Today's highlights

Nice morning, today's morning. I was sitting all the time typing numbers that don't matter to anyone and trying to explain that to my boss without actually saying those words. But that wasn't important. Small things can brighten your day.

Well, first of all, it's Friday. Whatever it brings, weekend means no work.

Then the radio, which we keep on at the office, started receiving calls from people around the city, reporting they'd seen a bright light and a solid white trail of smoke in the sky at around 7:05 AM. Some said it was blue light; one claimed it had lit up the sky briefly. The radio news and variety programme on Radio 2 has a funny staff. As they read out the ridiculous calls and messages left by the audience, others, even more bizarre, came in. Was it a giant firecracker? Some sort of UFO? "Could it be one of Menem's rockets that got stuck in the stratosphere?", said one, bringing back a memorable speech of Carlos (may he never find peace) Menem where he promised to build a platform for some kind of super-airplanes before an audience composed of school kids in the poorest part of the country. It was a meteor, and as it turned out later, it was seen in several provinces. A guy from the Ibero-American Astronomy Guild (LIADA) was consulted, and explained that it must have been a space rock about the size of a fist or a potato that passed through the atmosphere at high altitude at a speed of at least 100,000 km/h (28 km per second!), since that's the speed of Earth moving in its orbit.

I was already at work when it happened, so I couldn't see anything, but it was kind of magical. We don't get to see many astronomical displays like that — in the big city you barely get to see the stars.

As this funny story unfurled, a picket was blocking one of the main accesses to the city in the northwest, near the municipal limit. The picket had been there for days, and it was organized by neighbours of some of the poorest areas of Rosario, affected by the Great Rains, who demanded assistance from the government. As usual, the picket was not dispersed by the police. The road in question is needed for trucks that bring goods and cargo to the city and its port; there are only a few alternatives, and they're not well maintained or prepared to receive more heavy traffic. The result was chaos, a lot of tension and road rage. A truck driver who arrived in Rosario at night, unaware of the blockade, tried to find another route and ended up in the middle of nowhere; his truck was assaulted and robbed, and he was killed. Many citizens called out to the government, demanding that the picket be dissolved by police force. Unlike Buenos Aires, it's only recently that Rosario has had recurring road blocks disrupting traffic; the city is smaller and the people's patience is thin.

During the morning, the provincial government announced that they were waiting for a judge's authorization/command to send the police in. (That sounds a bit awkward, but the K policy is that anything short of shooting people in the street is allowed in a protest, and this is an election year, so the government first asks a judge to evaluate whether the general interests of the public are being hurt by the protest, before moving to suffocate it. This way, they're also covered if a policeman kills someone — the judge ordered it, not them. It's cowardly and unpopular, but then the police are not angels and they tend to overdo things a bit — loading lead instead of rubber bullets "by accident", for example.)

After negotiations and promises, fortunately, officials of the municipal government got the picket to free up one lane of the road, and an agreement was reached — the municipality and the province will work together with the neighbours to assess their needs, see what they lost in the flood, and replace it. They won't hand out cash, which is what the neighbours wanted. But that's OK with them, they say.

Finally, as I left work with a tired look of satisfaction ("it's Friday after work!") into a squeaky-clean-skied sunny afternoon, I caught a new prey for my collection. I swear I wasn't looking for it, but it was so glaringly, so unspeakably wrong that I had to snap a couple of pictures (front and back). I give you license plate UVJ641 (one traffic ticket on record), "parked" in the middle of 9 de Julio St.

Super summer storm!

Yesterday there was a terrible storm over a wide area between Rosario and Buenos Aires. Summer storms are commonly the product of several days of high temperature and humidity followed by the arrival of a cold front. The heat and the humidity had been so much that it rained cats and dogs for hours.

I've told you about climate change before. Ten, twenty years ago I remember these storms once every year, or even every two or three years. They were clearly unusual events. But extreme weather has become so frequent that we might as well revise what "extreme" means. Lately it seems that almost every storm is a catastrophe.

Yesterday's rain was accompanied by wind and lightning. The state of maintenance of our sewage pipes and our electrical grid is such that within the first hour of any significant storm, thousands are left without power and/or get their homes flooded. Soon after the storm released its fury, while I was in my office (it was 7:15 AM), lightning stroke nearby and blew off something in our phone line, so we're incommunicado now. Surprisingly, nothing else happened there or at home. However, when I came back I found that a group of people living in a shanty town beside an avenue about 10 blocks from home had blocked the street and organized a picket. The avenue was like a river of mud, and these people were (I guess) demanding attention from the authorities the only way they could, as they'd probably lost all their precarious furniture. The picket was still there today.

We haven't had more hail of the kind we got in November, but the weather has become a serious issue. People, especially people who own cars and use them every day, have developed an accute obsession with forecasts. Being caught in a storm might mean getting your car trapped in a flooded street, pounded by hailstones, or damaged by a falling tree limb. After a wave of criticism caused by its lack of quick warnings, the National Meteorological Service has upgraded its weather alert system, and every day paranoid rosarinos check the news and promptly inform their family and workmates (by word of mouth, phone or text message) as soon as they spot the words ALERTA METEOROLÓGICA.

End-of-year potpourri

Lots of news today... The end-of-the-year balance is coming for the whole country. Things look better, certainly unimaginably better than they looked five years ago... Exports are up, GDP increase looks like it will be around 9% again, and Argentina is officially out of hell according to K. This exhuberant growth has its downside, like more energy consumption (let's not go there again) and too many fish being fished. With regards to the latter, the government has just banned exports of fish of the Paraná River starting on the first day of 2007 and for eight months. Maybe we can still save those sábalos after all.

Not so far from here, and notwithstanding the outrageous statements of the power company president, the folks at the commune of Armstrong have come up with the idea of generating hydroelectricity on the Carcarañá River. Armstrong is a small city (est. pop. 12,000) with a lot of industries, and the projected hydroplant would supply 40% of its power needs.

On the local front, the Municipality of Rosario got its 2007 budget approved, with a AR$17 million deficit... In the meantime, the legislators voted to study the issue of the urban bus fee, which is AR$0.95 now and could increase to AR$1.20 before March. That's really not good news, but with bus drivers that earn more than lawyers and doctors, there's no simple alternative. The national government subsidizes the fuel for urban buses, but due to a clever manipulation of the formula used to calculate the proportions, most of those subsidies go to Buenos Aires, where bus fees are already ridiculously low. Some nice folks with their faces covered and toting sticks came to the Deliberative Council, defaced it, broke windows and created their usual mess, while the police watched.

This is becoming serious; yesterday a group of protestors hijacked a bus, claiming they had an "agreement" not to pay their tickets, and then blocked the road for hours. Another group planted a picket on the railways and stopped a train (coming from Tucumán and Córdoba, headed for Buenos Aires) for 40 minutes, demanding to be given "Christmas packages".

The people commemorating the 5-year anniversary of the Argentinazo (see my previous post) in Rosario painted all over the local seat of the provincial government, mixing their demands for justice with accusations against former governor Carlos Reutemann (calling him "murderer" for his responsibility in the murder of social worker Pocho Lepratti by the police, and "flooder" for doing nothing to prevent the 2003 flood of Santa Fe). Reutemann was the political child, protégé and faithful disciple of Carlos Menem; a former F1 racecar driver, he was inexplicably popular with the masses but had the charisma and the innovative spirit of an Egyptian mummy; he deserves every epithet -- only there's no need to deface a building to note that.

Back to the protestors -- many of these are piqueteros in general, but that term has become rather vague. The original piqueteros were unemployed people desperately protesting their predicament; these "modern" ones are 95% chronically unemployed bums, welfare mothers with their children, people from the slums who have nothing better to do and are tempted by the possibility of getting free food, and a lot of violent resentful young men with nothing to lose encouraged by the government policy of letting them do whatever they want (short of physically attacking other people, and sometimes even that). They're led by a few talking heads armed with basic Marxist or anarchist rhetoric, and what I'd call low-level politicians -- they can't organize a party, but they can gather a gang under a banner.

The personal front
I'm trying to put this chaotic end of the year into perspective. Somehow news have been piling up on me lately. I'd vowed not to let interesting/important things pass without mentioning them here, so that's why I wrote this post. Maybe I'm forgetting other important things, only because I'm not sure how personal stuff would sit with my readers. What can I say? Apart from the bad taxi service, the blackouts, the politicians, the piqueteros, the heat, and the hail, this has been a good year overall, if anything because I'm learning to cope with the frustration produced by things like the aforementioned, and others which I prefer to stay silent about. That, and I had a superb icecream cone today, at the very hottest time of day. What more can I ask?

Aftermath of the hail

This is the story of a still unfolding tragedy. You've already watched the first act, but there's sadly much more.

Act 1: a horrible hail storm hits Rosario. People get hurt, windows get smashed, precarious homes get destroyed. Damages for US$270 million.

Act 2: While people with cars and windows line up before glass shops and get charged suddenly increased prices, people with no cars and no windows desperately ask for help from the government (tin roofs to repair their homes, mattresses to replace those ruined by the rain, etc.).

Act 3: Government workers are sent to assess the damages in the poor neighbourhoods, and the requirements of their residents are recorded and forewarded to the authorities. Surprisingly, the goods are delivered more or less in time.

Act 4: Unsatisfied because they want more or angry because they've been ignored, groups of poor people set up pickets blocking important roads in the peripherical areas of Rosario. Other groups move from their old homes and squat on abandoned public and private lands.

Act 5: A policeman trying to redirect traffic at a busy intersection blocked by a picket is hit by a car and dies a few days later. People in charge of the emergency relief operation report that the pickets are making it impossible to distribute the goods. Indignant neighbours denounce that some are selling their relief packages instead of using it.

This is about the point up to where this tragedy has devolved. Mayor Liftschitz said today, probably with reason, that the picketeers are being (at least) encouraged, if not led, by minority political factions. We've come to know those; they're the kind that always emerge when it's time to burn tires, and who pass as defenders of the poor, when they're in fact borderline criminals with nothing better to do and a very, very skewed left-wing ideology.

The provincial government, which manages the police, has stated through the Government Minister Roberto Rosúa that the street blocks will be handled "through consensus and peaceful means", only employing police force in the case of crimes committed by the picketeers, such as charging cars with a "toll fee" to let them pass unscathed through the blockades. Rosúa, who has excelled at being useless in several ministries under two administrations, seems not to notice that blocking a street with burning tires is a crime. Like the national government in the case of Gualeguaychú, the Santa Fe Provincial Government prefers to look away, fearful of legitimate repression (maybe because they did engage in illegitimate repression not so long ago and were exposed). Or may it be because problems in Rosario make the ruling Socialist Party administration look bad?

In case you haven't noticed already, I consider myself a leftist. I was born under the shadow of the latest dictatorship, which used violence against popular dissidence of any kind, and I hate the use of force against the weak and the poor. I also know that the Argentine police, all of it, is corrupt, brutal, tainted with all sorts of human rights abuses not committed then, but being committed now, everywhere. And I, yes, I want the police to suffocate those pickets, to look for their leaders and bring them to justice. This is not a protest, it's some greedy lowlife politician wannabe rallying the ignorant to see if s/he can get money and goods from the government. This could be done today or tomorrow in an hour, without firing a single bullet, and the money and the goods could reach those who really need it -- 10% of the population of Rosario lives in shanty towns, and they're not all disrupting traffic and threatening drivers. Why do we still put up with this?