Juan Domingo Perón according to The Simpsons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekend part 2: Japanese culture

(This is continued from the last post.) After the Friday birthday party and the Saturday breakfast Marisa and I were exhausted, so we had lunch and then took a long nap. Later in the afternoon we took a bus downtown to see a Japanese culture show at Plaza Montenegro. This year is the centennial of the first immigration to Argentina from Okinawa (Okinawa Prefecture is where most Argentine-Japanese came from). I knew that the Japanese Association's taiko group (Ryūshin Rosario Taiko) was going to perform; I know many of the guys there and taiko's always nice to watch and listen to, plus I hoped Marisa would appreciate it as well. As it turned out, they were terrific, and they were joined by another group, Medetaiko, from Buenos Aires. [PS: Marisa just posted a short video: Medetaiko en la plaza.]

Marisa liked taiko — she described it as energetic. She observed that percussion groups like Choque Urbano (or Stomp or Mayumana) must have taken much of their inspiration from them. Medetaiko, especially, focused on multiple percussion registers and patterns, while our own Ryūshin Rosario Taiko is more oriented towards choreography. There was a karate exhibition, and for the finale both taiko gropus performed together. The people who had gathered there, and stayed in spite of the creeping cold, applauded enthusiastically.

The celebrations continued the next day at the Japanese Association. They had what they call a "bazaar", with typical foods, people selling vaguely "Eastern" stuff, and brochures for those interested in Japanese culture, with a background of dance and music on stage. I said hi to a lot of people I knew, introduced Marisa to a few of them, and we watched some taiko and kimono-clad ladies dancing with fans, while having yakisoba and yakitori (washed down with sake). Marisa said she wanted to steal the yakitori sauce, and noted that she would've preferred the sake to be served cold, which is utter heresy.

We left and I waited for her bus to come before I went on to wait for mine. Both took quite a long time to come, which was terrible because we're experience a winter-like cold wave... And that was our weekend for you.

Weekend part 1: Visitors from Buenos Aires

It was a busy weekend. I signed up for Friday shodō (Japanese calligraphy) classes this year, and we began last week, so there I was at 7 PM, back at the old Japanese Association after my summer vacation and getting hisashiburi desu ne! ("it's been a while!") from everyone. You'll remember I decided not to keep on studying Japanese. I'm still firm on that, but I know I'm going to miss my gakkō. It's been four years and counting — you can't not get attached.

Just as we were beginning the class, I saw my first calligraphy teacher, Kyōko, just outside (I need to get a picture of her!). It was a huge surprise. She left for Japan in 2005 after two years volunteering in Argentina, but she made lots of friends, so she manages to visit every now and then, and now it seems she's going to stay and teach some Japanese.

After class I went to fetch Marisa and we took off for a friend of mine's birthday party at the Club Mitre (the place by the river, remember?). It was rather cool. We stayed longer than we'd planned. On Saturday morning we were supposed to be having a welcome breakfast for a couple of photographers visiting from Buenos Aires.

At 10 AM we were there with Claudio, another guy from the Rosarigasinos, waiting for our visitors to show up, when we got a call from one of them asking for directions. Fifteen minutes later, no sign of them, we called. They'd taken a wrong turn. Frantic exchanges ensued. They were using a GPS guidance system and it seems it was confused. Long story short, it was almost 11 AM by the time they were sitting before their coffee cups. Meet Slaff and SandroG...

Since the guys had to be somewhere else to have lunch at 1 PM, we could only walk them around for about an hour... They took a lot of shots of the river and the ships, and then we went down Oroño Boulevard, since they wanted to see old architecture. We only got as far as six blocks when their time ran out. They had some free time in the afternoon, so I hope they were able to see some more of Rosario, although in any case, as Sandro said, this surely wasn't the last time.

There was more to last weekend. The Japanese community was celebrating, and we were there to enjoy. Coming soon...

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 II: The papers

A few more things about the farmers' strike, or as Página/12 calls it, the agricultural businessmen's lockout. The strike, lockout, or whatever you call it, is now on hold while the leaders of the movement wait for their call to negotiate with the government.

Covers of Página/12 and La Nación for March 26 (the day after Cristina's inflammatory first speech, the cacerolazos in upper-class Buenos Aires, and the disbanding of Plaza de Mayo demonstrators by Luis D'Elía's thugs).

Since the subject of Página/12's word choice came up, here's something I meant to say before. I was appalled by Página's coverage of the conflict. I'm well aware that Página is a leftist newspaper, and like all media, they select news and editorialize on them from that perspective. I'm a lefty myself, not a radical, but in general I'm in agreement with that perspective.

Sometimes Página's op-eds go over the top and I don't like that; I don't like how certain people in their staff see 1970s' politics, or class struggle, or whatever their pet subject, in every bit of current news. To balance that, I read La Nación, which is right-wing and anti-government, but also has a few really good writers, alongside some whose opinions make my stomach turn.

Well, my discovery these days was that Página/12 is obviously, visibly, on the pay of the national government. Página's coverage of the strike/lockout was so deliberately skewed, so unctuously pro-government, so grossly anti-strike, so monolithically defensive of Cristina, that I can't be convinced that ideology alone is responsible. I felt angry. The rest of the media coverage was sloppy, partial, sensationalist, sentimental..., as usual. Even La Nación didn't dig so much in the trash. Página's was a pro-government campaign, almost as subtle as Luis D'Elía screaming his hate for the rich.

The fact is, I'm a "salad bar"-type political pragmatist. I tend to distrust and discount the opinions of people who are in the extremes, but outside of those, I applaud anyone, from the left or the right, who comes up with a good idea, or something that looks like a good idea. I had a deep distrust of Néstor Kirchner when he ran for president. I changed my mind as he did some really cool things, like renewing the Supreme Court, facing up to the utility companies that wanted to triple their fees, maneuvering around the defaulted bond-holders who would see the country broke to get paid, and repealing the laws that prevented the torturers and murderers of the last dictatorship from being tried. Then he started channeling Juan Domingo Perón or something (that is, Perón minus the articulateness and good diction in speeches) and the worst elements in his government acquired power, and then he passed it all on to Cristina, who has been doing exactly the opposite of what should be done since Day 1.

All this time (getting back to the subject) I heard Néstor and Cristina criticizing the media for this and that. Néstor K once said the media should inform objectively instead of doing opposition politics (that is, kill the editorial section, kill political analysis — just repeat whatever the government officially communicates to the press), and more than once he pointed at specific journalists and specific papers. Cristina is even worse. For all her supposed communicational talents, she sounded remarkably stupid, to me at least, when she tried to make a sarcastic comment — "It seems as if the media were forbidden from printing good news." The Kirchners never understood journalism, maybe because in Santa Cruz the media were few and were controlled by their friends and cronies.

Up to the export tax crisis, Página/12 was (so it seemed to me) rather neutral, not in the sense that it didn't editorialize, but in the sense that it wasn't systematically putting out an apology of the government. La Nación, on the other hand (so it seemed to me) was always trying to poke holes in everything the government did. Granted, as of late Página would have real trouble finding something good to say about the government, and the ideological strain was showing; and La Nación was enjoying a free ride on the scandal rollercoaster, so it came out as more objective (negative spin wasn't necessary) and didn't look so clearly anti-government.

When the countryside rose, Página/12 suddenly shifted gears (or so it seemed to me...) and launched an all-out offensive against the critics of the Kirchner administration. Even the witty Rudy & Paz comics became bitter, unfunny attacks on the "oligarchy". You could count a half-dozen headlines each day, every one of them a long editorial piece, pointing out the many sins, past and present, of the participants in the protest — and not one objective criticism of the idiotic measure taken by the Ministry of Economy which had caused all the trouble in the first place.

It got me really mad. I've gone mad with La Nación over the coverage of certain episodes by specific writers, here and there, and I'm accustomed to see through its supposed objectivity into its rotten conservative heart. But I didn't expect this from Página: a whole paper, which used to cover a variety of topics seriously when appropriate, or with well-placed irony and sarcasm in other cases, turned overnight into a government propaganda machine. Not for a left-wing government, but for an administration that's fast turning us back to old-style fascism. I can barely read it anymore. In fact, since the campo crisis started, I almost don't read about it in the papers — I pick and choose only the shorter informative articles, and quickly skip over the editorials.

It's all bare ideology out there now. Dialogue, compromise and solutions seem to have been banished.

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.

Vacations in Córdoba: Carlos Paz and back

Our last trip was to Carlos Paz, a city about an hour from Córdoba. Carlos Paz is a busy town traversed by the small San Antonio River, with opens into Lake San Roque, formed by the dam of the same name. It's an all-time tourist trap, not unlike Mar del Plata, and like Mardel, it's full of over-colourful marquees advertising plays starred by wrinkled middle-age "actors" and busty "vedettes", shops selling all kinds of souvenirs, and endless crowds of fat tourists with loads of kids that push you and trip over you and block your way in the sidewalk.

Carlos Paz (like Mar del Plata) is the paragon of overvalued touristic spots — people come here and happily, obliviously, fill it to the brim, paying whatever they're told to pay, going through the motions, and thus the town inexplicably survives until the next season. Nothing changes. There's no incentive. People will continue to come, so why spend money on beautifying the city?

It's not that Carlos Paz is ugly. It's not. It's just ordinary. Supremely ordinary. Run-of-the-mill, featureless, flat. There's nothing of note here. Not a singular piece of architecture, not one place of breathtaking natural beauty. Nothing. Sure, you've got the river and the lake, and the sierras beyond — no big deal: there are a million places in Córdoba and elsewhere with the same natural features and less irritating surroundings.

So why did we go? Well, although I didn't particularly liked the idea, Marisa wanted a place with a quiet spot by a body of water, not far from Córdoba City, and I agreed with that. And neither of us had been to Carlos Paz in a long time (I think I went there as a child). We weren't prepared for it.

I was determined not to leave a single peso in this awful town, but tradition demands that you bring back alfajores when you go to Córdoba, and we were leaving the next day so we might not have the time to go shopping then. So we went into a shop and bought several dozens. Those alfajores were the only good thing to come out of our visit to Carlos Paz.

We went back to Córdoba and, though very tired (I was actually ill all this time — I'll tell you about that later), decided to take advantage of our last night, so we went out to see an artisans' fair. I don't particularly care for those, but the night was pleasantly cool and the fair had an upbeat vibe. We bought home-made liquors there, and Marisa got a purse to give as a present for her niece. Then we had dinner nearby, and went to bed early.

The next day was our last, so we finished packing our stuff and then studied the map — had we missed anything? I saw we hadn't seen the Museum of the Marquis of Sobremonte. Rafael de Sobremonte was Governor-Intendant of Córdoba for 14 years. Outside the province it's known as the guy who was in charge of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata and ran away from Buenos Aires with the royal treasure when the British attacked the capital city in 1806. It seems, however, that Sobremonte was doing what he must. As for Córdoba, he's said to have been an excellent administrator there.

The museum, as in other cases, turned out to be the house where Sobremonte lived, an old colonial-style building, simple, with thick walls. I wish I had good pictures of it, but all we were allowed to photograph were the patios. Some rooms preserved furniture and personal effects, others were just used to display objects of the time — military uniforms, weapons of various kinds. On one of the big inner yards were several large bronze cannons.

I noticed the rooms were very well-kept, but the outdoor areas weren't — the cannons were simply thrown there, exposed to the elements. Policemen (museum security) were sipping mate next to one of the rooms. There were plastic buckets and other cleaning tools next to one of the venerable walls. It looked as if, leaving aside the rooms allocated for the museum, the rest was free to use by anyone in charge.

The above notwithstanding, the museum was a nice place to see. It was larger than it seemed at first, so it kept us busy almost exactly until the time we had to leave.

We did a small detour back to the hostel to take pictures of the Cathedral, which was now almost empty (it was Tuesday, and the rage of Easter weekend had passed). They're restoring it, so we had to stay out of certain areas.

After that, we headed for the hostel, got our luggage, took it to the bus station (only two blocks away, thankfully) and sat down to wait for our bus, which came almost in perfect time, for which I felt stupidly happy at the time. You know what happened next...

Vacations in Córdoba: Alta Gracia

On our fourth day in Córdoba, we took a short trip to Alta Gracia, a town less than 40 km from the provincial capital.

Alta Gracia is most famous for being the home of Ernesto Che Guevara during his childhood and youth (after his family moved in from Rosario, looking for a climate better suited to Ernesto's asthma). It was originally a Jesuit town, so there's also a Jesuit church and mission, and other signs of the presence of these enterprising religious order. And it's the place where the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla came to rest during the last four years of his life.

It's a quiet town, with an abundance of simple, sturdy white houses along meandering streets; parts of it climb into the surrounding hills, full of green. A stream runs through the western, older part of town.

We arrived before noon after a one-hour trip from Córdoba City and discovered that the bus terminal lacked an information booth. We had passed the busy touristic part, and now we had no maps, no-one to point us to where we should go. I found a large map glued to the inside of an empty office, and took pictures of it. After a long while, following the zoomed image in my camera's screen, we got to the closest marked spot, the Manuel de Falla Museum.

This was a good way to start the day, because the museum was wonderful. De Falla moved to Argentina in 1939, after the Spanish Civil War, and to Alta Gracia in 1942, looking for peace and quiet — and I'm sure he got plenty. The house he rented was designed specifically for the needs of the sick, with plenty of natural lighting in all the rooms, and a gallery to spend the day in the sun.

De Falla had a chronic condition and this was exactly what he needed. After his sister became a widow, she took care of him, while he worked on the cantata Atlántida, which he never finished. He died in 1946. His remains were taken back to Spain by request of the dictator Francisco Franco. De Falla was a very devout Catholic and a lover of things traditional and Spanish, so Franco viewed him as ideologically OK. We don't know how De Falla he felt about Franco, but he sure didn't like his intellectual friends being murdered or forced into exile for political reasons, and his country torn apart by war; that and the ensuing solitude and desperation, according to the museum's guide, was the reason why he moved to Argentina, where he had played concerts before. He was buried in the cathedral of Cádiz, his city of birth, and his personal effects were taken to Spain, but decades later many of them were brought back to Alta Gracia.

After this nice tour, we followed the map to the home of Che Guevara. The contrast couldn't have been greater. Where the De Falla museum was peacefully empty, quiet and unassuming, Guevara's childhood home was full of noisy, rude tourists, stuffed with souvenirs and trinkets, all of it recognizable from a block away. I hated every moment I stayed in there. Besides the many photographs, there was nothing of interest except a replica of the famed motorcycle (the one in The Motorcycle Diaries).

At the porch there was a very badly done bronze statue of little Ernesto for the tourists to take pictures beside it, and an equally horrible bust of Guevara in a corner. Granted, this was the peak hour of the busiest weekend in the whole tourist season, so you might find fewer people at other times, and if you really appreciate Guevara you may be inspired by his lingering presence in this place while there's no-one stepping on your toes. But Guevara didn't actually do anything here.

Next we looked for a place to eat lunch. It was the hottest time of day. Once the sun went down a bit, we went back to the stream and spent some more time there, just relaxing. Then we dragged ourselves to the Jesuit historical core.

The Jesuits weren't people to just come and build a church. They built whole towns around their churches. It's all a World Heritage Site now. The church is surprisingly well preserved, as are the courtyards and galleries around it.

In front of it there's the Tajamar, a wall that the Jesuits used to dam the stream and create a reservoir for their water needs. Nowadays the water level at the Tajamar is usually low, the water is green and stagnant and covered with plants, although it surprisingly doesn't stink. Birds live around it, and people fish in it too. It's a nice sight when the sun goes down and the ancient buildings and the trees are reflected in the surface.

And that was the end of our visit to Alta Gracia, and probably the best day in our vacations. We took the bus right there beside the Tajamar and arrived back in Córdoba as night settled in.

Vacations in Córdoba: Quebrada del Condorito

On our third day in Córdoba, we intended to reach the Quebrada del Condorito (which translates as Little Condor's Gorge), a gorge on whose walls condors can be seen from up close. The gorge and the high plateau that surrounds it at no less than 1,900 m above sea level, called Pampa de Achala, are all part of Quebrada del Condorito National Park, created in 1996. There's a project to raise condors there and repopulate the area with them.

If we'd had our way, we could've chosen the day and enjoy it to the max. But it turned out that you have to buy bus tickets in advance, or you may not get a place. So we got our tickets for Saturday morning on Thursday afternoon. It's the bus that goes along the winding road known as Camino de las Altas Cumbres (High Summits Road), crossing the Sierras Grandes range from Villa Carlos Paz (west of Córdoba City) to Mina Clavero, and we had to get off the bus midway, in a place called La Pampilla.

Well, Friday night was unbearably hot and humid, so we went to bed reviewing the precautions stated in the national park's brochures for sunny days: lots of water to drink, a light windbreaker since the wind blows strong all the time at those heights, some good sunblock, etc. An hour later, however, we heard the familiar faraway rumble of thunder, followed by a steady downpour of rain.

Come morning, there was still raining lightly. We didn't want the bus ticket money to go to waste, but even disregarding that, we would probably have no choice after this — who knows when we could get other tickets. Off we went, with the vague hope that the rain could stop and maybe even the clouds could part. We had a two-hour trip before us into an area where the weather is known to change rapidly, so it wasn't completely ridiculous to think that.

La Pampilla was just a spot along the road. We'd somehow gotten the idea that there were huge signs pointing to where the adventurous tourist was supposed to go, but no. We almost climbed over a fence on the wrong side of the road, until we spotted a sign and a path on the opposite side. We took it. It was cold (10 degrees? 5 degrees?) and there was a drizzle, and wind blowing it into our faces (I had to take off my glasses). About a mile later, shivering and dripping wet, we came to the park rangers' house. We were informed of the various dangers (including pumas) and sent on our way, with the warning that there weren't any other human-built shelters of any kind beyond that point. Yipee.

Soon we stopped feeling so cold. The landscape was soberly beautiful and the road wasn't steep. However, we were literally inside a rain cloud most of the time. By the time we reached the middle point, we were soaked all over, except where our windbreakers had (partially) protected us. We forged on. We got to the last marked spot (number 10), and there we found a sign indicating the way for the place where you could actually see the condors... 45 minutes away.

We turned back. I felt I was going to faint, and Marisa was shivering. We searched for shelter, and found a rock with a top projection that kept the wind and most of the rain from us. We took out the thermos to prepare hot mates... only to find the water had cooled off. By now it was lukewarm — we threw it over our hands to regain the sensation, and then ate our ham-and-cheese sandwiches. That was good.

We retraced our steps. Once we got disoriented and went in a circle for 15 minutes. Soon afterward, though, I sensed a change in light. The drizzle had all but stopped. I put on my glasses. The wind was blowing away the clouds, and a bit of sun was beginning to shine through. Minutes later, a patch of blue sky appeared and expanded.

We found another big boulder to cover from the wind, and took off a couple of layers of clothing, including our socks. They wouldn't dry completely, but they would get warm, as we would. We stayed there for a while, and then headed back, dead tired but uplifted. I saw many details of the landscape for the first time — I realized that before, with the wind and the rain, I'd kept my eyes fixed to the ground and all my efforts concentrated in merely walking on.

The trip was worth it. Even with the rain, the cold, and not seeing a single condor up there, we had a lot of fun.

Vacations in Córdoba: Day 2

Our second day in Córdoba was spent fully in the city. We had a handy tourist map, with the must-see spots, so we started as early as we could to try to visit all of them. Córdoba's most famous touristic show is the Jesuit Block, an old section of town where all the major historical buildings are preserved (although they're not all strictly built during the period of Jesuit dominance). So we headed there.

While walking we spotted a couple of majestic church spires some blocks away, so we diverted our course and ended up before the stunning beauty of the Church of the Sacred Heart of the Capuchin Fathers.

(I'm only showing a few pictures here because Córdoba-based photographers with more time and/or better equipment have had plenty of opportunities to collect photos of it that surpass my humble attempts. See La otra catedral de Córdoba: Iglesia de los Capuchinos at SkyscraperCity, which BTW has a large community of Argentine architecture, history and urbanism buffs.)

Being Holy Friday, there were no celebrations in progress (quick note for those without a Catholic education: God doesn't appreciate that you celebrate while His Son is nailed to a cross), so we could get inside and take pictures freely.

Before that, however, we got diverted from our diversion by the musical water fountain of the Paseo del Buen Pastor, which I'm told is a new venture: a preserved church, a former women's prison turned into a modern art gallery with semi-transparent façade, and a little shopping mall, all together in the same triangular half-block wedged between a street and a diagonal avenue, plus an animated "dancing waters" show [click on the link for video].

I'm rather convinced that this was an attempt on the part of Córdoba's municipality to copy the dancing waters of Parque Independencia in Rosario. Whatever the case, they got it OK.

It was noon, so good pictures were hard to get. We were hot and thirsty, so after visiting the Paseo and the Capuchins' church we walked around and found a shady spot to prepare mate and eat something. We were struck by the troublesomeness of this simple enterprise.

Córdoba City is big. It's an old city which has grown and turned into a metropolis over long centuries, growing into this size (while Rosario went from an insignificant village to a major city in less than 50 years). It's got wide multi-lane one-way avenues, two- and three- and four-way crossings with a complex traffic coordination, wide sidewalks. Parts of it are simply ill-suited for people on foot — rather designed for fast vehicles.

We missed the tree-lined narrow streets of Rosario and its many small green spaces. It took us forever to find a place where the sun didn't scorch our backs, and it was sitting on an old bench in a square with too little of anything in the way of vegetation, amid the roar of nearby traffic.

We wandered a bit more and found the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat, a school founded in 1687 that has had some notable characters among its pupils. Parts of the building are a museum (showcasing old documents and scientific instruments), but in fact the whole college is a historical building which you can visit outside of class hours. It was around two in the afternoon, and the streets were white hot; by contrast the interior of this ancient place was cool and peaceful. We took ages exploring all of its hidden corners.

We came back to the hostel and took a nap. At night we were supposed to meet Adolfo, our photographer contact, and some guys from the Córdoba-based Viernes Foto Club group. We agreed to meet at the Paseo del Buen Pastor, where a Via Crucis was being staged.

Sure enough, we met Adolfo and VFC's people, and after some pictures and a visit to a historical house cum museum, we went to a bar called Johnny-B-Good, where they usually gather for a beer or two. I'd been feeling a bit down and sleepy, and had had a headache since before getting to Córdoba, so I skipped the beer and restrained my hunger. By the time I was feeling a little more upbeat, we had to leave. It was getting very late and we had a trip to the Quebrada del Condorito scheduled for the next morning.

Vacations in Córdoba: Day 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that was our first day in Córdoba.

I'm with the farmers, or, see what happens while I'm away

Marisa and I came back from our Easter weekend vacations today. It all went terrific, except the countryside was burning (figuratively) while we were away, and reality eventually caught up with us when we headed back for Rosario. As you must know, agricultural producers are on strike because of the latest increase of the export taxes.

What's happening now is more important than the story of my vacations, so I'll put that off for today and begin by the end. We left Córdoba City on schedule, at 01:30 PM, with only a bit of concern for what we heard on TV about the road blockades put up by the farmers on strike. We headed southeast along the highway and National Route 9, and around 03:00 PM we were stopped near a town called Oliva. Farmers had blocked the way with harvesters and only a trickle of vehicles was allowed through.

We were cleared a few minutes later, and thought it was going to alright from then on. One hour later we arrived in Villa María, our first major stop. The driver got off and announced "We're stopping here for fifteen minutes!" so everybody could get off the bus, stretch their legs, go to the toilet, or whatever. We stayed beside the bus and waited. Twenty-five minutes later the driver came back and told us, "We're not moving from here until further notice." There was a road block that wouldn't allow anybody through, and several buses were held on the road already. Moreover, there seemed to be some tension developing between the farmers and the drivers of the cargo trucks detained by the block. It seemed safer to stay in the bus terminal, where we had basic facilities, rather than in the middle of nowhere outside town.

Some time afterward, someone said the president was going to give a speech on national TV, hopefully to untangle the mess, put forward some promise, some ideas for compromise, some hint of appeasement that could bring the farmers to dialogue. We waited.

Sure enough, at about 06:20 PM Presidenta Cristina K appeared. What followed was both the finest piece of oratory and the crappiest piece of diplomacy I'd ever seen. After angering the farmers, then going away on vacation as if nothing happened, she re-appeared and dumped this load of senseless vitriol on them. No sense of humility, no intention to fix the trouble, appease or compromise, no change at all from the standard Kirchnerist babble — self-exaltation of their achievements, denial of their faults, offensive defense, confrontation. What you could expect from an activist, an ideologue, or a legislator defending her party line — certainly not from a president of a country where major roads of the most populated and most productive provinces are being blocked by protesters.

Cristina was surrounded by the usual host of cronies and opportunists, including the governors of two provinces. The ones most involved, however, were not present: Schiaretti of Córdoba and Binner of Santa Fe. Schiaretti, a fervorous Kirchnerist, was being pressed by the local authorities of all the municipalities in the province, some of then openly in favour of the strike. And Binner, a Socialist, had already, if cautiously, established Santa Fe's official stance beside the farmers.

The question is not whether the farmers earn enough, not enough, or too much (whatever that means) . The question is: we produce a lot, the federal government takes a big chunk of it, and none of that money returns. It's used to finance federal spending, a lot of which goes to pay for pseudo-welfare: piquetero organizations affiliated with the government, who serve as shock troops and political meeting filler as appropriate.

Back to Villa María... After Cristina's speech people were extremely upset. I'd let my parents know I was going to be late; now I text-messaged them again, and also my co-workers, since I was supposed to be back at the office at 7 AM the next day. The General Urquiza bus company was a model of bad PR — the drivers didn't notify us properly on their intended course of action, and nobody offered to buy us all a meal, which was the least they could do. So we had something to eat on our own, and got on the bus again.

Other passengers came telling there was a demonstration and cacerolazo in Buenos Aires, and soon we learned the protest had spread. Thousands of people were banging pots and pans and honking their horns in Rosario near the Flag Memorial, and people other than farmers were joining the strike and the protests in Entre Ríos, La Rioja, Mendoza, and even Santa Cruz. The north of Córdoba was practically isolated by multiple road blocks. A group of demonstrators had come close to clashing with Gendarmería at the Hernandarias Tunnel below the Paraná River (between Santa Fe City and Paraná, Entre Ríos).

At the same time we heard of the Kirchnerist piqueteros in Buenos Aires, led by Luis D'Elía, violently assaulting and driving back the peaceful demonstrators at Plaza de Mayo, and a similar incident in Rosario involving a Kirchnerist movement called Libres del Sur. Although they claimed they went there on their own, it's obvious they were sent by the government, which now says they'll use force to remove the pickets if necessary.

In the 1950s, President Juan Domingo Perón co-opted the large unions, organized a corporatist model with control of the heavy industries, attacked the dissident press and the "oligarchy" of the old countryside landowners, and allowed the extreme factions of his multi-faced Justicialist movement to turn into militias, which could be put to use as needed. To this day historians hesitate whether to call this fascism, but we know Perón brought those ideas in after a visit to Mussolini's Italy. The Kirchners have been revisiting that sad story all this time. They haven't managed to silence the press or lead intellectuals into exile, like 20th century Peronism did. But we now know for sure that plain citizens won't be allowed to demonstrate peacefully against government policies in the large cities — not as long as busloads of indoctrinated lumpen and paid-for thugs can be brought in to dissuade them. The Kirchners don't tolerate dissent — you must like them and love them no matter what, or you become automatically the Enemy.

I stayed in the bus listening to the radio, feeling rather gloomy about the general state of the country, and fell asleep late. I woke up a couple of times to false alarms. We left at 7:15 AM, as the first light of dawn appeared.

We had an uneventful trip. I slept on and off, and took pictures of the passing countryside landscape. It all seemed so peaceful! There were no pickets anywhere else, though occasionally you could see traffic stations full of trucks, and other trucks along the sides of the road. As we entered the last part of the highway, somebody volunteered music for the drivers to put on the bus speakers. Some people cheered as we arrived at the bus terminal, at 11:30, almost 22 hours after leaving Córdoba.

What, vacations again?

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

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

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

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

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

I'm off now. See you next week!

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.

Shopping for languages

In case you read Spanish: did you hear about my newest blog, Alerta Religión? It's about the evils of religion and blind faith — seen as causes of intolerance, discrimination, and absurd suffering. Do pay a visit.

I feel like this year is really starting now. Summer's over — there are still hot afternoons but no more of those unbearably hot evenings, and almost always a breeze. Classes are starting, and soon I'll start mine as well.

This year (for the first time since 2004!) it won't be Japanese. I took the plunge and signed for Arabic classes last Friday. The Rosario Arabic School is a little house with an old-fashioned courtyard on Dorrego St., a comparatively quiet part of downtown, two blocks away from my old highschool. The head teacher is the one who founded the school back in 1945 — a respected member of her community, a talented translator, and probably a veritable fountain of history, though a bit hard of hearing.

To tell you the truth I'm not that enthusiastic about Arabic, but only a bit curious. When I started learning Japanese I didn't think about it, I only did it because it was a strange language and I liked how it sounded. As I progressed, I felt I could really learn Japanese, all of it, in time. Then I came to realize I couldn't. That wasn't a problem — I was satisfied with keeping myself at a level I could manage and continue practising and learning bit by bit. But the study schedule wouldn't let me do that, so I quit. Arabic I'm going to start with a different outlook, just checking to see if it goes well with me and perfectly aware that I will drop it the very moment it becomes a chore. It's not like I'm doing it to fill my CV.

I need to call my Japanese school to see when calligraphy classes begin, since they're independent of the rest and I intend to keep practising it, at least until Watanabe-sensei returns to Japan in July (and speaking to sensei and her daughter in class will be language practice, too — something to keep me from forgetting spoken Japanese for a while). And I'll have to check if the Arabic school also offers calligraphy courses. I once read somewhere that Muslims believe calligraphy is an art that God Himself gave us. I don't believe in any gods, but that's got to mean something.

And those are my plans for the end of March. In the meantime, Easter weekend is coming. I'll be leaving on Wednesday night for Córdoba, and back home by Tuesday night the next week. After that it's going to be work and study, no vacations or escapades, for a long time...

Freedom except where void

From the official website of Reporters sans frontières, English version:

Reporters Without Borders learned last night that UNESCO has withdrawn its patronage for today’s [March 12] Online Free Expression Day. We were notified of the decision by the director of its Freedom of Expression, Democracy and Peace Division. Defending the move, UNESCO said it gave its patronage for the “principle of this day” but could not support the various demonstrations organised to mark it.

The demonstrations were by and large protests against censorship. There are a number of countries where you can't speak or write against the government or the dominant religion (sometimes those two are one and the same), or else you run the risk of being harassed and having your website or blog or radio station or newsletter shut down, of losing your job, or worse — being punished by legal or illegal means, with jail or a beating or death. The list includes Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

I seriously doubt UNESCO is concerned by the possible reactions of Cuba, Zimbabwe, Tunisia or Burma to RWB's efforts to denounce their record of press freedom violations. This is just a cowardly surrender into self-censorship. This is why so many people think the UN and its agencies are useless bureaucracies.

It's understandable, maybe: China is a communist dictatorship, the most populated country in the world, and it has nuclear weapons; Saudi Arabia is a theocratic dictatorship with the world's largest reserves of oil, and is always working at producing fanatic terrorists in case they're needed anywhere. Iran, about the same, only it's ruled by an anti-American Holocaust denier of a president instead of a pro-American decadent monarchy. And Egypt you can't bother because they keep the other Arab countries in check. But all that aside, what's UNESCO's "Freedom of Expression, Democracy and Peace Division" for, exactly? What are they doing about those nice abstractions?

For the photographers: Robert Capa

Last night I got to see a 2003 documentary about the famous photographer Robert Capa, titled Robert Capa: In Love and War. It's a very good exploration of the life of this formidable man, that I knew next to nothing about prior to this. Maybe a bit partial, but then you can't cover a whole life in 90 minutes, least of all such a complex life as Capa's.

The documentary was shown at the Peña Fotográfica Rosarina, and I learned of it through a friend of Marisa's who's a photographer. It was free of charge and anybody could attend, but I felt a bit out of place as I entered the building on Urquiza St. The folks at the Peña are mostly pros or trying to be, and generally they're on the traditional film or the newer digital reflex camp, so they don't commonly mix with us lowly non-reflex users. (I have a bridge camera now, and a couple of my own fellow Rosarigasinos have DSLRs, but still there's an invisible line between us and the Peña's guys.)

Anyway, the environment was friendly enough, and the movie was very nicely done. If you can get it somehow, do yourself a favour and watch it.

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.

A wedding (and no funeral)

Susana and Facundo, two of the members of my photographers' group (the Rosarigasinos), got married last Saturday. They've basically lived together for ages, but they surely felt this was a major (even if symbolical) step. Wanting only a small ceremonial gathering where all their relatives and friends could attend, they got married in a small church in their neighbourhood, with a minimum of fancy arrangements.

From what I could gather, both would've rather skipped the church altogether, but unfortunately there's not any other comparable single place where you can get together all the people you love. So we all had to sit down and listen to the priest babble about Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Christian duties of husband and wife, and the absolute requirement for them to bring forth as much Catholic offspring as possible.

I went around the temple taking pictures (the newlyweds, of course, didn't even think of hiring a photographer — they had about a dozen of them doing that work eagerly for free), so I avoided listening to most of the priest's patter. Marisa, who's no more a believer than I am, cried a little (this she had announced before the ceremony as being very likely to happen) and chose to grab a few pictures from her pew, since her camera is not that good to get indoor shots without the insidious flash, and the altar was already crowded. After that we hugged and kissed the newlyweds, and some threw rice at them as tradition demands. (The lady who swept the entrance of the church wasn't happy — Marisa got scolded for her fervorous rice-showering.)

After church we proceeded to Parque Independencia, which has some nice landscaping — a typical place for photo sessions of newlywed couples and quinceañeras, with an artificial lake, a white bridge, colourful trees, a row of columns, and a flower calendar (updated every day by the park's gardeners). The day was gray, with raindrops falling here and there as if ashamed of their solitariness.

Photo advice: a cloudy sky is good for this kind of event photography, because you usually have diffuse lighting coming from all angles, instead of the warmer but harsh light that comes from an unmitigated sun. Strong point-like light sources (e.g. the sun, but also a flash in the darkness) give faces a sharper look, with darker shadows and possibly blown-out highlights. You usually don't want that when you're doing portraits or weddings. The only thing you have to mind in cloudy days is the light coming from the background. You can (and probably should) use fill-in flash to compensate. That is, force your camera to use the flash even it says the amount of light is enough, so that the flash "fills in" the parts of the subject that lie in the shadow. Combine this with a "cloudy day" white balance, and you're set — better than sunlight.

1 in 200

One in two hundred. That's my (admittedly rough) estimate of how many people believe INDEC is reporting the true inflation rate for February — which turns out to be, according to them, exactly 1 in 200, or as those math snobs say, 0.5%.

The good news is that, according to one economist consulted by La Nación, last month's Consumer Price Index "doesn't seem as fudged as in other cases". Let's rejoice.

Food and drink did rise a bit more — 1.1%. That's just 11 more pesos. It's not much, and now that tomatoes are cheap (in real life, not in Kirchnerland) you might actually be eating and drinking a lot more for that modest extra amount.

Not only that, but with the soon-to-be-implemented seasonal substitution sampling method, inflation will be magically reduced further! The method works by ignoring large price variations — replacing the varying items with others of the same category, whatever that means. Take, for example, potatoes. Suppose they're suddenly up by 15%. That's a lot. That has to be anomalous. It must be because it rained a lot — or not enough — or maybe the Chinese suddenly developed a taste for fries. So you take potatoes out of your statistical sample for this month's inflation rate. You can do without potatoes for a month, can't you?

The true experts note that, once you begin tampering with the inflation rate, the whole statistical edifice has to crumble. Those GDP growth figures, for example, say nothing if you don't factor in inflation to get the real growth. Gloating over the nominal GDP figures, like the Kirchners love to do on every conceivable occasion, is like coming from the gym and congratulating oneself on gaining weight when most of it is fat rather than muscle.

And then the fudging of the inflation rate is not only obvious if you go to the supermarket, but can be easily inferred by looking at the (presumably untouched) figures of tax revenue. If the VAT brings in 38% more than last year, and people are buying more or less the same amount of things and there aren't a lot more people buying and you haven't caught a massive amount of tax evaders and forced them to pay the tax, then it's obvious that most of that increase is due to rising prices.

Since INDEC is irrelevant, most people who care are now working with private estimates, which produce rates on the order or two to three times the official figures. By now it's clear that INDEC is not doing statistics but propaganda, so I think we should rename it to something more meaningful. The acronym is so math-geekily cool I wouldn't want to change it, but I have an idea to preserve the initials... Let's call it Instituto Nacional de Distorsión de Estadísticas a medida de Cristina.

A bullet train through our pockets

Remember when I told you about the cost of the "bullet train" proposed for the Buenos Aires–Rosario route? Many people already felt it was a lot. Enough to rebuild a good part of the national railway grid, remember?

Surprise, surprise: the actual amount of money involved has shot up to four times what I reported! Not only do we have to pay $1.3 billion for this white elephant, we also have to issue Treasury bonds for about $4 billion as a guarantee for the loan that Alstom, the winner of the bid, will have to get from the Société Générale bank. No-one, and I mean no-one, told us about these extra billions up until now — when it's too late to back out. Congress must authorize the spending. (All who believe Congress will have a serious, informed, non-partisan debate about this, raise your hands. How many hands do I count? I thought so.)

And note I say "we" because that's us getting indebted through our government, and that's our money being spent. Indebting a country with much more pressing needs to pay for a railway where a trip will cost twice as much as going by plane, a train that cannot possibly be profitable, a train that will be given for exploitation to the government's Big Business friends and kept running through subsidies — again our money.

People we should be free of by now

Ah. Just when we Latin Americans thought we had shaken off these kinds of governments for good, up pops Mad Hugo, and not content with subjecting us all to his rambling anti-imperialist speeches, he's now threatening to bring war back to our subcontinent.

It just doesn't get more magic-realist than this. A big faraway country run by a religious lunatic under the command of a huge military-industrial complex orders a small country, half-owned by drug-trafficking terrorists and the other half devoted to coffee and banana plantations, to serve as proxy on its War on Drugs and Terror and Marxism, and said small country sends people into another country to kill the terrorist negotiator while he's at work, possibly about to agree on the release of long-held prisoners, at which a fourth, neighbouring country, full of oil reserves and run by a populist quasi-dictator with a fetish for red shirts, feels threatened, cuts diplomatic ties, and sends ten battalions to the border.

And our intrepid Presidenta, who is very well-spoken and tries to project an image of herself as a true stateswoman and always has something to say, says nothing about the madman in the red shirt.

Mind you, this is not a matter of right or left. Latin America has had its internal struggles, even full-blown wars, but mostly we've been free of that for a long time. Since Chile, belatedly, rid itself of its murderer-in-chief in the 1990s, no major country in this part of the world has fallen under a dictatorship. Strong-fisted governments, governments where Congress and the judiciary are a joke, governments with almost no accountability, yes — but not dictatorships. It's usually only plain dictators who can plunge a whole country into armed conflict these days.

And more importantly, a consensus has slowly emerged — an agreement among all the larger countries that, whenever continental stability is threatened, everybody will step in to defuse the conflict. Like a family where the big brothers don't let the little ones hurt themselves. But then Hugo came along, a big brother on his own right, and started behaving half like a spoiled brat, half like a grown-up on drugs. An intervention is in order, perhaps?

Alerta Religión

I've just opened a new blog in Spanish, Alerta Religión, to deal with religion-related news of the kind I mentioned last Friday on my first post of Religion Watch.

The format is unlikely to stay the same, mainly because my online news sources for this are in Spanish, so I can just direct Alerta's Spanish-speaking readership there, while here I must at least translate and explain a bit more.

Some search engine bait... Alerta Religión: Recolectando entre las noticias diarias los resultados de la intolerancia y de la fe sin razón. Para los que no entienden cómo personas normales, sanas, se vuelven idiotas insensatos cuando algo se cruza con su religión.