Politics and Pesos...

Three Sundays ago, the government of Argentine President Mauricio Macri suffered a serious setback to his re-election campaign, when Peronist opposition candidateAlberto Fernández drew nearly 50 percent of the vote in the country’s presidential primary elections. Discontent with the economic situation, including high inflation and unemployment, propelled a protest vote against the party in power. Fernández is the odds-on favorite in the general election, which will take place October 27th.

Today's official exchange rates against the US dollar.

In the aftermath of the primary, Argentina’s peso plunged from 45 to the dollar to nearly 60 before rebounding slightly into the high 50s. That fueled inflationary fears—though one might argue that’s something Argentines are accustomed to—but the bigger problem appeared to be the Macri administration’s shambolically inconsistent approach toward the issues.

An extensive wine tasting at Aldo's tomorrow will cost about US$10.

In the short term, foreign visitors may benefit—at least until prices catch up with devaluation. For the moment I’ll just note, anecdotally, that a wine tasting tomorrow at Aldo’s—a premium restaurant just a block off Buenos Aires’s central Plaza de Mayo—will cost only about US$10. That includes accompanying snacks, plus discounts on optional wine purchases and dinner itself, if desired (Full disclosure: I have lunched anonymously at Aldo’s and would certainly recommend it).

In 2014, in Puerto Madryn, I changed my dollars at this auto glass repair shop.

Even if there’s a short-term advantage, politics may mean it doesn’t last, especially if the opposition wins in October. Under the previous government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, foreign exchange controls and currency manipulation made travel in Argentina awkward, and encouraged a flourishing black market where tourists and Argentines themselves would change their dollars under the table in cuevas, so-called “caves”—in one case, in the Patagonian city of Puerto Madryn, I changed my cash dollars surreptitiously in an auto glass repair shop.

Meanwhile, in Argentina’s Byzantine politics, the presidential candidacy of Alberto Fernández seems an odd one because the vice-presidential running mate is Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (no relation)—a political powerhouse in her own right who’s under multiple corruption indictments from which her current senatorial seat provides her immunity.

In 1973, when Argentines chose Héctor Cámpora as their president, they knew they'd be getting Juan Domingo Perón.

Given that Alberto Fernández served both the late former President Néstor Kirchner and his successor/wife, Cristina could be the power behind the throne, so to speak. This is not unprecedented in Argentine politics—in 1973, when Héctor Cámpora won the presidency with Juan Domingo Perón still in exile, the party’s slogan was “Cámpora al Gobierno, ¡Perón al poder!” (Cámpora to the government, Perón in power!).

Trans-Continental Coda

It’s worth noting that Argentina’s isn’t the only currency Southern Cone currency showing weakness. When I left Chile, in mid-April, their peso was at 660 to the dollar. Today it’s almost 720, nearly a ten percent decline. That may make Argentina’s neighbor somewhat more affordable, but its economy (and politics) are not nearly so volatile.

Home for the Holidays?

I’ve never been one for the “holidays,” and have normally worked through them – one of my greatest frustrations, on the road, has been the week of enforced inactivity between Xmas and New Year’s, when it’s difficult or impossible to accomplish much in updating my Moon Handbooks to Argentina, Buenos Aires, Chile and Patagonia. I’m always operating on deadline, with limited time to explore and revise my coverage of the cities, towns, parks and associated attractions in the countries I’ve grown so attached to, and the virtual loss of a week when it’s almost impossible to meet with anybody can be frustrating.

The best-case scenario, often, is to retreat to my room, which is easiest when I’m in Buenos Aires, glued to the computer in my own apartment. It’s also a risky time of the year in the Argentine capital, not because of high crime but rather because of uncontrolled fireworks that, during last night’s celebrations, led to 57 emergency room visits. It gets worse at New Year’s Eve, when the reckless airheads start tossing firecrackers from their balconies into the streets.

Alternatively, I’ll stay in a quiet Chilean town such as Villarrica, hoping to polish some of the work I’ve already accomplished. Perhaps the most memorable holiday I’ve spent  was December 24, 1998, when I was the only visitor in the campground at Chile’s Parque Nacional Nahuelbuta (pictured above), home to the largest coast range concentration of the pewen or monkey-puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana). That may have been the only place I’ve ever experienced the peace and calm that, ideally and often wrongly, so many people associate with this time of year.

This year, having returned from Buenos Aires about ten days ago, I’m passing the holiday period in the cool, damp winter of Northern California where, however, there’s one enduring reminder of Argentina. With the heavy rains of the past week, we’ve experienced an invasion of Argentine arts in the kitchen and, to a lesser extent, in the bathrooms. Argentines themselves may find it increasingly difficult to travel abroad because of foreign currency restrictions, but their native insect colonies are a permanent presence here.

Explaining the Looting

As Argentines continued to argue over the causes of the wave of looting that took place over the past several days, I concluded that “If you don’t know what’s going on, well, you’re not alone.” One far more astute observer than I has pointed out the difficulties of assigning blame or responsibility in Argentina’s byzantine street politics – the Argentine-born Chilean-American novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman, in an interview with Argentina’s Ñ magazine, was asked the following question: “You have said that nobody has been able to explain Peronism to you in a reasonable manner. How would you explain it to a third party?”

Dorfman, whom I know slightly, gave the following response: “If I could explain that to a second party, or third, or a fourth, I might have written a best-seller about it.”

Weekend Wrapup: Puyehue, Evita & Evo

Today’s entry offers practical information on Chile’s ongoing volcanic eruption, which is disrupting travel in Argentina and even around the globe, plus coverage of Eva Perón’s jewelry and Bolivian president Evo Morales’s self-appointed status as a TV critic.

Lava Plugging Puyehue?

To this point, the Volcán Puyehue-Cordón Caulle eruption has been mostly ash and pumice, blanketing parts of nearby Argentina - most notably the scenic lakeside resort of Villa La Angostura - in a dry rain that’s collapsed houses, paralyzed transportation, and killed livestock that can’t find forage. Argentina’s federal government has declared Neuquén province a disaster area and now, according to Montevideo-based Mercopress, Chile’s Servicio Nacional de Geología y Minería (Sernageomin, National Geology and Mining Service) reports that a “cork” of lava in the caldera could trigger an explosive event. It is currently under red alert; the lava flow in the photograph above dates from the 1960 eruption.

According to LAN Airlines, its Chilean domestic flights to southern destinations (including nearby Puerto Montt) as far as Punta Arenas are operating normally. The luxury Termas de Puyehue hot springs resort (depicted above) - virtually in the shadow of the volcano - claims to be “operating totally normally,” even though Sernageomin has indicated the possibility of lahars in the nearby Río Golgol drainage. The Argentine side, though, is a different story - Bariloche’s airport, in particular, is off limits, though the Buenos Aires Herald reports that service to the southern Patagonia cities of Río Gallegos, El Calafate and Ushuaia has recommenced.

Found in Italy: Evita’s Family Jewels
Eva Perón always claimed that she and her husband, President Juan Domingo Perón, had the best interests of the Argentine people at heart - at least, those who were not part of the “oligarchy.” A couple days ago, police recovered US$9 million worth of the late first lady’s jewelry, including a tiara that was a gift from Dutch royalty before her death in 1952, that would seem more appropriate to an oligarch (For what it’s worth, Holland’s current Princess Máxima Zorreguieta is an Argentine who would definitely satisfy Evita’s standards for an oligarch).

Stolen from a Spanish jeweler in 2009, Evita’s baubles were recovered in a joint Spanish-Italian operation in the city of Milan - appropriately enough, the city where Argentine military dictatorships and their successors hid her corpse, in an unmarked grave, from 1955 to 1971.

The War on Soaps: Evo’s Media Blitzkrieg
Everywhere, except in true dictatorships, it’s common for the government and the press to have an adversarial relationship - following the lead of her late husband/predecessor Néstor Kirchner, Argentine President Cristina Fernández has an ongoing feud with the country’s two main dailies, the conservative La Nación and the centrist Clarín, for presumably unfair coverage. Bolivian president Evo Morales, though, may have set a new standard for media criticism, having blamed telenovelas (soap operas) for at least 60 percent of the country’s divorces.

Morales (photograph above courtesy of Agencia Brasil), an ideological ally of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, has deepened his criticism to castigate action movies as a major cause of violent crime: “My point, although others might jeer at me or bait me, is that those films about violence and terrorism, that cause family problems, should be banned.” Then, of course, all will be well in this almost stereotypically unstable country (which, in fairness, seems a better place today than it was under an endless succession of military regimes that, when I met my Argentine wife there in 1981, enforced a 10 p.m. curfew throughout its territory).

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A Farewell to Sábato, and a Giveaway

The battered paperback in the photograph above is my personal copy of Ernesto Sábato’s On Heroes and Tombs, possibly the definitive Buenos Aires novel but, apparently, no longer in print in English. Far less celebrated for his literary output than his countryman Jorge Luis Borges (who never wrote a novel), Sábato died last Friday at age 99, less than two months short of his 100th birthday. In the immediate aftermath of his death, he was the subject of a tribute at the Feria del Libro, the annual Buenos Aires book fair that will continue through next Monday.

A Communist and a physicist in his youth, a democrat, novelist and painter in his maturity, Sabato was an indefatigable campaigner for human rights. He made his literary reputation with his first novel, The Tunnel (1948), and followed it with On Heroes and Tombs (1961) and The Angel of Darkness (1974, known in Spanish as “Abaddon el Exterminador”). Andrew Graham-Yooll’s obituary of Sábato in the Buenos Aires Herald provides a succinct summary of his career, from both a literary and political perspective.

Not being a literary critic (unlike Graham-Yooll, who is an acquaintance of mine), I can’t do full justice to Sábato’s literary career or personality. Still, I found On Heroes and Tombs absorbing not just because of the tragic tale of an Argentine family in the turmoil of the 1950s. It’s also because the novel is literally grounded in place - many of its scenes occur in and around city landmarks that are still recognizable today, even if they’re not always part of the tourist circuit. A novel within the novel, titled “Report on the Blind,” may be a metaphor for life in the Argentine capital, but it’s equally fascinating if read literally.

As a public intellectual, Sábato opposed human rights abuses under the Peronist governments of the 1940s and 1950s, but also under the military regime that overthrew Perón in 1955. His most visible contribution to public life, though, is his role as president of the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desparición de Personas (CONADEP), created by President Raúl Alfonsín to investigate human rights abuses under the notorious Proceso military dictatorship of 1976-83. The commission’s landmark report, under the title Nunca Más (Never Again) provided concrete evidence of extrajudicial disappearances and executions that led to the successful prosecution of the junta leaders and many of their underlings.

Win This Book!

No, not my precious copy of On Heroes and Tombs, but rather the new fourth edition of Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires. I will award copies of my own guidebook to the city to the first two readers who can identify the church in the photograph below, which plays a key role in On Heroes and Tombs, by either its formal or colloquial name. Since I don’t want to make the contest too difficult, I’ll provide one additional clue: it’s in the northern Buenos Aires barrio of Belgrano. Please send all entries to my personal email, in the header above, not to the comments function of this blog.

¿Mañana es San Néstor?

Personality politics and demagogic spectacle have long played major roles in Argentine public life. The epitome of this, of course, was the way Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Eva Duarte summoned their partisans to the Plaza de Mayo, promoting a populist agenda that made them objects of reverence to a large segment of the public. It’s no accident that the late journalist and novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez titled his fictional biography Santa Evita. In a similar vein, Mariano Ben Plotkin chose Mañana es San Perón for his cultural history of Peronist Argentina.

In English, Plotkin’s title means “Tomorrow is Saint Perón’s Day,” and the book deals with the way in which Peronism transformed Argentina’s political culture - or, rather, how it advanced already existing authoritarian trends in the country through its manipulation of cultural symbols. According to a summary in the American Historical Review, Plotkin “aims to describe the development of the mechanisms used by the regime to promote political consensus and mobilization: the myths, symbols, and rituals employed to strengthen its legitimacy; and the techniques of Peronist bureaucrats to invest the persons of Perón and his wife with charisma…”

Martínez, (who also wrote The Perón Novel, a fictional memoir of the caudillo), once referred to his fellow Argentines as “cadaver cultists” who honored their most famous figures not on the day of their birth, but of their death. That was apparent when, in July of 2002, adoring Peronists thronged the Cementerio de la Recoleta on the 50th anniversary of Evita’s death (pictured above), even as the Museo Evita opened its doors simultaneously in Palermo (only about two blocks from the apartment we had just purchased).

The latest figure in the parade of Peronist symbols may be former President Néstor Kirchner, who died suddenly of heart failure last October 27th. Less than two months after his death, the main street of his hometown of Río Gallegos was renamed in his honor and, on passing through Río Gallegos a few days ago, curiosity prompted me to visit his family crypt in the local cemetery.

Nearly surrounded by tributes, with a guard always on duty, Kirchner’s tomb (pictured at top) has already become something of a pilgrimage site, and the municipal tourist office readily marked it on the map for me. With its banners, testimonials and floral wreaths, it’s dominantly a political tribute at present, but that doesn’t mean that at some point Kirchner won’t acquire the same secular sainthood that the Peróns now enjoy. Certainly Kirchner and his wife, the current president Cristina Fernández, considered themselves heirs of the Perón legacy, however complex and contradictory that legacy may be.

Certainly the Peronist government of Buenos Aires province thinks the same way: recently, it introduced a measure that makes disorderly street politics part of civic education: graffiti, picketing (blocking roads and highways), and escraches (public shamings) are to become part of secondary school curricula. Meanwhile, as I passed through the coastal town of Piedra Buena, I photographed a campaign billboard asserting that mayor Pepe Bodlovic would be “always with Néstor.” Perhaps he’s so distraught at his ally's demise as to want to join him? Or could this indicate an early step toward sainthood?

That said, according to Nicolás Kugler, my assistant in updating the current edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia, not everybody in Río Gallegos is enthusiastic about the renaming of the former Avenida General Roca. For what it’s worth, on the updated city map that the municipal tourism office proudly showed me, it’s still Avenida Roca.

Streets and Roads: Southern Cone Oddities

Today's digest consists of observations on streets and roads in Argentina and Chile.

Welcome to Danger!

Is it dangerous to travel in the Southern Cone countries? Well, in the process of updating the current edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia, I’ve driven about 1,700 kilometers since leaving Santiago on December 8th. In the course of doing so, I occasionally encounter delays for road works that, almost invariably, warn drivers of the hazards ahead: “Peligro a 100 M” (Danger 100 Meters) is the common phrase.

So pervasive are these signs, in fact, that there’s a joke about them. As a driver proceeds down the road, he spots a series of them: “Peligro a 500 M,” “Peligro a 200 M,” “Peligro a 100 M” and, finally, “¡Bienvenidos a Peligro!” (“Welcome to Danger!).

WiFi v. Toilets
From La Serena in the north to Puerto Montt in the south, Copec gas stations along Ruta 5, Chile’s segment of the Panamerican Highway, are not only places to stop for fuel but also to use the facilities and check email. With no password protection, Entel’s Internet services are free but, at the same time, Copec charges its clients 250 pesos (about US$0.50) to use the toilets. What this says about Chilean priorities, I’m not quite sure.

The Politics of Names
Nearly thirty years ago, when I first lived in Buenos Aires, it was in the central Congreso district where my in-laws had a small apartment on a street named Cangallo, after a Peruvian locality that played a key role in the South American wars of independence. Until 2002, when we bought an apartment in Palermo, we continued to stay there whenever we were in Buenos Aires.

In 1984, though, we found that we no longer lived on Cangallo, which had borne that name for more than a century. After the return to democracy in 1983, the street name miraculously became “Teniente General Juan Domingo Perón” (the caudillo’s diehard admirers almost always refer to him by his military rank rather than as president, despite the fact that he was elected to the office three times). During the military dictatorship of 1976-83, of course, Perón’s name was anathema but, under the civilian government of Raúl Alfonsín (a Radical rather than a Peronist), the city was free to honor the memory of the man who, for better or worse, transformed Argentina’s political culture (for what it’s worth, despite their misleading name, Argentina’s Radicals are a middle-of-the-road party).

In reality, changes in street names are commonplace with almost every change of government in Argentina, and often at other times - if there’s a political point to be made. The most recent example is the renaming of the main avenue of the Patagonian city of Río Gallegos - on Saturday, the Avenida General Roca, originally named for the 19th-century military commander who defeated (some would say slaughtered) the Patagonian Mapuche, became “Avenida Dr. Néstor C. Kirchner,” after the former president who died of a massive heart attack in October.

Kirchner, a former Gallegos resident and governor of Santa Cruz province before defeating two-term president Carlos Menem to win a long-shot race in 2003, is certainly the highest-profile public figure ever to emerge onto the national scene from Argentine Patagonia, so the honor is not undeserved. At the same time, as a guidebook writer, these changes present me a challenge - as I and my friend Nicolás Kugler update the current edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia, we’ll have to change every address on the main drag in our coverage of the city, and on the map that accompanies it.

Navimag Ferries, the Panamericana, & the Peronist Diet

One of Chilean Patagonia’s most notable attractions is the scenic Patagonian fjords trip from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales with the Navimag ferry company who, recently, have renamed their car/passenger vessel M/N Magallanes as the M/N Evangelistas, after an earlier vessel on the route. More importantly, according to product manager Adrien Champagnat, Navimag has remodeled the Magallanes to include some more spacious (and expensive) accommodations with greater amenities, though this will remain “the poor man’s cruise” - with cozy but comfortable budget bunks for backpackers.

I’ve done the trip myself at least half a dozen times but, at the end of January, I will do it from south to north for the first time - I’ve always traveled from Puerto Montt to Natales before. Tentatively, I will be giving a couple digital slide presentations on Chilean and Argentine Patagonia on board.

Meanwhile, in January, Navimag will retire the smaller M/N Puerto Edén, which used to ply this “inside passage” route and has been providing service from Puerto Montt to Puerto Chacabuco and Laguna San Rafael, in the Aisén region. This will leave Puerto Chacabuco (and the regional capital of Coyhaique, about an hour east) without ferry service for the first time in my memory, but Navimag’s sister company Navimag Cruceros will now sail to Laguna San Rafael from Puerto Montt, after least for this summer, on the Mare Australis, one of its small (100-passenger) cruise vessels (its twin sister, the Via Australis, appears in the photo below).

This puts Cruceros in more direct competition with Cruceros Skorpios, which has been doing this route for decades - as a ferry company, Navimag could never match the amenities on Skorpios, but Cruceros can match or surpass them. At the same time, that leaves the Naviera Austral passenger/car ferries from the city of Castro (on the Isla Grande de Chiloé) to Chaitén as the major connection to the Carretera Austral and Coyhaique; I can only presume that commercial truck traffic to Coyhaique will now go through Argentina, as certain sections of the Carretera Austral are difficult or impossible for 18-wheelers.

The Road South
On Wednesday, for the first time since the February earthquake, I drove south from Santiago for about 500 km. It was a holiday, so traffic was light but even so, the road damages that I could see were minimal and detours few - in some places traffic was reduced to a single lane in each direction while repairs proceeded on the other side. In fact, someone not paying close attention might even assume that this was just routine maintenance or replacement but, in a few places, the roadway undulated, the guardrails were twisted, and there were temporary supports beneath overpasses as more urgent work took place elsewhere.

I spent the night at El Rincón, a secluded German-run guesthouse roughly 120 km from the epicenter. Owned and run by Winfried and Elke Lohmar, it’s a rambling wooden structure, with extensive gardens, that bent but did not break despite the historic 8.8 magnitude of the event. They went without electricity for four days and the cell phone networks were saturated, but they had plenty of drinking water stored and were able to haul water from the nearby river to flush the toilets. The greatest problem was that their bookcases tumbled and their contents were scattered (the bookcases are now attached to the walls).

The Evita Diet?

Meanwhile, according to the online magazine Planeta Joy, there’s a new trend in Buenos Aires restaurants - over the past several months, three Peronist restaurants have risen up, so to speak, in the Argentine capital, and another in the Buenos Aires province capital of La Plata. In a country whose politics are so personalized, and which often looks to past glories rather than future goals, nostalgia for Juan and Evita Perón is unsurprising, but it’s ironic that the gourmet ghetto of Palermo could become the locus of a gastronomic theme park inaccessible to their “shirtless” followers. However unconsciously, though, Peronism thrives on irony.

Bolivia Sees the Sea; Argentina's Sea Change

In the War of the Pacific, which lasted from 1879 to 1884, Chile acquired about a third of its current territory, in the northerly Atacama Desert, from Peru and Bolivia. That marks the last time that Bolivia enjoyed direct access to the ocean but, with the cooperation of Peruvian president Alán García, the landlocked country will soon do so again - Peru has granted a strip of coastal access about 200 kilometers (roughly 120 miles) north of the Chilean border for Bolivia to do as it pleases - including establishing a naval presence there. At present, Bolivia’s navy is confined to Lake Titicaca (shared between Peru and Bolivia), and the eastward-draining rivers of the Amazon Basin.

The rights and wrongs of the war aside - and it’s easy to argue that the nitrate-rich Atacama would have contributed to prosperity for both Peru and Bolivia as it did to Chile - it’s questionable whether this “outlet to the sea” for which Bolivia has clamored for more than a century will revive anything other than Bolivian nationalism. In reality, for more than two decades since a paved road from the Chilean port of Arica (pictured above, it was part of Peru in the 19th century) reached the Bolivian border, Bolivia’s access to the sea is better than it ever was - for commercial ends at least. By far the closest and quickest route from the Andean highlands to the Pacific, Arica is also the place where Bolivians take their beach holidays.

In the 19th century, when Bolivia’s main port was the now crumbling ghost town of Cobija (pictured above, Cobija served as a location for the recent James Bond flick Quantum of Solace), it exported silver from the bonanza mine at Potosí, though Antofagasta eventually succeeded it. Today, though, it probably means that Bolivia will build a Pacific fleet that it doesn’t need, and can’t afford, in peacetime - primarily because of a long-lived irredentist grudge against Chile.

Kirchner's Candidacy Expires

Across the Andes, meanwhile, Argentina is experiencing a sea change of its own with the fatal heart attack of former president Néstor Kirchner on Wednesday morning in the tourist center of El Calafate - a town which the Santa Cruz province native helped put on the map with massive infusions of capital that helped build an international quality airport for the gateway to the Moreno Glacier (pictured above). With his widow, the current president Cristina Fernández, he also built the town’s sprawling Casa Los Sauces luxury hotel complex (pictured below), where accommodations go for around US$700 per night. The Kirchners maintain their own house on a contiguous property.

Kirchner, who served as president from 2003 to 2007 before being succeeded by Fernández, was by most accounts a notorious Type A personality who had had several other health scares in recent months. Widely considered the leading candidate to return to the presidency next year, he leaves a political vacuum despite the immediate outpouring of support for his widow from along the entire political spectrum. Soon enough, Argentines will learn whether Fernández can survive, politically, without the man that many of them considered her co-president, even as he held no formal executive power.

Stanley Harbour to Dársena Sur? The "Black Pig" Returns

Nobody will ever duplicate the photograph below, of Ross Road in the Falkland Islands’ capital of Stanley, because the vantage point from which it was taken no longer exists - well, it does still exist, but it’s now in Buenos Aires. That, of course, requires some explanation.

Stanley's Ross Road, as seen from the mast of the "Black Pig" in 1987

In 1986-7, when I spent a year-plus as a Fulbright-Hays scholar in the Islands, there were still many reminders of the 74-day war that began in April 1982, when Argentina’s tottering military dictatorship bought themselves a few extra months in power by invading and occupying the remote South Atlantic archipelago, which Argentines know as the Malvinas. I have no desire to go into the rights and wrongs of British colonialism and Argentine irredentism here, but only to point out that the war left a palpable impact on the islands - many of the minefields planted to deter the British counter-invasion, for instance, still remain on the beaches at Gypsy Cove (near Stanley) and other locations.

Other impacts, though, were more transitory, and one of those was the 494-ton oil tender known as the Yehuin, which was left in Stanley Harbour after Argentine forces surrendered. Viewed as military surplus, the homely “Black Pig” (so called for its paint job) briefly belonged to an English friend of mine who often puttered around the water to the consternation of the local harbormaster, who considered that the vessel was not seaworthy and that my friend - a talented jack-of-all-trades - was not qualified to sail it.

In my last months in Stanley, the Black Pig was docked at the Falkland Islands Company jetty at the east end of Ross Road and, one fine clear day, I walked aboard the ship and climbed the mast to take the photograph above, which looks west. As Stanley is a town of low-slung houses, this was the only place in town to gain an aerial perspective on its main commercial street, which looks very different nearly a quarter century later.

At some point, though, the ex-Yehuin was again sold off to Spain’s Cintra company and, now Panama-flagged as the Audax II, it showed up in Buenos Aires’s Dársena Sur port area a couple weeks ago. There, a ragtag “Resistencia Patriótica” (Patriotic Resistance) symbolically reclaimed the ship by tagging it with spray paint Peronist scribbles - an event which they commemorated with a Youtube video (see below) that borders on self-parody - raising an Argentine flag, for instance, on the same mast I climbed for my photograph. Of course, acknowledging international maritime tradition, the ship was already flying an Argentine flag.

Apparently, in fact, there was a 1999 decree to declare the Yehuin part of the country’s naval heritage, but no congressional action ever implemented the measure. The Resistencia Patriótica, meanwhile, has asked a federal judge to impound it but, for my part, I’m simply pleased the Black Pig was there when I needed it.