Showing posts with label Argentina. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Argentina. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

The suicide that was not a suicide in the asylum that is not an asylum

Karl Marx was right when he wrote: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." For proof, one need not look beyond the strange case of the Argentine prosecutor whose president has ended up declaring his death "the suicide that was not a suicide."

The bare facts simplified:

1) Alberto Nisman spent roughly 20 years investigating the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association community center in Buenos Aires.

2) Nisman's leading theory of the crime was that the bombing could be traced back to a criminal conspiracy involving the Iranian government, all covered up by the government of Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

3) On January 18, Nisman was found dead in his home, of a gunshot head wound with a weapon at his side, a development that was reported as a suicide until indications appeared that homicide could not be ruled out.

For about the past two weeks, Argentines on the Internet have been screaming that Kirchner is a "murderer," to which misguided Kirchner supporters have offered the shrill response that "we warned" the dead prosecutor.

Then, the once merely mediocre Washington Post bravely decides to vie for last place among major U.S. metropolitan newspapers.

On February 2, yesterday, the paper ran a front page story, written by reporters allegedly on the scene in Buenos Aires. On second and subsequent mention, they refer to the president of Argentina as "Fernandez." This is the equivalent of referring to Hillary Rodham Clinton as plain "Rodham."

To this average netizen, sitting in Washington, D.C., far from the events in Buenos Aires, where he once lived, the whole thing is perplexing and annoying to the point of inducing an eerie sense of insanity.

The AMIA bombing years ago struck me as yet another sad chapter in the long story of Argentine anti-Semitism. Adolf Eichmann, the SS-Obersturmbannführer who was one of the main organizers of the Holocaust, chose his hiding place well. He was seized outside Buenos Aires in 1960 before being tried and executed in Israel.

The idea that Iran is somehow involved in the AMIA bombing seems odd to me: there is no dearth of home-grown haters of Jews in Argentina and no need to import any. But, OK, let's say that Nisman had information he didn't share with me; I didn't know who he was until just before his death.

Also preposterous to me is Nisman's notion that former vicepresident Kirchner, who became president in 2003 upon the death of her husband Nestor, would  be involved in Nixonesque shenanigans concerning events a decade before she was in power. One might as well suspect Hillary Clinton of involvement in the Reagan-Bush Iran-Contra coverup.

And yet, and yet ... if everything in Argentina looks as if it is a reflection in one of those warped fun-house mirrors, perhaps that is the way they really are. Just as Nisman's suicide is not a suicide, Argentina is an asylum that pretends to be a country.

My ancestors were Argentine and I live in Washington partly to escape that past, even as I try to learn from it.

One of the lessons is that Argentine history is, indeed, a story of mistakes transmogrified into disasters and devolved into sheer absurdity. Another is that, even when posted as correspondents in Buenos Aires, Americans will never understand what I mean.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

To Return, Perchance To Stay

"To return ... with a withered face, the snows of time have turned silver my templea ..." I'm not tango devotee, nor a fan of Carlos Gardel, but there are lyrics that say it all and this one, upon returning from a trip to South America (and cybernetically reconnecting with former school classmates as a result of the emergency of one), feels appropriate.

No, I don't long to return. That's only the paradox Thomas Wolfe (not the modern Tom Wolfe) proposed in his novel You Can't Go Home Again, which is, ultimately, a version of the rejection of Jesus in his childhood Nazareth. We can't go back. Or as they sang after World War I, "How ya gonna keep'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?"

I "returned" to São Paulo, where I never lived but had visited before. I have relatives in Brazil, as I have in many other countries. To that was added a brief stop in Bogotá. Furthermore, I "returned" once already via the cyberworld while remaining on the terra firma of the good ol' U.S. of A., after hearing via email of a temporary health crisis (the reader is welcome to thank the god of choice) of a former classmate.

Sometimes distance from the daily occurrences of even people and places we know let us discern differences that have happened to them over time. Call it the Rip Van Winkle Outsider Effect, if you will.

Bogotá, for example, no longer has those packs of street urchins engaged in begging or street vending. Or perhaps they hide them better today from the tourists. You do see in their place some grungy old and obviously very poor men. Are they the children of yesteryear grown old? At least their descendants don't seem to lead similar lives.

São Paulo has always been a thriving hub of commerce. I was amazed that its newyorkization (all Latin American cities aspire, in my view foolishly, to have New York skyscrapers) is not absurdly functional. Instead of the square, sterile and high blocks, the Paulistas have been concerned to build modern art objects.

Sure, being in the country of architectural genius Oscar Niemeyer gives them some incentive to avoid modernizing without rhyme or reason. But I can declare: modern Paulista buildings have a grace that is not found even in the big cities of the First World. Really!

While the consensus among those with whom I spoke is that the economic miracle of Lula is fading (and the efforts of Dilma to build stadiums for the World Cup has been an inexcusable waste), it is still remarkable that Brazil's poverty fell from 22% in 2002 to 9% in 2012 As a point of comparison, in the United States, the rate is 15%, having never dropped below 11%.

These rapid declines are slowing. Perhaps it's like dieting.

Of course, the Third World poverty based on poor or unevenly accessed infrastructure persists. You see people in the 21st century still without electricity, power, fresh drinking water and weather-worthy housing. That's not to mention the social problems that are of a more First World type, such as education, work and opportunity.

And there is the kind of return.

I got a mass email from my secondary school "litter" announcing that a former classmate was in intensive care and suddenly saw names that had never been in my inbox before. They were people whose names evoke a variety of experiences in my youth.

Other names, of course, yield nothing. ("This guy attended school with me?")

Then there's the fact that at a certain age, the numbers begin to diminish. Five of my fiftysomething classmates have died. Any day now, I is listed among them.

We are not intimates, except for two or three who kept up a friendship through the years. There's at least one who is not in the list and I don't want to see even if it is only an email address. Yet for better or worse, all of us are part of each other's youth.

In my case they are men (I went to a boys' school, where the existence of beings called "girls" was mostly theoretical) who are intelligent, vigorous that have managed to stay afloat despite everything that has happened to Argentina since 1968.

(Yes, I know, some readers were not alive then. You are forgiven.)

It occurs to me that many of my concerns will be echoed in theirs. The values ​​that were instilled in us are the same. The intellectual reference points are, in essence, the same.

We will have had failures. You can't reach a certain age without failing; the absence of failure yields no success. I would have liked to say that my former colleagues and I made the world better, as we once expected. But no.

All these things make returning to people and place in the past desirable and undesirable at the same time, leaving a bittersweet taste. Nostalgia has pulled us back to a reality that somehow did not welcome us or serve us well enough to keep us there.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

The Argentine reaction to the new pope reminds me why I left

In the streets they celebrated the election to St. Peter's chair of Argentine as if it were a soccer championship. At the same time, others began to sling mud made out of murky allegations without facts or dates. This is Argentina I left in 1970, never again to reside in its territory. 

How much ignorance! How much bile!


There are nations that have been staunchly Catholic, mostly out of rebellion: Ireland and Quebec against English Protestantism; Poland, Slovakia and Croatia against the Orthodox Russian Empire (later the Soviet Communists). However, they are exceptions and Catholicism has declined among them at about the same rate as the influence of the heretical invader.


However, in Argentina, and Latin America in general, the Church is colonial. The Catholicism of the majority is largely confined to rites of passage: baptism, wedding and burial. In the Pampas, the traditional gaucho greeting was "Hail Mary Purest," to which the newcomer was expected to reply "Conceived without sin." Was it faith or custom?

  
The nominally Catholic Argentines, who make up 90-something percent of the population since time immemorial, have received little or nothing of the content of the faith. There's a mixture of popular piety, superstition and remnants of pre-Christian religions that mixes Lent with Carnival, with the African orixa gods with saints, the decals of the Virgin next to that of the pinup of the moment, and Argentine Indian blessed Ceferino Namuncurá with "San Perón." 

Behold the mass that this week "won" the papal "world cup." As always with Argentina and Latin America, however, there are also conventional thinkers who hate the Church for ideological reasons; their information is no better than that of the flock. 

There's no anticlericalism more rabid than that of traditionally Catholic countries. See Garibaldi, Voltaire and Unamuno in Italy, France and Spain. In Argentina, Italianized by a huge influx of migrants from 1880-1914 and the two post-war periods, there is a huge motherlode that comes from the famous Anarchist Errico Malatesta, who emigrated there, along with other persecuted ideas of Europe. 

For them, it's enough to find photos of Jorge Bergoglio, in his role of national superior of the Jesuits and later bishop, with the first de facto head of state under the 1976-83 military regime -- both portrayed in liturgical or protocolary circumstances -- to argue that the new pope is a "murderer". I know perfectly well that Gen. Jorge Videla was tried in open court and, with plenty of evidence, found guilty of active participation in more than 5,000 kidnappings and murders.

However, in the case of Bergoglio there haven't been trials nor even proof of anything remotely criminal. There were inquiries and investigations, both official and unofficial; none of them unearthed the proverbial smoking gun proving complicity in what the Argentine military called the "dirty war". 

Gossip is not enough to condemn him, but the Argentine lumpen intelligentsia don't let the absence of facts get in the way of conclusions. 

Let me be clear. Bergoglio is and has been part of a clerical leadership that fundamentally tends toward conservatism in theology, philosophy and their vision of society. The hierarchy Argentina is a sea of ​​Thomists at the service of last absolute monarch in the world. One cannot quote expect revolution from them. 

I confess that this conservatism was one of the factors that influenced me to abandon what might have been be a priestly vocation that I felt in that bygone era when lights sparkled in the post-conciliar Church then reading "the signs of the times." 

I refer to the encyclical Populorum Progressio and the Latin American bishops' social justice cry in the Declaration of Medellin. I have in mind Dom Helder Câmara, the Brazilian bishop who advocated treating atheist Marx as Thomas Aquinas dealt with pagan Aristotle. Or Gustavo Gutierrez, the scribe of the liberation theology that was spawned in basic ecclesial communities, or Carlos Mugica, the priest of the slums of Buenos Aires -- I met both very briefly. Finally, I recall Camilo Torres, the Colombian guerrilla priest whose death with machine gun in the hand is still a sign of contradiction to me. 

Were they exceptions? Or are those like them, like Francis of Assisi or Francis Xavier, the minority that actually became Christian. 

All this is debatable. What is indisputable it's not a crime to be a dogmatic Pope, such as Francisco I.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

We (still) have good reason to hate the Brits!


Exactly 30 years ago today I wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post titled "We Have Good Reason to Hate the Brits"  in a vain attempt to provide a counterweight to American Anglophilia about the Malvinas Islands.

But nothing is as easy as you think. I went through a meeting with intelligence agents, deaf and hostile debates in the media and even threats sotto voce. The best response was that of a cousin. "The nationalist in you came out," she wrote me.

And that's what I believe happened to many Argentines on April 2nd this year. Suddenly they spoke of the "heroes" of 1982. Few remembered that the Argentine armed forces had only been trained to suppress unarmed civilians.

The defeat by one of the NATO powers was only a matter of time. The soldiers sent to the "war" by the Argentine generals who had no experience of war, were cannon fodder, not heroes. Thirty years after the events there has to be a way to lower the emotional volume that the Buenos Aires government is stoking for plainly demagogic reasons.

The Argentine claim to the islands is no more legitimate than the Zionist claim to Palestine. Possession is nine-tenths of the law and the Argentines have not held the islands for nearly 180 years, just as Palestine was not a Jewish State since before Alexander the Great.

And frankly, what can Argentina give the Falkland kelpers?

Yes, as I wrote in 1982, the British took from Argentina (and Ireland, India, Anglophone Africa, etc.) much more than the Falklands. This is why they have earned the instinctive antipathy of most Argentines. But in Argentina and between Argentines there are fundamental problems of higher priority.

Ultimately, the war 30 years ago yielded the only beneficial result Argentina could expect: to get rid of the cowards in uniform who were strangling their country.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

200 Years Ago in Argentina

Today in Argentina is celebrated as the 200th anniversary of ... what? It's not quite the declaration of independence, that was on July 9, 1816, but certainly the beginning of Argentina's self-rule and, to be completely accurate, fairly consistent misrule.

A group of the educated elite in Buenos Aires deposed the Spanish viceroy, arguing that Napoleon's invasion of Spain and imprisonment of King Ferdinand VII meant that the government of Spain was illegitimate. It was a thinly veiled ruse.

Upper crust young, idealistic republican egalitarians, who looked with hope to the pre-Napoleonic events of France since 1789, allied with somewhat more cynical merchants tired of the cat-and-mouse smuggling game around the Spanish colonial trade monopoly.

To what end? A minimal consensus was not reached until 1852, when at least a majority of Argentinians -- or at least those who counted for decisions of this sort -- could at last agree on what they did not want.

That consensus broke down in 1930, when demands by a new, emerging class of non-Spanish immigrants and first-generation citizens was met with the hard hand of the military, martial law and a decade of extremely public electoral fraud. This led to decades of struggle, involving the emergence of a charismatic leader named Juan Perón and the recurrent counterattacks from the gendarmes serving the heirs to the mantle of landowning oligarchs, namely the new commercial and industrial elite allied with the United States.

In 1983, once again, Argentinians were in unison about what they did not want, and since then they have experienced a series of largely corrupt, ineffective governments run by politicians elected on the shoulders of a fading memory of Perón.

Only a hundred years ago one of the top ten economies of the world, Argentina today sinks ever lower toward 100th place. A nation of 40 million that produces enough food for 300 million now has millions of hungry people.

What exactly are we celebrating again?

Monday, April 26, 2010

Argentina, Land of Insanity

I have closed the associated Ñoñario blog (all visitors are blocked) at the request of the author, who no longer wishes an Internet presence. He has concluded that Argentines -- his prime audience -- are so insane that even trying to comment on current events and history on a factual basis is an Augean task not worth the time and effort.

Let Argentina sink to yet new astounding new levels, through the ever inventive self-destructiveness of Argentines. I am not kidding.

This is a country that, around 1910, was still had one of the top ten economies in the world. Today it is probably the 150th or so.

In the 1920s and 30s the Argentine elite fought tooth and nail to keep its feudal and largely agricultural society intact and its economy a net exporter of cheap commodities and a net importer of expensive manufactured goods.

In the late 1940s and 50s, Perón turned needed attention to the nascent industrial union movement, but he misspent the nation's then-vast gold reserves on patronage pet projects.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the country was split between Peronists fighting for the return of their exiled leader and the middle class and oligarchy, ushering in military coup after military coup to prevent the return. Meanwhile, the peso lost value and the economy began to go to hell.

Unsatisfied with chaos, Argentines once again welcomed military rule in 1976. This time, the generals weren't kidding around: they made a proven 9,000 people disappear, kidnapped and tortured thousands of others, led the country to a disastrous war with a NATO member (the UK) and helped raise annual inflation to above 1,000 percent (that's thousand, not a typo).

By 1983, tired of military disasters, Argentines chose civilian ones instead. After the Mexican peso effect collapsed the Argentine economy briefly, a charlatan offered a supposed dollar-parity of the peso.

How was this illusion maintained? By selling off the state-owned airline, merchant marine, telephone company, oil company, etc., until all the family jewels were gone.

In 2001, the spell vanished and peso went from 1=1 peso to dollar to 3 pesos per dollar. One day you had a dollar, the next you had 33 cents. That's what Buenos Aires taxi drivers mean when they mention "the events of 2001" -- not 9/11.

So, having kept the country backward, devalued its currency and destroyed its economy and taken the country to a disastrous war, not to mention egregious human rights violations, what did Argentines elect new leaders to do? Of course, to incur an unpayable foreign debt in the billions!

Every time I've thought, "well, now, they've learned their lesson," they manage to surprise me by sinking to new and unsurpassed depths. They sank below hell decades ago!

Of course, try to tell that to an Argentine ... in Spanish. So now you know why my associate and I are sticking to English. The hell with them!

Monday, April 19, 2010

Operation Eyes

[Editor's note: By popular demand, here is a translation of a recent post from Desde Yanquilandia from the Spanish.]

A week or so ago, I finished reading two books I brought back from Argentina in January. The first was a "The Question in Their Eyes," a novel, and the second "Operación Traviata," a jourmalist's investigative account of the 1973 murder of Argentine unionist José Ignacio Rucci.

Both books fascinated me by their common underlying themes, justice and injustice in Argentina, violence and dark, the "decensus in averno" the country experienced in the seventies. The authors of both books, oddly enough, belong to the that generation was too young to have really experienced all that and they have in common an oblique approach to the era, yet one that in my opinion is reliable.

The facts in question in the novel (which I understand differs from the Oscar-winning adaptation to film, "The Secret in Their Eyes") occurs in the late sixties, mostly in the central courts building I passed by every school day on the 102 bus. There are references to things I remember and also details of adult life that I did not experience in the flesh while in Buenos Aires.

As for Rucci's murder, it was a fleeting memory of a news story that flashed briefly when I lived in Canada. Despite my ideological and moral sympathies toward the labor movement and collective bargaining, to me Argentine union leaders who always seemed to be thugs, having workers shut off electricity whenever they wanted to pressure the government, which for many years was the largest employer.

But all that, in the novel and journalist's account, came before military repression, the Montonero and the ERP guerrillas, and eventually the disappeared and Weimar-like inflation in Argentina. No to mention other things.

Neither author expends effort attempting to debate whether the military really were "gorillas," as Argentine opponents called them, or which faction of Peronism was right. Everybody knows that the conclusion to such debates might be yes, no, and none of them.

Both authors treat that tragic and hair-raising recent history as background noise. Their stories, far from ignoring the noise, end up explaining and conveying the everyman experience of those years in Argentina, without getting into polemics.

A common crime becomes a reflection on violence, the shortcuts that sometimes one has to take to see justice served and the ultimate probability that there is no solution to such conundrums, apart from love. Similarly, premeditated murder and treachery become the excuse to examine the evolution of political and paramilitary forces in 1973 as they were heading for disaster, with the lone and persistent reporter cleverly avoiding the argument traps to present a credible version of what actually happened.

For 200 years, ever since the populace first demanded open proceedings in the discussion of breaking with Spain, the Argentine people have been demanding to know what is going in the spheres of power and institutionalized violence that the state assumes in name of society. These books bring that demand a step closer to becoming reality.