Travelogue
Argentina - It was the Land of Opportunity - 20 February 2011
La Boca is the working class district near the docks, famous for its narrow cobbled streets and brightly coloured houses. If paying a visit it pays to be cautious. It’s a fairly rough area and tourists are sometimes targeted by petty criminals. I found the area remarkably small, largely consisting of a single street, so I had trouble working out what the attraction of the area for tourists was.
Nearby is the famous Estadio Alberto Armando, better known as La Bombonera, the Chocolate Box, the home of Argentina’s most popular football club, Boca Juniors, with a capacity of over 60,000. Home matches are sold out, and the crowd jumps up and down, literally rocking the stadium superstructure. Their main rival is cross town club River Plate, with whom the contest the Superclasico.
Thomas De La Rue Limited made a fortune out of Argentina and other Latin American nations, they being the printers of national currencies. You can buy entire sets of past currencies in street markets, immaculately preserved, ironed flat and restored in some cases with the finest strips of surgical tape. The designs are fascinating, but usually feature stern looking statesmen and generals, which in this part of the world tend to be one and the same.
The old peso was replaced by the australe, which in turn was replaced by the new peso. Periods of hyper-inflation render the original denominations worthless. So units of currency which originally began life at one-for-one with the US dollar, with notes of 1, 5, 10, 50 and 100 are surpassed by notes that run into the thousands, and in some cases, the millions, before the whole process starts again with new notes issued.
Politically, Latin America was foundered with the rise of the caudillo, or strongman, in the absence of centralised authority, and representing the interests of the rural elites and landowners. In the first-half of the 19h century Juan Manuel de Rosas came to prominence as caudillo of Buenos Aires. His reign lasted more than 20 years. During his reign he institutionalised torture and in an ominous precedent for Argentina, created the notorious mazorca, his ruthless secret police force.
Buenos Aires was the hotbed of Peronism. Juan Peron emerged on the political scene during the 1940s and managed to be both revered and reviled at the same time. He won tow elections for president beginning in 1946, accompanied by his wife, the iconic Evita. Peronism was a form of virulent nationalism. The spectacle of vast public rallies was something Peron learned from Italian and Spanish fascists, before the military turfed him out in 1955, thereafter commencing almost three decades of catastrophic military rule in Argentina, culminating in the Guerra Sucia, the Dirty War.
For the climate of fear that existed in Argentina during this period you can view Imagining Argentina with Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson. In it Thompson plays a journalist who is carted off to a series of detention camps, while husband Banderas searches in vain for her. Eventually, Banderas joins the Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (www.madres.org) the Mothers of the Disappeared, who parade outside the Ministry of Defence building, demanding justice.
Later in the film, the secret police in the green ford falcon return and take the couple’s only child. While Thompson eventually escapes and is reunited with her husband, the daughter is not seen again. A friend, played by Reuben Blades is also abducted, tortured, drugged, and then thrown from a helicopter hundreds of metres above the River Plate to his death. The characters in the film are based on real life.
Argentine women are fond of dyeing their hair blond, which always looks curious on those with dark features. The streets are cobbled in many parts of town. Cafes abound where you can drink the national brew, Quilmes, with its label in the colours of the flag, blue and white.
Buenos Aires movie houses show new releases earlier than many other countries, for reasons I’m unclear about. They haven’t escaped the clutches of multinational junk food. MacDonalds sells Gaucho burgers, and terrible coffee.
The city is relatively safe, though like most places it pays to be careful. Curiously, one day a passing motorist in a narrow side street, tried to snatch the postcard from my hand as I walked to the post office.
The capital is home to the Tango, which the late Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina’s great writer, and former professor of literature at Buenos Aires University, referred to as a form of rock ‘n’ roll when it emerged out of the bordellos in 1883.
Argentina is the eighth-largest country in the world covering an area just under 2.8 million square kilometres. From north-to-south it stretches almost 3000 miles. Route Nationale 40 runs for 5000 kilometres from Tierra del Fuego to the border with Bolivia.
To fly across he pampas takes two or three hours. Much of the land is now owned by El Tejar, the Argentine conglomerate and the world’s biggest farmer with land comprising over 1.5 million hectares. A big company in a big country To fly across he pampas takes two or three hours. Much of the land is now owned by El Tejar, the Argentine conglomerate and the world’s biggest farmer with land comprising over 1.5 million hectares, a big company in a big country. This is the land of the Gauchos, Latin cowboys, virtually born and raised in the saddle.
Agriculture has nearly always sustained this country, though it has careered through boom and bust more times than most would care to remember, for it was the land of opportunity.
