Opportunity on Ice?

Yesterday at 11:20 a.m., Argentine time, the last remnants of the ice bridge connecting the Perito Moreno glacier to the mainland collapsed, and a torrent of ice and water streamed into Lago Argentino. Unfortunately, the website that was to bring the live event to the world seems to have dropped the ball or, worse, taken the ball home and hidden it. For much of yesterday and the day before, a site message said that bad weather prevented live feeds, despite reports of clear skies; since the rupture occurred, the site only links to poor-quality videos of an uncertain age, and they are obviously not of yesterday's event. I've contacted a friend in the provincial tourism office for an explanation, but haven't heard anything back yet.

This sort of situation brings out the cynicism and paranoia in Argentines. On the website of the Buenos Aires daily La Nación, reader comments included speculation that the footage was given exclusively to national government cronies. Admittedly, the right-of-center La Nación is no friend of the government, especially in the current confrontation with farmers over export taxes, but its webmaster deleted so many comments that one can only imagine how intemperate those might have been. One sarcastic commentator said that "The glacier's collapse left the president without any excuse to fly to Calafate - which is what she'd rather do when there are clouds on the horizon." The deleted comments were presumably far harsher, and probably even more personal, than that.

The Santa Cruz province tourism website does post several articles on the glacier's rupture, but does not translate them into English or any other language (though the rest of the site has English, German, Italian and French options). The Secretaría Nacional de Turismo, in charge of promoting Argentina around the world, makes no mention of the event.

This was a spectacular opportunity to promote the Moreno Glacier and Argentina to the world at large. Unfortunately, with everyone seemingly making the worst of a good situation, that opportunity may have been lost.

Live Ice

As the rupture of the Moreno Glacier approaches, the Santa Cruz provincial government has installed a live web cam so that spectators around the world can watch the event live. According to the daily Clarín, provincial authorities are asking airlines to add flights to El Calafate from the country's principal cities but, given the shaky logistics of Argentine air travel, this seems improbable.

Meanwhile, Wednesday (July 9) is Argentina's Independence Day. After observing the event at Tucumán's Casa de la Independencia (pictured here), President Cristina Fernández is expected to fly to El Calafate to witness the rupture, presuming it hasn't already happened. That's apparently a higher priority than any compromise with Argentine farmers who object to government export duties; her frosty attitude toward them has stalled efforts to repair a different sort of rupture - a political problem that needs a conciliatory solution.

As the Water Rises, the Glacier's Gonna Burst

One of the world's great natural spectacles is the rupture of Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier, which happens after the moving ice blocks the Brazo Rico (Rico Arm) of Lago Argentino, in Parque Nacional Los Glaciares. Water builds up behind this natural "dam" until the ice can no longer hold the weight of the water behind it, and it explodes in a rush of ice and water toward the main glacial trough.

This happened 15 times in the 20th century, and most recently in 2004, when I missed it by just a couple days. It's always been a summer event, as optimum seasonal temperatures presumably weaken the ice, but authorities are expecting the glacier's first winter rupture at any time. Today I hope to consult a climatologist friend, who's worked on the glacier, to get his take on any link to global warming.

Only a handful of visitors, about 400, are on the scene, compared with the many thousands who visit the park every summer. There's a good report, with video footage, at the website of the Buenos Aires daily Clarín.

Putting the Gloves On, Taking Them Back Off

Boxing may be a declining sport, but boxers have long been cultural icons in Argentina. It all started with heavyweight Luis Ángel Firpo, the "Wild Bull of the Pampas," who knocked Jack Dempsey out of the Madison Square Garden ring in 1923, as depicted by artist George Bellows at the time. The first reports of Firpo's punch triggered euphoria in the streets of Buenos Aires but, unfortunately for Firpo, Dempsey recovered to score a second-round KO. Firpo still became a legend and, with the help of his wealthy patron Félix Bunge, the working-class kid even managed to finagle a niche in Buenos Aires's elite Recoleta Cemetery.

Other Argentine boxers may have had greater success in the ring, but had worse luck - or self-imposed misfortune - outside it. High-living heavyweight Oscar Bonavena contended for the title against both Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, but died from a gunshot wound at Nevada's notorious Mustang Ranch brothel in 1976. Light heavyweight champion Víctor Galíndez retired from the sport after suffering two detached retinas; switching to stock-car racing, he died in 1980 when struck by another vehicle as he waited in the repair pit. Imprisoned for killing his second wife, former world middleweight champion Carlos Monzón executed his own death sentence in an automobile accident while on furlough in 1995.

Argentine boxing may be making a comeback, though, as the flamboyant U.S. promoter Don King visited Buenos Aires this week to watch Hugo Garay defeat the Ukrainian Yuri Barashian for the light heavyweight title. King, in a TV interview at the first link in this paragraph, spoke highly of Galíndez. As his own career advances, Garay may want to ponder the fate of his predecessors.

Last night's fight took place at Luna Park, a landmark covered stadium seating some 8,000 people. It also hosts an extensive calendar of concerts, basketball games and other events; international performers who have played here include Frank Sinatra, James Brown, Luciano Pavarotti and many others.

At Luna Park, more than 2,500 porteños paid 50 centavos admission each to listen to the Dempsey-Firpo fight - such broadcasts were a novelty in the 1920s. Later, in 1944, Eva Duarte maneuvered to meet Juan Perón at a political meeting here, and the rest is history. "Evita" may not have been a boxer, but she certainly became a fighter.

The South Atlantic as Biography

In last week's mail, I received an invitation to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in London, for the book launch of the Dictionary of Falklands Biography. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make the trip, but the project should appeal to anyone interested in the South Atlantic Ocean, Patagonia, and the Falklands (known to Argentines as the Malvinas) in particular. Most of the contributors to the book's short bios are British, but there is one prominent Argentine historian and one Chilean. Some entries are autobiographical.

Lack of time and money prohibit my attending the launch, but the book deserves attention. Covering the period prior to the Argentine invasion of 1982, it's been a labor of love for former Islands Governor David Tatham, who invited me to contribute a piece on Scottish sheepfarmer John Hamilton (pictured here), who emigrated to the islands in the 1880s but spent much of his life in Chile and Argentina as well. In the mid-1980s, I had spent a year-plus in the islands on a Fulbright-Hays grant while researching my PhD dissertation in geography at the University of California, Berkeley; during that period, I did some biographical research and writing on Hamilton with materials from the local archive. While I also did some university teaching in the ensuing years, I got sidetracked into guidebook writing (which. however, has allowed me to revisit the Islands several times) and thus never published that material until now.

Hamilton is an interesting figure because he embodies the ambivalence and ambiguity of the relations between the Islands and the continent. He acquired substantial properties in Argentine Patagonia and, in 1904, he married Olivia Heap, a Scotswoman who had been a nurse at the British Hospital in Buenos Aires. His daughter Penelope later married an Argentine.

Even as his Argentine properties prospered, Hamilton kept a close watch on the Falklands and, when opportunities arose, he began to acquire property there. In 1922, for instance, he bought Beaver Island and adjacent islets; shortly thereafter he purchased Weddell Island and the Passage Islands, and then Saunders Island (pictured here) in the mid-1930s. He also owned property in Stanley.

While he lived mostly in Argentina, Hamilton was neither a speculator, nor a stereotypical absentee landlord. He took positive action to improve pastures on badly overgrazed Weddell, including stock reductions and replanting of tussac grass, and he imported coniferous trees from Punta Arenas as ornamentals and windbreaks. He also attempted to diversify the farm economy through minor industries such as seal oiling (soon abandoned) and the introduction of exotic mammals such as foxes, skunks and guanacos from the South American continent. The idea was that their pelts, as well as those of South American otters, would find overseas markets; ironically, foxes proved a plague to West Falkland farmers.

Hamilton kept much of his money locally, with more than £90,000 in Stanley's Government Savings Bank even during the 1930s Great Depression (when he donated several thousand pounds for construction of lighthouses on East and West Falkland, and improvements to King Edward Memorial Hospital). He also researched road-building in the countryside at a time when such projects were so visionary as to be almost hallucinatory.

In 1940 Hamilton moved to Buenos Aires because of a chronic eye problem and, when ongoing treatment required him to remain nearby, he purchased a stud farm at the locality of Merlo, west of the Argentine capital. He died in September 1945, survived by his daughter Penelope Alvarez.

Unfortunately, the Falklands properties became a bone of contention because of their ownership by Hamilton's Argentine heirs; while Hamilton had once attemped to move his headquarters from London to Stanley, he ran into complications with Argentina, which may have seen his properties as a foothold in the Falklands. Instead, he incorporated offshore in Jersey.

After his death, many Islanders argued for Hamilton's expropriation as part of an ambitious land reform scheme that never came to fruition. In 1987, five years after the South Atlantic War, the Hamilton estate finally sold Beaver, Weddell, Saunders and surrounding islets to local residents. In a visit to Weddell only a few months before that took place, I copied the photograph above; a few years later, Hamilton's handsome Weddell house, with its spectacular interior woodwork, burned to the ground in a chimney fire - the photograph with it.

War and Peace in Tierra del Fuego

In late 1978, only a couple months before I first traveled to Chile and Argentina, the two countries nearly went to war over the possession of three small islands in the Beagle Channel, east of Isla Navarino, in Chilean Tierra del Fuego (directly opposite the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, which is divided between the two). At the time, both countries were under notorious military dictatorships, and only a handful of foreign visitors came to enjoy one of the planet's most stunning combinations of sea, sky, land and ice (Navarino is the island in the background of this photograph, which was taken from the mountains behind the Argentine city of Ushuaia).

Fortunately - it was a close call - the two countries agreed to a papal mediation that averted war, but that did not mean all was well. When I first saw Ushuaia in April 1979, shop windows were full of posters with the uncompromising slogan ¡Nunca Cederemos lo Nuestro! ("We Will Never Give Up What is Ours!"). Later that month, as I hitchhiked from Bariloche back to Chile, the Argentines had not yet dismantled gun emplacements on what is the second most important border crossing between the two countries (no military preparations of any sort were apparent on the Chilean side).

It's a tangible measure of progress, in what is now one of the world's most peaceful regions, that the Chilean Senate has invited Pope Benedict XVI to celebrate the successful mediation later this year. According to Senator Carlos Bianchi of Punta Arenas, "The idea is to get Argentine and Chilean members of Parliament together both in Patagonia and Antarctica to commemorate thirty years of peace.” Near the Santa Cruz province town of El Chaltén, at Lago del Desierto, where a Chilean policemen died in a firefight with Argentine gendarmes (border guards) in 1965, the Argentines have erected a respectful memorial to their former enemy.

Perhaps the delegations can meet in the hamlet of Puerto Williams, on scenic Navarino, where the Chilean navy still maintains a base - though it's much smaller than the Argentine base in Ushuaia. For any on-board ceremony, though, they'll have to requisition a bigger vessel than the one I found anchored on my last visit there. Despite a reputation for military bellicosity, South America's defense spending is world's smallest, as a percentage of GDP.

Chile is Whale-Friendly

This week, for the first time, the International Whaling Commission is meeting in Santiago. Yesterday at Quintay, a former whaling station south of Valparaíso, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet took advantage of the occasion to declare all 43 cetacean species in Chilean waters to be national monuments.

In Chile, a national monument is usually an archaeological or architectural landmark, and it may also be a protected area comparable to a national park (though usually much smaller). The designation can also apply, however, to "regions, objects, or living species of plants or animals of aesthetic, historic, or scientific interest, to which is given absolute protection." There is plenty of precedent for Bachelet's action, which in effect creates a coastal reserve of 3.3 million square miles within Chile's 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone; other species enjoying such protection include the alerce (falsh larch) tree, the Andean condor, and the Andean huemul (a endemic deer that appears on Chile's coat-of-arms). Marine mammals such as Commerson's dolphin (pictured here) will join them on the list.

In Argentina, the southern right whale that breeds at Península Valdés enjoys similar status under the national park service, but this measure is less far-reaching that the new Chilean measure (which drew immediate objections from Japan, which does whaling for "scientific research" in the southern oceans and Antarctica).

At Home in Buenos Aires

Over the last several years, Buenos Aires has made frequent appearances in the travel sections of daily newspapers and in travel magazines of various orientations. Now, though, it's starting to crack the mass media in other categories, as happened last week when, fortuitously, we saw our own Palermo apartment on HGTV's House Hunters International.

That's a little misleading, as I'll try to explain. In the program in question, a couple from Punta del Este (Uruguay) were relocating to Buenos Aires for professional reasons, and needed to find housing for themselves and their two Labrador retrievers. It meant downsizing, especially for the dogs, and one of the apartments they visited was a spacious flat in a new building just two doors away from our rather more modest unit (whose exterior was visible in some of the street shots). The view of the café across the street (pictured above) is virtually identical to ours but, in a city where people often leave their dogs on balconies during the day, this apartment's semi-circular balcony was not large enough for two 80-pound Labs (one of our neighbors has a rather shy and quiet Rottweiler who spends much of the day on theirs). Eventually, the couple settled for a smaller but luminous Recoleta apartment with a larger balcony.

Buenos Aires's idiosyncrasies, as seen by a foreign resident, also come out in an insightful article by novelist Maxine Swann in last week's New York Times Home & Garden section. Swann points out, for instance, that "Mentioning you have an appointment with an analyst, or that your child does, is comparable to saying you have a hair appointment," even though "the Argentines I was meeting did not seem particularly interested in self-improvement." That may be the case, of course, unless you consider "Tango Therapy" as a means of self-improvement (a few years back, during the 2002 economic meltdown, one dance instructor offered "Self-Help Tango" during the annual Festival de Tango).

Swann points out some of the pitfalls that anyone living in the city may encounter, such as improvised repairs in her Chacarita rental that led one plumber to say "What the hell is this?" Her landlord, meanwhile, built a rooftop pool that once flooded her apartment, and she missed the opportunity to buy an apartment after the meltdown, though she and her Argentine then husband managed to rent a spacious Recoleta flat at bargain prices.

Nothing that Swann writes will really surprise anyone who's lived here, rather than just visiting as a tourist, but she does a good job of summarizing the rewards, as well as the drawbacks, of this fascinating city. It's essential reading for anyone considering a leap into the Baires real estate market. For what it's worth, she says her next novel will be set in Buenos Aires.