Michael Batson

My plane to Buenos Aires was late, very late. So late in fact, that it had yet to arrive in Auckland to go to Sydney to return to Auckland, for the journey back to Buenos Aires. According to the staff at the Aerolineas Argentinas check-in desk, the schedule had been disrupted by “unexpected volcanic activity over Patagonia”.

This utter falsehood was a portent of things to come with Argentina’s national airline that was to dog me throughout my time in South America.
In the early hours of the following morning, over 12 hours past our intended departure time, the creaking Jumbo jet, one of the oldest I’d ever flown in, headed out over the Earth’s curvature across Antarctica to Buenos Aires, the “Paris of the South”. Among the passengers there seemed an extraordinary number of airline staff with their families.

Gabrielle was a leggy twenty-something year-old from a well-to-do family in Rosario, a city north-west of Buenos Aires. Her family had enough money to pay for her to spend several months in Australia and New Zealand, before she headed home for work or marriage, she seemed unsure which. She explained that in Argentina there was old and new money.

The former was deemed respectable residing with the established families, ranchers on the great pampas, or those with legitimate commercial interests. The latter, she said, was not and derived largely from crime, usually drugs.

Argentina has seen economic boom-and-bust cycles in such quantities so as to qualify as a global template for such economic variations, with periods of prodigious economic prosperity followed by crashes and hyper-inflation. Politically, it was equally polar opposites with pseudo-democratic rule oscillating with often brutal military dictatorship.

At one time the country had more immigrants per head of population than did the United States. “You know about Argentinians” the saying goes, “they’re Italians, who look like the French that speak Spanish, who wish to be English.” Argentina should have rivalled the US economically, except for one crucial factor, it has no mineral resources.

When our plane touched down at Buenos Aires’ surprisingly small international airport, we were greeted by rapturous applause, from the passengers. Surprisingly small that is, for a metropolis of over 12 million souls, the second-largest city in South America after Sao Paulo and possibly the Southern Hemisphere, save for Jakarta.

Buenos Aires is laid out in a broad grid pattern bordering the natural contours of the Silver River – Rio de la Plata – the River Plate, which divides Argentina from its much smaller neighbour, Uruguay.

The establishment of European settlement in Argentina dates from the early 1500s despite violent objections from local Indians. In addition to the wealth generated by the fertile pampas, railroad construction in the second half of the 19th century increased the economic power of Buenos Aires as raw materials flowed into its factories. Buenos Aires became a multicultural city that ranked itself with the major European capitals. By the 1920s, the city became a favoured destination for migrants from southern Europe.

The British built the country’s railroads with railwaymen flooding the country from Lancashire, London and Lincolnshire. Behind them they left an impression in the form of sport. Argentina is a hotbed for football, played by great swathes of the general population, but especially by the working classes. Across South America you will find football sides to mirror their English namesakes; Everton, Liverpool and Arsenal.

The teams of the capital include San Lorenzo, Argentinos Juniors where Maradona made his name as a professional, Huracan, Velez Sarsfield, and the giants, Boca Juniors and River Plate, with the latter’s stadium holding almost 80,000 for club games.

Rugby is a minority sport and the preserve of the professional classes.

The clash of the capital’s biggest teams, the Boca-River Plate derby is the stuff of legend. The build-up goes on all week in the media, Boca having their own television channel. Units of the Argentine army are mobilised in case things between the fans get out of hand. The English broadsheet, the Observer, listed the Superclasico at the top of their 50 sporting events to see before you die.

Anglophile Brit Jimmy Burns, Scottish father, Spanish mother, born in Madrid and correspondent with the British papers, says in his encounters with South America Beyond the Silver River, that Buenos Aires’ aped Europe without ever managing to better it, while turning its back on the rest of Latin America’. Argentina was not born with the nineteenth-century War of Independence from Spain, but was instead the result of subsequent plunder. First came the missionaries, next the gold prospectors, and finally the farmers and the military riddled with disease.

Argentines proudly proclaim their country as the only one in the Third World without a colour problem. General Roca’s “Conquest of the Desert”, the invasion of Patagonia and the pampas, was genocide pure and simple, wiping out great swarthes of the indigenous Indian population in an orgy of brutality, alcohol and disease combined utilising unfettered access to high-powered weaponry.

In the first half of the twentieth-century, the pampas had a per capita income higher than that of Sweden or Switzerland, a foreign trade larger than that of Canada. It was one of the main exporters of cereals and meat products and was known as the “granary of the world”. On the plains of Argentina, you could grow what you liked and there was room for everyone, thousands saw it as the land of opportunity. Now the region mirrors Argentina’s failure as a nation, and the wasted potential of a continent.

After the First World War, Argentina’s export began to lose their markets. Successive governments borrowed heavily and spending continued. The city’s architecture is impressive, mirroring Paris, Barcelona and Madrid. The Avenue 9 de Julio at 140-metres broad is supposedly the world’s widest street. It is cluttered with the city’s taxi fleet, consisting of yellow and black Ford Falcons of 1960 era design. The car has a sinister reputation in Argentina. The country’s secret police used green versions to collect their victims, “The Disappeared” during the so-called Dirty War of the generals during 1976 to 1983, of which there were over 30,000.

Devoid of legitimacy and increasingly unpopular, the generals’ demise followed the debacle of the Falklands War, when the ruling junta forgot the military maxim. An army designed for internal repression will ultimately fail against conventional forces, properly equipped. “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” is a message seen on many a wall across the country, stoking nationalist sentiment.

Editor and journalist, Jacobo Timerman, an Argentine Jew from the Ukraine, was imprisoned and tortured by the secret police for his continued criticism of political violence and government economic policies which angered the military regime. He wrote an account of his ordeal in the autobiographical Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number. His ordeal lasted over two years despite no official charges ever being brought to bear. Undaunted by his ordeal, he later he wrote a stinging criticism of the neighbouring Pinochet regime, Chile: Death In The South.

Buenos Aires harbour is filthy polluted, the water almost black and filled with the detritus of human habitation carelessly deposed of. Frightening then, that Argentina has control and access to large tracts of wilderness in Antarctica, without managing to display any semblance of environmental protection on its own doorstep.

Of the famous Argentine beef, I could not find a result on restaurant menus. Instead, I was treated to gristle overcooked and Milanesia, the local version of wiener schnitzel, which wasn’t bad. Local wine is served with ice and tonic from a pressurised soda dispenser. Quite civilised really, for as in Asia this prevents binge drinking with all its associated detrimental connotations.
TBC...