hassle

I left the Herald at 6:30 yesterday and hopped on the 152 bus, which usually gets to my corner in about 4 minutes. Yesterday, though, it took a hard right as soon as I boarded, taking a new route and proving that ‘you never know what’s around the corner in Buenos Aires.’ As in any city. We left an un-congested, rapidly-moving street for a mass of belching diesel trucks going nowhere. I couldn’t get out of the bus in the middle of a six-lane highway, so I was stuck onboard for half an hour.

Eventually we reached the disturbance: a rally being held by Carlos Menem in Luna Park – the big former boxing stadium turned whoever-will-rent-us space. Luna Park was surrounded by cops, protestors, and menemites, and the streets for blocks around were clogged with buses presumably used to truck in the paid “supporters.” Word has it they make 20 pesos for coming to the rally.

Nobody here seems particularly horrified that supporters at rallies are paid; I guess all of the candidates have done this as long as anybody can remember. Nobody seems surprised, either, that Menem has refused to participate in presidential debates. He also refused to debate before the two elections he won in the 1990s. It doesn’t look like anybody else (except the most left-wing candidate, Elisa Carrió) is terribly excited about holding debates this time, either. It’s not debating skill that makes you a good president, says Menem. Perhaps he thinks it’s skill in putting up posters?

The figure of Carlos Menem has dominated election discussions. Menem presided over Argentina’s last period of relative prosperity (in the 1990s), and he doubtless thought he would be summoned back by the people as was Juan Domingo Perón. The other candidates also seemed to believe that was likely, focusing their campaigns on undermining Menem.

But the public seems to have absorbed the fact that the present crisis owes a lot to the way Menem ran the government, most obviously to his pegging of the peso to the US dollar. Or maybe they got fed up with his corruption, which supposedly involved collecting large sums of money for arms trafficking and for overlooking the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center (which remains the deadliest anti-Semitic attack since the Holocaust). Anyway, he now stands to get about 10% of the vote, according to the polls, and is likely to lose to the government’s candidate, Nestor Kirschner.

But this blog is is supposed to be about travel, not politics.

I had somewhat similar travel problems on Saturday, when the train I was taking back from Tigre had to stop because somebody had thrown themselves in front of the train ahead of us. We eventually backed up, switched tracks, and drew alongside the other train. Train staff then pried open the doors of our train so that people could jump from the stuck train to our already jam-packed train – across a five-foot gap above the electrified rails. This would have been tough enough for young, big, fit people but a lot of the passengers were old, and there was at least one poor fellow on crutches.

During the hour and a half or so needed for this operation, we were stopped beside the Buenos Aires horseracing track, and in sight of the large Mosque apparently built by Menem. A guy standing on the other side of the car commented sarcastically “Menem did it.” He seemed to be referring not to the construction project but to the general badness of the situation – on the train, in the country. His words echoed an anti-Menem poster common in the city these days (below), which in turn responds to a pro-Menem poster saying “Menem knows what to do, and knows how to do it.” Thus ensued a long conversation between strangers about Menem, and what is wrong with Argentina.

Apparently the pro-Menem posters seen in the capital reading “With Menem we lived better” have a different variant in the poorer suburbs of the city: “with Menem, we lived ok.” And a Herald reporter found graffiti in a poor, poster-free slum reading “with Menem, we used to eat.”

But I was supposed to be writing about travel!!

I had one more more interesting travel experience on Friday, when my girlfriend took me on my first trip to a “country” (as they are known in Spanish) – a gated, suburb-like community. We took a clunky bus – which was supposed to be the express but apparently wasn’t – out to Pilar, a jumping-off point for a number of “countries.” Then we hopped in a remis (cab) and Victoria asked the driver to take us to Carmel.

The name rang a bell. “Isn’t that where that murder took place?” I asked.

“No,” said Victoria. “That was some other country, much more fashionable.”

The taxi driver cut in. “No – it was Carmel, where you’re going. In fact just today the cops went there and arrested somebody from her family.”

We were talking about the murder of María Marta García Belsunce, a sociologist and part of a super-wealthy family, who died of a heart attack in October, according to her death certificate. Except that some time later she was found to have five bullet holes in her body that may have had something to do with her death. The crime remains a mystery, although potentially guilty people are accumulating in prison.

Someone commented that the police just don’t go into the places where the economic extremes of the nation live: they stay out of the worst slums, and they don’t go into the "countries". So people who live in either of these locations tend to think that they don’t have to obey the law.

It turned out we were not really supposed to be going to Carmel – Victoria checked the name again and it turned out to be some other "country" whose name starts with a C. So the driver turned around and took us 180 degrees in the opposite direction, to a smaller "country." Less exciting, but I felt safer.

previously there was o country of mine
afterwards you have Easter eggs

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