Can Soccer & the Pope Cause Border Issues?

Because of deadlines on another commitment, I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit, but it’s also because most recent off-season news from the Southern Cone has been topics that don’t much rouse my interest, most notably soccer and religion. Though to some people the two apparently overlap, to me they’re the cultural equivalent of Ambien.

First, chronologically, is the fact that Chile hosted the 2015 Copa América soccer tournament and defeated Argentina in the championship game a few days in a so-called “penalty shootout” (roughly equivalent to deciding a basketball game by shooting free throws). It still mystifies me that soccer players are incapable of continuing in overtime until somebody actually scores – at the very least, this would determine which team had the best-conditioned athletes.

Chileans were ecstatic, Argentines rather less so – especially the 7,000 who were caught on the Chilean side of the Andes when snow blocked their return to Argentina (the photograph above, taken from the Chilean side in summer, shows the snow-covered summit of Cerro Aconcagua in the distance). Some of those Argentines, apparently, responded to the border closure by staging rowdy protests and even robbing chickens and empanadas from a restaurant in the city of Los Andes.

I’ve managed to avoid soccer games since playing briefly as a schoolchild but, decades ago, I actually attended a Mass with a Chilean friend who has since become an atheist. It was a once-in-a-lifetime cultural experience I’d prefer not to repeat, though I do occasionally enter churches – and once, even a mosque – in the course of researching and photographing my own guidebooks. While I can acknowledge their historical significance, that’s the limit of my interest.

Admittedly, that’s not true for everyone – as will be apparent in Paraguay this weekend. Since adopting the alias “Pope Francis,” the artist formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio has still not returned to his native Argentina, but a million Argentines may overrun border crossings this weekend as the Pope is due to make an appearance in the capital city of Asunción.

If so, they’d better do so soon. According to the Buenos Aires daily Clarín, Argentine customs agents will go on strike tomorrow. Whether those who manage to cross the border will be able to return could be another question entirely, and we can only hope they won’t emulate the soccer fans who were stuck in Chile.

My Dinner with Anthony? On Bourdain in Paraguay

Last month, I got a surprise email from a CNN editor who asked whether I could write a brief listicle (I hate the word) on “ten things you didn’t know about Paraguay” to accompany an upcoming program on celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” travel series. While I knew Bourdain’s reputation, I had never seen the program but I did know something about Paraguay – I first visited in the 1980s and, while working for a publisher whose name I’d rather not mention, I traveled there extensively during the 1990s.

While Paraguay’s no longer a priority for me, I was able to expand that list from ten to 14 for CNN’s benefit. Nearly surrounded by the South American giants of Argentina and Brazil, not to mention Bolivia, Paraguay has no knockout attractions in its own right, but it can be a place where (to quote myself) “closer contact and the lack of preconceptions can lead to memorable, even intimate, experiences at underrated sites.”

Bourdain’s agenda was a bit different from mine (the video above shows the entire program). While his background is gastronomy, he was also seeking traces of his great-great-great grandfather, who immigrated to Paraguay in the 1850s. In the process, speaking with local journalists, historians and even a (fairly recent) German immigrant, he doesn’t whitewash the country’s unfortunate history of vicious dictatorships and Nazi refugees, and an economy that has long depended on contraband (though that may be changing with a soy boom).

While Bourdain is a chef, he’s no food snob, and he relishes street eats like fried empanadas (I almost always prefer baked), calorie- and cholesterol-laden lomito sandwiches, and sopa paraguaya (“Paraguayan soup” but, in reality, the local version of cornbread). He does show people eating ice cream (underrated here) and sipping mate (which Paraguayans sip cold as tereré in the withering summer heat), but he doesn’t comment on either of them.

To me, the most appealing dishes Bourdain ate were fresh river fish – the surubí (Paraná catfish) and dorado (“river tiger,” so called because it’s great sport for game fishing) - and the program shows the local fishermen on the Río Paraguay. Sad to say, he didn’t get far beyond the capital city of Asunción, but his river excursion did take him to the ruins of Nueva Burdeos, a brief French colonization experiment where his ancestor had once been. Nueva Burdeos is now Villa Hayes, named for the obscure US president who awarded the savannahs and thorn forests of the Gran Chaco to Paraguay after the country’s War of the Triple Alliance against Argentina and Brazil.

In the end, Bourdain’s local contacts manage to locate documentary evidence of his family connection, who may have imported gunpowder to support the dictatorial regime of Carlos Antonio López (whose portrait appears in the banknote above). Those contacts believe the late Bourdain relative lies in the city’s Cementerio de la Recoleta (not quite so prestigious as its Buenos Aires namesake), but poor record-keeping and subsequent construction make it impossible to locate the tomb.