Pulp Friction: Argentina, Uruguay and The Hague

Just two days before Earth Day, the International Court of Justice in The Hague settled, presumably, a longstanding dispute between Argentina and Uruguay over a pulp plant on the Río Uruguay, the border between the two countries. The Finnish company Botnia built the US$1.1 billion plant in the Uruguayan city of Fray Bentos, across the San Martín bridge from the Argentine city of Gualeguaychú, in Entre Ríos province. Fray Bentos was once the site of the Liebig Extract of Meat Company, which produced canned corned beef that was widely distributed in Europe, and the bouillon cubes known as Oxo; its site is now a museum.

Best known as the home of Argentina’s Carnaval del País (National Carnival), Gualeguaychú has acquired an undesirable notoriety over the past several years as a handful of protestors have, in effect, controlled the border by blocking the bridge over the river. The Court’s Solomonic ruling allowed both sides to claim victory: it agreed with Argentina that Uruguay violated a 1975 treaty by not consulting with Argentina over the plant, but also agreed with Uruguay that there was no evidence that it was causing any pollution whatsoever. Uruguay will not need to move the plant - the most expensive project in Uruguayan history - or pay any sort of compensation to Argentina. It will, however, need to consult with Argentina on any further developments on the fluvial border between the two countries.

The ruling, though, does not touch on the controversial issue of the border blockade, which for four years has virtually eliminated traffic and commerce through what, historically, has been the busiest border crossing between the two countries. In effect, the administration of former President Néstor Kirchner and the current government of his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, have abdicated control of the border - normally administered by Argentine customs and immigration. Technically, it’s still controlled by customs and immigration, but picketers have blocked the approaches and threatened anyone who wants to travel to Uruguay. Buses from Buenos Aires now have to use more northerly crossings at Colón (100 km north) or Concordia (a further 100 km), adding time and expense to any trip to Montevideo.

The issue, according to an editorial in yesterday's Buenos Aires Herald, is that “Ultimately no court in the world can tell an administration how to deal with the chronic domestic matter of protesters who block roads to voice demands. It is the President who after The Hague must now address the same question pending since 2006: should authorities allow an international bridge to be blocked forever?” According to an article in the Buenos Aires daily Clarín, meanwhile, the intransigent protestors do not appear ready to abandon their blockade, having refused an offer from the governor of Entre Ríos to even discuss the topic.

Meanwhile, Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana has called on the protestors to respect the Court’s ruling, and Fernández de Kirchner is due to meet with newly elected Uruguayan President José Mujica next Wednesday, a conclave at which the topic will undoubtedly come up. It’s still anybody’s guess, though, whether Uruguayans will be able to attend the 2011 Carnaval in Gualeguaychú.

Evita Plays Oakland?

In Buenos Aires, I live just a couple blocks from the Museo Evita, and only a 20-minute walk or so from her tomb at the Cementerio de la Recoleta, which I revisit regularly in the course of updating Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires and my other titles. The cemetery has always been an attraction (though not just for Evita) but the museum, which opened in 2002 on the 50th anniversary of her death, has become a significant destination as well.

Evita’s post-mortem odyssey, fictionalized in the late Tomas Eloy Martínez’s novel Santa Evita, is a surrealistic tale made even more outrageous in that most of what Martínez wrote is fact: her elaborate embalming by the mysterious Spanish doctor Pedro Ara (pictured here, with Evita), her “residence” at the CGT labor union headquarters, her corpse-napping by the military (which included a stint with an infatuated officer), the surreptitious shipping to an anonymous grave in Italy, and a post-mortem prisoner exchange (for the assassinated General Pedro Aramburu) that left her at Juan Domingo Perón’s Madrid residence-in-exile. Finally, after Perón’s death in 1973, his widow Isabel (who had lived alongside the mummy in Madrid and succeeded him as president) brought Evita to Argentina, where she eventually ended up in the Duarte family crypt beneath her birth father.

It may be hard to imagine a more implausible story, but on a recent visit to Robert Wright’s exceptional Recoleta website, I encountered a brief blurb on San Francisco author Mark Coggins’s The Big Wake-Up, an action-mystery novel based on the premise that the real Evita - there were in fact several replicas of her corpse - had ended up in Oakland’s historic Mountain View Cemetery, barely a ten-minute walk from my California home. Wherever I go, apparently, Evita’s never far away!

Having recently read the book, I don’t intend to give away too much of the story, but it involves Coggins’s wise-cracking private investigator August Riordan and two parties that want Evita’s body: an Argentine politician and his military allies, and an outlandish disciple of Dr. Ara’s who tries to embalm everybody she can in the process. With an obvious debt to the great Raymond Chandler, it’s fun bedside reading before or after a trip to Buenos Aires, or on the plane.

Argentina's Bi-Bicentennial

Argentina may be unique among the world’s nations in celebrating two independence days. The first is 25 de Mayo (May 25th), which coincides with the 1810 Revolution that declared the Spanish viceroy in Buenos Aires illegitimate (because the government that appointed him no longer existed), and marked a starting point for the South American wars of independence. The second is 9 de Julio (July 9th), which corresponds to the date at which the United Provinces of the River Plate (forerunner of contemporary Argentina) declared formal independence at the city of San Miguel de Tucumán in 1816.

Argentina has chosen to celebrate the former date, barely a month away, for its bicentennial. To that end, it’s undertaken an ambitious program of modernization and upgrades for many of the country’s top cultural attractions: the Teatro Colón (pictured here, before the scaffolding went up) and San Telmo’s Museo de Arte Moderno, among others, and privately run institutions such as Palermo’s Museo Evita. It’s also meant, at the same time, that these sights have been either closed or open only by limited access for much of the last year (or, in the case of the Colón, for several years). Surrounded by scaffolding, they’re barely visible, though the Colón, at least, has a temporary Centro Vivencial (visitor center) to suggest what the rejuvenated opera house will be like when it reopens.

That grand reopening is due take place May 25th, with the traditional presidential command performance with, presumably, the popular guided tours due to resume shortly thereafter. The Museo de Arte Moderno, though, is well behind schedule and will not reopen until late this year, probably for the start of the spring tourist season in October or so. Despite the scaffolding, the Museo Evita remains open, along with its highly regarded restaurant.

For those of you who can’t visit Argentina this year, Argentina may be coming to you - at least to those of you who live in or around Washington D.C. In honor of the bicentennial, the Smithsonian Institution is hosting a series entitled “Argentina at the Smithsonian 2010,” with a diversity of events that will include tango (both live and on film), popular music, lectures on topics such as wine and the military dictatorship of 1976-83, and poetry. Art events will include a meet-the-artist interview with Guillermo Kuitca and a “Contemporary Argentine Masterworks” exhibition that will include figures such as León Ferrari. Whether the masterworks will include the controversial Ferrari’s “Christian and Western Civilization” (pictured here), a protest against the bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s, is uncertain (I have visited Ferrari in his Buenos Aires apartment, and it’s hard to reconcile this soft-spoken 90-year-old man with such outspoken protest).

For those unable to visit either Argentina or the Smithsonian in 2010, meanwhile, there’s an alternative: there are six more years to plan for the country’s second bicentennial on July 9, 2016. By then, perhaps, all the renovations will be complete.

The Old Argentine Anti-Express

Every once in a while, I get inquiries from people who want to travel on Argentine trains, probably because of the ironically romantic vision propagated by Paul Theroux’s overrated opus The Old Patagonian Express. Theroux's book was a self-indulgently dyspeptic rail journey through the Americas that ended on the narrow gauge train (pictured here, now exclusively a tourist attraction) from the hamlet of Ingeniero Jacobacci to the city of Esquel.

As politely as possible, I tell visiting railfans not to bother - except for serious foamers, long-distance train travel in this country is trial and tribulation. At one time, the British-built Argentine rail system was the envy of the Americas but, under the populist Perón regime in the late 1940s and early1950s, it became more important to keep fares low than to maintain service and even rolling stock. By the time I first traveled on Argentine trains in the early 1980s, the system was so decapitalized and deteriorated that we would spend hours in unexpected delays in the middle of the Pampas, with no heat in winter and no cooling in summer. Once, on the Ferrocarril San Martín line from Buenos Aires to Mendoza (a route which no longer exists), the entire train was packed with conscripts, who could travel free of charge so long as they stood - which they did for the whole 24-hour trip.

Former President Carlos Menem catches a lot of flack for the rail system’s deterioration, as he privatized so many state services in the 1990s, but in reality Argentine railroads were beyond repair - almost literally - long before then. In the interim, comfortable long-distance buses, with sleeper service that almost matches airlines’ business class - at least in comfort and spaciousness - have superseded them. They are also far faster than the remaining trains.

Still, at intervals, the resurrection of the rail system becomes a hot topic, as it did two years ago when the government presumably reached a deal with French interests to build a bullet train between Buenos Aires and Córdoba via Rosario, thus linking Argentina’s three largest and most commercially important cities. This would cut travel time to Córdoba to three hours (as opposed to nine by bus).

Nobody is holding his breath for this to happen, though. Yesterday, the Buenos Aires daily Clarín published an account of a recent rail journey from Retiro station (pictured here, with a commuter train at the platform) to Córdoba that took 15 hours - but only because it covered half the route by bus when the train broke down. Its average speed was 43 km per hour, and nowhere was there any sign of the so-called bullet train. The link above includes a film clip that sardonically contrasts today’s train services with those of yesteryear.

A Trip to Tigre

When Porteños want to get out of Buenos Aires, the closest option is the suburb of Tigre, the gateway to the Paraná delta. Barely half an hour from downtown’s Retiro station, Tigre is a riverside greenbelt city that’s the terminus of the Mitre railroad, a commuter line for the Argentine capital’s prosperous northern suburbs. It’s quick and cheap to get there - believe it or not, the fare to Tigre is 1.35 pesos, approximately 35 US cents!

My Thursday excursion, though, started from the barrio of Belgrano, whose station is closer to my own Palermo apartment. I made a stopover at Béccar, five stops south of Tigre, to see Villa Ocampo (pictured here), the country home of writer Victoria Ocampo (1890-1979). Ocampo, born to wealth and privilege, created the literary journal Sur and entertained world-class writers, including Graham Greene, Federico García Lorca, and André Malraux here, not to mention her own countrymen such as Jorge Luis Borges and novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares (married to Ocampo’s sister Silvina, a poet).

Open to the public, now a museum and cultural center, Villa Ocampo is a Belle Epoque house built by her parents on an enormous lot that once stretched all the way to the river. Today, the grounds are much reduced - though most of us would still consider the gardens enormous - and it’s only a seven-block walk through wooded streets from the train station. It’s best, though, to time any visit for a guided tour, as self-guided visitors may only see the ground level - the first floor, where Ocampo herself slept and her distinguished guests had their own spacious rooms, is otherwise off-limits.

In Tigre, meanwhile, my primary goal was to visit the new Museo de Arte Tigre (MAT), occupying the spectacularly restored Tigre Club (pictured here, dating from 1913). Though it once housed a hotel and casino, it now displays figurative works by Argentine artists from the late 19th to the 20th century, stressing but specializing in landscapes, portraits, and still lifes linked to Tigre. The first-floor terrace that extends to the riverside offers great rivers of the river and its parkland.

Artists represented include major figures such as Antonio Berni, Benito Quinquela Martín, and Juan Carlos Castagnino, but it also holds special thematic exhibits. Currently, it’s hosting a series of three dimensional pieces by “Artistas Plásticos Solidarios en el Mes de la Memoria” (Plastic Artists in Solidarity in the Month of Memory), memorializing the victims of Argentina’s 1976 coup and subsequent “Dirty War” in conjunction the March 24th anniversary, now a holiday for reflection - and protest - in the country.

I’ve not even mentioned my favorite Tigre-area destination, the bedrock island of Martín García, a full-day excursion reached by Cacciola catamaran from Tigre. Once a penal colony, Martín García is still a halfway house for prisoners from Buenos Aires province, but it’s also home to lush gallery forests and some unexpected architectural masterpieces - such as its rococo theater (pictured here).

Go Now! The Latest from Chile

While finishing up the manuscript of the new edition of Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires in the Argentine capital, I’ve also been keeping an eye on developments in Chile before heading back to California next week. Despite Sunday’s 7.2 earthquake along the Mexican border, I have no qualms whatsoever about returning to the Bay Area, which is roughly 500 miles (800 km) to the north - just as most of Chile is far from the epicenter of the February 27 event, and has seen little or no damage.

In that context, I’d like to quote from a reader named Dona who took my advice and went to Chile shortly thereafter (I have edited a bit for brevity, punctuation and typos, inserted hyper-links where appropriate, and added some of my own comments in rectangular brackets):

“Just got back from Chile, and as Wayne said, the damage is relatively minor [in Santiago and other places Dona went]. Considering the magnitude of the original earthquake, I have to say that I am very impressed with the structural soundness of most of the buildings. We stayed in a high-rise apartment, and there was evidence of some superficial damage, but as the owner said, the buildings themselves are ‘robust’ and built to withstand earthquakes. The attitude of the people of Chile is impressive - and I would say that Chilenos are ‘robust!’”

“However - things are not QUITE back to normal. We weren't able to visit the Parque Quinta Normal, as several of the buildings within it were damaged; the Palacio de Bellas Artes [pictured here] was open, but it had suffered a lot of damage; and the airport's terminals won't be up and running for another six months, according to the American Airlines person I spoke with [I presume Dona means complete terminal repairs, as Santiago's airport itself is fully functional]. On a lucky note, we didn't have to pay the US$131 fee to enter.”

“We were there when the 7.2 aftershock struck, within moments of the President's [Sebastián Piñera’s] inauguration on March 11, and while we felt the rumbling of the building we were in and marveled at the chandeliers swaying, we didn't see any evidence of more damage. Later, we were in the Metro when the power went off - which meant exiting thru the rear door of the conductor's car and walking on a plank to the platform - to be greeted by subway personnel with flashlights to help us get out in a somewhat orderly fashion. I don't want to scare anyone, as life for most people in Chile is as if nothing extraordinary has happened. All of these experiences make for a more exciting adventure...”

“So - my advice, if you are considering going to Chile, go! The tourism dollars help the economy, and the fact the many people are staying away from Chile was certainly evident. We stayed in Pucón [pictured above] for a week, and the town was virtually empty. I felt bad for the people who rely on tourism dollars to keep afloat, but it made for a wonderful experience for us as we had the place almost to ourselves!”

Dona’s mention of the US$131 reciprocity fee, about which I’ve written several posts (also describing Argentina’s similar recent measure), deserves additional comment. According to Terence Lee, who wrote me from Chile yesterday, “The reciprocity fee was suspended for a few days after the earthquake. It is now being collected as normal.” Nevertheless, a highly placed private sector individual has written me that “We’re working on that, and now that there’s a new government we’ll see if they’re more receptive” to eliminating the fee (for US citizens and those of other countries who impose a similar visa fee on Chileans). That would be another positive step toward reactivating the travel and tourism sector.

What Hol(y)day Is It?

Historically, South America is a Catholic continent, where Spain’s colonial legacy, in countries such as Argentina, helped make it the official religion. Pre-Columbian South America, of course, had its own belief systems - which haven’t all disappeared - but after independence the continent’s religious diversity increased dramatically. In Argentina, this meant an influx of Russian Orthodox Catholics, Protestants of various denominations, Jews, Muslims and others.

In fact, the Argentine state still provides economic support for the Church, even paying the salaries of bishops - though a 1994 constitutional reform eliminated the requirement that the president be a Roman Catholic. It also deleted a particularly anachronistic clause that required the state to “maintain a peaceful relationship with the Indians and promote their conversion to Catholicism,” but even these reforms overlook the fact that Argentina is a more secular country than in the past.

Despite the Catholic tradition and the growing presence of evangelical Christians, for instance, Semana Santa (Holy Week) is as much or more a four-day getaway as it is a strict religious observance. In my Palermo neighborhood, on Good Friday, there was little sign of any religious influence despite the presence of a large church less than a block away. Some businesses had closed early, though - I had to walk a couple extra blocks to get my morning paper, for instance, because my nearby newsstand was shut. Government offices, of course, were closed, given their liberal holiday benefits.

While it’s true that about 40,000 people participated in the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross) march from the Plaza del Congreso to the Catedral Metropolitana, at least twice that many spent the weekend sunning themselves in the Buenos Aires province beach resort of Mar del Plata (pictured above). Even last weekend’s Pesaj Urbano, the Passover fair that closed two blocks alongside Palermo’s Plaza Armenia, seemed far more secular than religious. With live klezmer music, games on themes such as rescuing Moses from the reeds (as pictured here), the annual Jewish festival (Argentina’s Jewish community of about 200,000 is the world’s sixth-largest) felt more like a cultural/commercial county fair in the United States.

That said, Argentina has not gone nearly as far as militantly secular Uruguay, where the four-day break is officially known Semana de Turismo (Tourism Week). Secularization there dates from the early 20th century, when the government forbade crucifixes in hospitals, prohibited the army’s institutional presence in religious ceremonies, eliminated the position of military chaplain, and decreed that the flag could not be lowered for religious symbols or individuals. Later, in 1919, the government of José Batlle y Ordóñez created Semana de Turismo (which is how Uruguayans normally refer to it) and changed December 8’s Día de la Vírgen (Immaculate Conception) to Dia de las Playas (Day at the Beach). At the same time, Christmas became the Fiesta de la Familia (Festival of the Family).

Torture Tours

It’s hard to imagine that, someday in the future, queues of solemn tourists might file through Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Thirty years ago, though, it would have been equally unthinkable to suggest that, in 2010, groups of Argentine and foreign visitors would stroll the grounds and halls of Buenos Aires’s Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, the naval mechanics’ school that was the most notorious clandestine torture center during the military dictatorship that ruled here from 1976 to 1983.

Today, the ESMA - a cluster of handsome buildings with neoclassical touches on a wooded campus in the northern city barrio of Núñez - is the main physical site of Memoria Abierta (Open Memory, link in English), an organization dedicated to preserving the grim history of state terrorism. Touring it, as I did Monday morning, is a draining experience - but not in the way it was for the more than 5,000 “desaparecidos” (disappeared persons) incarcerated, abused, and (mostly) executed here or pushed from helicopters (alive but drugged) into the Río de la Plata.

Before his term expired in 1999, President Carlos Menem - himself a victim of the repression, though he later pardoned his junta jailers - relocated the institution to Puerto Belgrano, near the city of Bahía Blanca in southern Buenos Aires province. At the same time, he ordered the ESMA's demolition and its replacement by a dubious "monument to national unity." In the end, public outcry prevented the ESMA’s destruction.

Menem's decrees infuriated human rights groups and city officials, who saw the former ESMA as the most gruesomely suitable location for a facility that would preserve and present documentary records, oral histories, sound, film, and photographs of the period. In early 2005, then President Néstor Kirchner and Buenos Aires mayor Aníbal Ibarra announced agreement to move remaining naval educational facilities elsewhere and open the ESMA grounds to visits.

Today’s tours visit the grounds and just one building, the Casino de Oficiales (Officers’ Club, pictured here), where most of the torture and other abuses took place. Astonishingly, even as torture took place in its basement and guards shoved shackled and hooded prisoners up and down the stairs - the poorly insulated third floor and the attic were areas of coffin-like confinement - officers lunched in the café and even slept in the second-floor hotel rooms.

In a extraordinary instance of Orwellian linguistics, the military’s human rights abusers dubbed the basement corridor that led to the torture chambers the Avenida de la Felicidad (“Avenue of Happiness’). Meanwhile, parts of the third floor became impromptu maternity wards for female prisoners whose babies eventually went as adoptees to military families and civilian collaborators (in total, about 500 children were born in captivity, though not all of them here).

Astonishingly, at the same time, there were acts of resistance even as some detainees appeared to collaborate. ESMA survivor Víctor Basterra, for instance, was a graphic artist who made fake IDs for military kidnappers who used them to claim their supposed relatives’ belongings (which were distributed as booty from a room called “El Pañol”). At the same time, on “conditional liberty,” he smuggled out copies of photos - a truly sinister rogues’ gallery - that later served to identify many of the torturers.

In reality, the three-hour ESMA tour is a mentally draining experience that, although I’m glad I did it, I have no desire to repeat. I can only imagine what stress the guides, who do this several times a week, must go through: though the job requires many of the same skills of any tour guide, it’s a grim task, and jokes and small talk are totally out of order. On request, tours are available in English and, soon, in German. Interior photographs are not permitted.