effect supporting the Church with a tithe we didn't sign up for.

It's already preposterous to treat this tiny piece of land inside Rome as if it were a country, worthy of consideration and respect from the rest of the nations. If it weren't for historical and cultural reasons, the Pope would be shunned by the leaders of most civilized nations as what he is — the top of the hierarchy of a theocratic dictatorship, with views ranging from the bizarre to the outright dangerous, and an undue, and bad influence, on pressing world matters (such as the prevention of the spread of AIDS).

The Concordat gives the Vatican some powers that no country has on the soil of other sovereign country, and privileges that no sectarian group should enjoy in a modern society. So I say to Congress, end this ridiculous thing already!

See No Holy

And now for some good news... The powers that be in Argentina finally seem willing to end the unjustified existence of a shameful institution and, in the process, remind other powers that be that we can't always be treated like fools.

This is most unusual news, one that hasn't exploded onto the headlines but trickled slowly onto less visible places, but by now the matter is like a thick stain.

(You have no idea how difficult it is to write like that. Enough.) Some time ago, former Minister of Justice Alberto Iribarne was proposed as ambassador to the Vatican (or, as they humbly prefer to call themlseves, the Holy See). The normal diplomatic procedure is to let the other country know the name of the ambassador, and ask for its placet, that is, it's official OK. If the other country says nothing for a while, it's understood that they won't OK the proposed candidate, so he or she is silently withdrawn, and replaced in due time with another one, hopefully more acceptable.

Iribarne, so they say, has all the credentials to become an ambassador anywhere... except he's divorced, and currently lives with a woman he isn't married to. The moral censors of the Vatican couldn't let this pass. A man who lives in sin! I mean, you can let child abusers work there, and admit war-mongering murderers like George W. Bush through the gates, but — a man whose sexual union with a woman hasn't been ritually blessed by a Catholic priest? No way.

Yet this wouldn't've become a public issue if it weren't by a mysterious leak to the press. Somebody somehow got the news and published it, and there was a wave of outrage from Argentina, and a counter-wave of supposedly hurt feelings from the Vatican. From our side came support for Iribarne, one of the very few politicians that can be said to have earned the respect of most of his colleagues. Some also noted that, by the Vatican's strict rules, a quarter of all adult Argentine citizens would be considered unfit to talk to the Church as representatives of their country, simply because they didn't repeat the bunch of predigested nonsensical promises that the priest forces couples to utter before the altar.

Adding insult to injury, apparently, the Vatican proposed that Iribarne could be accepted after all, but only if his... how do you call that... let's say female mate... did not ever accompany him in official diplomatic ceremonies. That is, if Iribarne acted like a pious single man, or a widower. Iribarne flatly refused, saying he wouldn't dare impose such indignity on his companion. That's a man, girls.

Argentina isn't going to cut off diplomatic relations with the Vatican — that, sadly, would be unthinkable — but neither is it going to appoint another candidate for the embassy. The post will be left vacant for a couple of years, and a minor official will be left there ad interim. This turns out to be, actually, much ado about nothing, because most diplomatic relations between Argentina and Popeland is conducted through the Papal Nuncio.

What this did serve for was to decide, indirectly, the fate of an institution much younger than the Vatican, much younger than the ludicrous idea that a tiny piece of land with a theocratic dictatorship led by non-elected high priest should be considered, and treated as, a country. I'm speaking of the end of the Military Vicariate. But that's news for another day.

Just be merry

Now that Christmas has been reduced to leftovers and torn wrapping paper, let me say something about the first comment I received on my last post (the one about the Palacio Minetti). I felt it was appropriate to wish everybody a nice day — in particular, a "merry Christmas" to those who believe in the myth of Baby Jesus. One of my readers was apparently offended by my choice of words, and upon my ironic (but harmless) reply he proceeded to tell me that we "condescending atheists" are "disqualified" (from commenting on Christmas, I take it?).

Let's make a few things clear. Christmas etymologically means "the Mass of Christ". It's originally the commemoration of the birth of Jesus, the supernaturally-conceived son of the Judeo-Christian God, from an allegedly virginal Galilean Jewish woman called Maryām, about 2,014 years ago.* It's a myth, in the sense that it's not plain historical fact, but it doesn't need to be "real", in the strictest sense, to be meaningful. Christmas means different things to different people, including next to nothing but a consumerist spree and an occasion of food and drink binges for the majority of the Western world.

*As you must know, Jesus (if we're to use the Gospels as historical sources) must have been born in the spring or summer of 6 BCE or 4 BCE, not in the winter of 1 BCE as assumed by our calendar and our choice of date to celebrate Christmas. Shepherds don't tend their herds outdoors in the middle of winter; Herod the Great died in 4 BCE according to trustable sources, and the Roman governor Quirinus (the one that ordered the census mentioned in Luke) ruled in 6 BCE. The Gospel story was composed much later and is very badly done consistency-wise, both myth-internally and history-externally. This is something that Christian scholars have known for centuries, though you wouldn't hear it from your local priest.

The Christmas myth does nothing for me. I don't believe that one should cherish the "Christmas spirit" when one doesn't pay attention to Christ or his alleged teachings during the whole year, and then tries to sum them up in "let's be nice to each other, just once". Yet I know many people who believe in the myth, in its entirety or in a watered-down version; a number of readers of this blog probably belong in either group, and I wanted to let them know that I wished the best for their Christmas. I don't pretend to respect their myth as if it were meaningful to me, but I respect them.

In the end, of course, most people do the same things for the Christmas season, regardless of their beliefs. Everybody gathers (when possible) with the family, and eats a lot of high-calorie foods, and drinks a lot, and while some families quarrel, some others find this a suitable time for reconciliation and forgiveness. In Argentina, many (mostly older people) attend Mass early in the evening, and many (mostly younger ones) go out after midnight. Children open up presents. Grown-ups end up debating football or politics. Fireworks are launched. Hospitals' ERs get crowded with dozens of wounded from corks popping into eyes, burned from mishandling fireworks, and injured in alcohol-induced fights. At dawn, the streets end up littered with plastic bags, broken cider bottles, and passed-out teens. People take a second look at their presents and either decide to hang them in the walls or put them on their desks or wear them, or store them in some place away from sight. Children enjoy their new toy cars, videogames, toy firearms, and flashy T-shirts. Drowsy grown-ups pick up the leftovers and recycle them for Christmas Day lunch.

What this all has to do with Baby Jesus is beyond me, but if you choose to cling to that adorable myth, you don't have to be ashamed of it. We all have our inspiring visions. But a baby born two millennia ago from the immaterial touch of a ghost and doomed to be nailed to a wooden beam 33 years later because of my as-yet-uncommitted sins isn't a vision I can share, and political correctness isn't my forte. Hence, the different salutations: if you do believe in Baby Jesus, then celebrate his birth and be merry about it; if not, just be merry for whatever reason you can come up with. (The latter, of course, is what most people end up doing, no matter what their professed beliefs are.)

I understand there are cultural differences. I understand the United States has (or has had) this ridiculous "War on Christmas". It's not like that here, by and large. I don't know where that commenter wrote from, but for all the problems we have in Argentina, we don't have that kind of division running along our society. If I get a "merry Christmas" from anybody, I can tell him or her that I don't believe in Jesus, and all I'll get will be a blank stare meaning "well, and what's that have to do with anything?".

Almost tobacco-free

Good news for us fresh air breathers: non-smoking regulations are respected in most places in Rosario. Research conducted in May, in 34 enclosed public sites (bars, restaurants, pubs and universities), showed that 87% of them had a very good air quality, and that smoke-free rules were kept. The remaining 13% are mostly nightclubs, where controls are non-existent and self-restraint has apparently not caught on. People also smoke in university rooms during class.

I'm surprised at how people have become accustomed, in a matter of months, not to smoke in enclosed spaces. In a country where flaunting the law is done so casually, the degree of common courtesy shown by smokers even in places where no serious control is to be expected is astonishing, in a good way. Other people I've spoken to feel the same. This has to have an effect on the habit. Former chain smokers are now choosing to stay chatting with their families or friends at the table when they go to a restaurant, and only occasionally pop outside for a smoke.

The bit about the universities is depressing, though. I can more-or-less understand that you can't go around a nightclub telling people to put out their cigarettes — not in Argentina, not in the environment of most clubs. But in a classroom? And the worst offenders, I'm told, are the teachers. Of course, once the prof has lit up a cigarette, the students are likely to forget the law as well.

It's been a while since I last heard complaints from smokers. From time to time some politician or editorial journalist tries to make an issue of the alleged "freedom to smoke" that is being suppressed. But the dire consequences predicted by doomsayers ("People won't go to places where they're not allowed to smoke! The economy will collapse!") haven't materialized, and plain citizens who smoke are not demonstrating in the streets. Smokers by and large aren't mad at the law; if anything, a few I know are relieved — they don't want to quit but they've found a way to control their addiction.

I once heard a good analogy used to refute the "right to smoke" claim, even supposing secondhand smoke weren't an issue. Your right to smoke a cigarette next to someone in an enclosed place, the argument went, is about the same kind of right you have to let out a fart. Maybe it won't hurt anybody, maybe it's not anyone's business, maybe you should have the freedom to do what you want with your own body — but nobody else wants it around, and you're just nasty by forcing it on the rest of us.

Anniversaries and natural rhythms

Today's the anniversary of the Hail Hell. On November 15, 2006, a storm with hailstones big as golf balls brought Rosario to its knees. The effects are felt even today. You can still see its marks in some cars, whose owners could not or would not repair, and the hysteria that ensues every time hail is mentioned in a weather forecast as a slight possibility shows that people haven't forgotten.

I've always said that having a car is like having a child. A very dumb child who never grows up and demands constant attention and lots of expensive food and gear. Some actually treat their cars as they would treat their children (or better). A car will never learn to avoid hail, and so people who can't be bothered to walk ten blocks every morning and choose to clog the streets with their cars are doomed to be always on the alert, so they can run to their little babies and put them under a roof if the need arises.

(If you think the above rant is a personal digression of mine aimed at specific people, you're right. But it may apply to you, so think about it. For the most part a car is not needed for everyday activities here in the big city. You know that.)

As befitting the anniversary of a weird weather event, today's weather is also messed up. There's not a cloud in sight and no hail is possible, but the morning looks and feels like it was June instead of November. I've never seen a mid-spring season like this, with temperatures falling below 10 degrees Celsius as soon as the sun goes down. Yesterday, though the sun was blasting, it was cold and windy even at noon. Half the people I know (including myself) caught a cold or something worse last week.

Up until a few years ago, there used to be a certain day in the year (it could be September, it could be October) when your mother said "Well, kids, let's take all the warm winter clothes out of the drawers and off the hangers, fold them and put them away neatly in the closet's top drawers which you have to use a chair to reach. We'll take them down next year when the cold season comes. We won't need any of it until March." Such a thing is impossible today. We live by cold fronts and heat waves today — no seasons.

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).

You too can be a doctor

From now on, aspiring students won't have to pass a test before entering the Faculty of Medicine of the National University of Rosario. The student center had been demanding this for ages. Now, what does it mean?

The student centers of public universities in Argentina are all actually, and quite plainly, political movements. They're branches of well-known political parties, and they help recruit young members for them and gather people for demonstrations. For example, Franja Morada is a branch of the Radical Civic Union, which was born during the University Reform of 1918, and the MNR (which is currently the dominant movement in most faculties in Rosario) is a branch of the Socialist Party. As in all small and loosely regulated groups of this kind, the actual ideology is unimportant. The leaders stay on top by giving the other members what they want, which is done by organizing them and sending them to demand it before the authorities. The arguments used to support the demands need not be well-thought.

The issue of the entry exam was a casus belli for the university student movements. The exam was a filter. Before becoming a university student, the reasoning went, you should show you'd mastered basic concepts in highschool, and/or were prepared to invest time studying them now in your own time. In that way, you wouldn't be entering university-level classes without preparation.

The movements demanded that there was no exam invoking ideological reasons: the University Reform of 1918 revolutionized universities by advancing the idea that higher education should be public, free of charge, and free of restrictions, for everyone. (This acted as a great equalizer. Even today, despite the horrific state of education in Argentina, our universities continue producing fairly good professionals.) Thus, an exam that left you out of university before even starting it was a violation of the spirit of the Reform.

With the exam gone, everybody will be free to start studying. What's the problem with that? Well, the exam routinely filters out more than 50% of the aspiring students. Where will those extra students fit? Public university classrooms are already uncomfortably crowded, which works against the quality of teaching. Then also, those new students won't be among the brightest. Most will just be victims of a bad system that lets them graduate from highschool without knowing basic elements of basic subjects. But they'll slow down the rest — since the professors will have no choice but to go over what they should already know. You can't teach epidemiology without the basics of statistics, and you can't do statistics if you don't know math.

What does this mean for the political movements that pass for representatives of the student body? For starters, they'll have many more people to recruit from. Those people will be students who are having trouble keeping up with the rest, and they'll have even more incentive to give up study and protest more. (The leaders of university movements must be the worst students. They manage to stay in university until they're over 30 by presenting to one or two exams per year, so as to prolong their course indefinitely. You can't formally be a student leader and have a place in the government of the university if you're not a student.)

The answer is, of course, to have better education in the lower levels, and to show students the alternatives. There are too many doctors and too few nurses, for example. And there should be entry exams in all critical careers. Call me an elitist, but (provided there's a chance) I don't want anybody who isn't the best of the best to handle my health and my life.

Discrimination in Rosario

Unsurprising, but still terrible: more than half of the teenagers in Rosario felt discriminated at least once in their lives, and 84% say they witnessed others being discriminated. The preferred places for discrimination are everywhere, but the typical one is the entrance to the disco. The causes: overall physique, skin colour, being overweight, being (looking) poor or low-class... This is the result of a survey conducted in 15 schools.

Argentine society has become less and less egalitarian over the years. Class differences are more marked, and they're reinforced by physical stereotypes. In the large cities, being poor, having dark complexion, and speaking with an accent that is not mainstream Rioplatense, are often correlated. On the other hand, even though political correctness has made progress in our society, mocking other people because they're fat or effeminate or have aboriginal-looking features is still socially acceptable in many circles, as is oblivious talk of racial stereotypes as fact. The kids know this, and they're part of this — they both suffer from it and suffer it to continue.

I guess this is probably worse than in my time. I can't recall being discriminated, despite the fact that I have a complexion that is darker than average and (in my teenage years) carelessly adopted a look that makes me cringe whenever I revisit old photo albums. It was a phase.

Quite ridiculously, I did feel discriminated much more recently, once I went to a certain disco. They said I was too old — it was for people up to 25. Never mind this very same disco had refused to allow entrance (weeks before) to a couple of friends of mine who happened to be 24 at the time, because they were too young. I got the impression I was rejected because my shaggy general appearance diminished the disco's public status. Since I'd been more or less dragged to the place, I wasn't dressed for the occasion; but since I was going to pay a nice sum of $$$ to enter a dark room without proper security measures where I was to be trampled upon by hundreds of drunkards and subject to crappy music, only to get out a couple of hours afterward stinking of smoke of cigarettes I don't smoke, pushed by steroid-crazed pumped-up guards, I thought they were not treating me, the customer, as I deserved. I couldn't care less, really, but I got angry on principle.

Inevitably, one's environment changes one's ideas. I consciously try not to discriminate, but that's much easier when you don't feel your security threatened. Most of the "insecurity" broadcast by the media is pure sensationalistic crap; and of course, while a petty thief might take your wallet or your leather jacket, top government officials are moving around millions in illegal business and literally taking away your country and fortune... but the prey's acquired reflexes are difficult to suppress. I have avoided people in the street because of how they look, despite the fact they were most probably common folks who happened to be poor and understandably not happy about their condition. This is, sadly, what we've come to.

Three cities

One of the often-heard bits of political criticism leveled at the local government, here in Rosario, is that the city is actually two cities. One that is prosperous, bustling, already past the initial phases of economic recovery; a Rosario that has been noted abroad for its quality-of-life initiatives and which is also, now, increasingly being noticed as a place of great beauty, of comfort, a big city with the pleasant environment of a smaller town. The other city is the one left behind, the one with villas miseria scattered in humble neighbourhoods where sewage is still conveyed through open-air ditches, where blackouts are commonplace, where insecurity is rampant; a city that the downtown residents despise and which isn't featured in those brand-new tourist brochures or, of course, in the minds of the mayor or the local legislators.

The invariable strategy of the Peronist opposition, since the beginning of the economic recovery, had been to point this out and place themselves on the side of the poor, disregarding the fact that they've been running the province for decades and, save for a short span that we'd better forget, the country since 1989, and thus they've had the money and resources available to help ease this situation all this time. The equally invariable strategy of the Socialist government
has been a knee-jerk reaction, pointing out a long string of initiatives intended to re-join the two cities, which are all fine but unfortunately don't change the big picture, while they continue to dump millions into beautifying places that could wait and don't concentrate on the improvement of issues that can't wait anymore, such as the eradication of the aforementioned sewage ditches.

The gap between the rich and the poor is so wide (and this can't be denied by neither opposition nor government) that anything done on a less-than-grand scale will always look insufficient. The Socialist-ruled municipality has the advantage of being comparatively short on money; you can't really fight misery if you can't raise taxes and the provincial capital gets back from the provincial state, proportionally, three times what you get for things like public healthcare. With the Socialist, former Rosario mayor Hermes Binner being the favourite to get the governor's seat in the upcoming main election, that "advantage" may (should) vanish.

But Binner, before the true heat of the campaign, said something very sensible (in fact, one of the very few statements both relevant and sensible we've heard from all the candidates during the whole campaign): there are indeed two Rosarios, as there are two Argentinas. The city may prosper, but it can't ignore the situation of the rest of the country. Even more so if we consider how many people from poorer places have come to Rosario, looking for work, and have stayed because they can at least scrounge for food and hope to be assisted by the best public healthcare system in the country.

The current economic model has been good to the middle-class urban consumers and to those who had cattle and crops in the countryside. The lower/middle class continues to struggle, but at least many young people can get McJobs while they finish their studies in our still excellent public universities; and those in the lower class who've had the fortune to be trained in manual skills are working in the construction boom that's causing concrete and glass towers to pop up everywhere. The truly poor, however, the ones who have no money and no means to earn it because neither they nor their parents have ever had a stable job, are still there. Their situation hasn't changed substantially, except the opportunities to live off other people's leftovers are greater... but this also means their resentment is greater too. If they could vote as they wish (thinking they can is ridiculous), the results of October's elections would be very different from those expected today. (If you can get your hands on José Saramago's Ensayo sobre la lucidez, a.k.a. Seeing, do yourself a favour and read it so you understand what I'm saying.) Hearing a so-called "popular" president endlessly congratulate himself on macroeconomic numbers must be infuriating for those who don't get their fair share of GDP.

So why this post? As I read the papers today I thought — wow, look at these three news pieces, look how they reflect three (possible) cities.

Rosario, version 1: For nearly a week, several hundreds of poor people following leaders of the CCC (Corriente Clasista y Combativa) have occupied Plaza San Martín, opposite the seat of the delegation of the provincial government of Santa Fe, demanding food, basic supplies, housing, and money. Men, women and children, along with the horses they use to pull their carts, have stayed there burning tires, sometimes attacking or trying to rob passers-by, the horses eating what they can and, both animals and people, urinating and defecating whenever they can, while tonight the temperature went below freezing point. The municipal government doesn't know what to do. The provincial government doesn't know what to do. The police do nothing.

Rosario, version 2: The first stage of an ambitious project to turn Rosario into a "digital city" was started today, by making free wi-fi high-speed Internet service available along several blocks of Peatonal Córdoba, the pedestrian segment of Rosario's main street. The authorities acknowledged that, while there's an overarching municipal project to close the digital gap, this is not really intended for that, as it'll be only people with notebooks and laptops, and especially tourists, who'll benefit from this service.

Rosario, version 3: The city council is about to discuss a well-thought, and apparently feasible, proposal to build elevated trains in Rosario, of the same kind of those found in Sydney and Chicago. The return of urban trains is part of the government's plans for the near future, but nobody knows exactly how those trains could fit in the city's already overcrowded narrow streets... if not like this.

You can certainly point out that version 1 is a very current present time, while version 2 is a only a very small step in the direction of an unlikely future, and version 3 is entirely hypothetical. Yet I could find this just by glancing at three different newspapers today. So?

My point is this: ruling a city is complicated. Don't let yourself be fooled by politicians who promise simple answers. If they were simple, they'd be done by now. If solutions only required time and money, they'd be in place already. Most often that not, we can only advance in small, disappointing steps. I say we support each one of them — and don't ease the pressure on any of the rest.