Pope Argentinus I, The Musical: Ragtime Meets Tango

I am not religious, in fact I'm irreligious, but I can't ignore the ascension of an Argentine pope who threatens to upstage President Cristina Fernández (who has her differences with the church in general and the former Cardenal Bergoglio in particular). The Cardinal will relocate from his post in Buenos Aires's Catedral Metropolitana (pictured below) to a bigger stage in the Vatican.

More in the near future but, for the time being, enjoy Tom Lehrer's observations on liturgical music reform:

Popes may be replaceable, but Lehrer is not. In fact, to continue with the Argentine theme, he even composed his own distinctive tango:

Credit Where Credit Is Undue?

Over the past couple decades, for all their shortcomings, credit cards have made foreign travel easier, eliminating or at least reducing the need to carry quantities of cash and helping avoid the need to convince immigration officials of “sufficient funds.” If Argentine domestic trade secretary Guillermo Moreno has his way, though, MasterCard and Visa may lose much of their utility for Argentines and perhaps even foreigners.

That’s because the combative Moreno, who once began a meeting with angry Argentine businessmen by laying a pistol on the table, appears to have unilaterally decided that bank commissions on credit card purchases in supermarkets are too high. Known for capricious policies such as prohibiting companies from importing any more goods than the value of their exports, he believes they contribute to annual inflation figures that probably exceed 25 percent, though the government admits less than half that. He has also instituted price controls on many items in an attempt to keep the rate down, but such measures often backfire into shortages and a growing black market.

In Moreno’s world, reducing the banks’ three percent commission to one percent, through a supercard sponsored by the government-run Banco de la Nación, would get matters under control. Should his caprice become obligatory, travelers spending any extended period in the country – it’s common, for instance, to rent a Buenos Aires apartment instead of staying at a hotel - might find themselves unable to purchase quantities of food at the supermarket without cash. Nobody really knows what the details might be, but it could conceivably extend to gasoline purchases from YPF, the state-owned oil company whose stations are the country’s most numerous.

Other things being equal, of course, credit card purchases make relatively little sense for those who can sell their dollars on the informal “blue” market, where the exchange rate is now closer to eight pesos than it is to the official five-plus.

Plenty of Argentines are skeptical about this – former economy minister Roberto Lavagna thinks it could lead to rationing and called it “absurd,” while Banco de la Ciudad president Federico Sturzenegger said it  was “crazy.”  Some of the most creative opponents produced the satirical spot above to portray the realities of the “Morenokard.” Even if your Spanish is non-existent and you don't catch some of the topical references, the spot will give you an idea that Argentina can be a challenging country.

And Now For Something Completely Different

On another topic entirely, I have recently opened a Twitter account to inform readers about potentially interesting topics that I may not have the time to analyze in detail in this blog. Feel free to follow me there at @southernconetrv.

¿Adios Hugo?

Normally, in this blog, I don’t venture outside the Southern Cone countries, but the week’s biggest event has taken place in the only South American country I have never visited – Venezuela, where the charismatic president Hugo Chávez died on Tuesday. Some Venezuelans might disagree that I have never set foot in the country, because I have visited parts of neighboring Guyana over which Venezuela has an irredentist claim, but I can assert that I’ve never had a Venezuelan stamp in my passport.

Chávez, of course, was a controversial and polemical figure. Like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, he was a military golpista (coupmonger) although, unlike Pinochet, his attempt to overthrow Venezuela’s constitutional government failed. When he finally did ascend to the presidency, through legitimate elections, he went about concentrating power through patronage politics, largely financed by oil revenues. Despite his ability to communicate with his country’s dispossessed, Chávez did them a great disservice – with his hyper-personalized politics and short attention span toward policy, he undermined the country’s institutions. Though he was not personally murderous (unlike Pinochet), his de facto neglect helped make Venezuela one of the world’s most violent countries – the capital of Caracas averages two homicides per hour.

In a recent edition of The New Yorker, journalist Jon Lee Anderson (biographer of Che Guevara) described Chávez as the “Slumlord of Caracas” in an article that would discourage just about anyone else thinking of visiting the city. On Tuesday, Anderson published an incisive post-mortem follow-up that characterized the former colonel as one of the world’s “most flamboyantly provocative leaders.” Anderson’s nuanced assessment of Chávez avoids demonizing him, but does point out his contradictions and weaknesses; the late Christopher Hitchens was not so generous in writing about his own personal encounter with the Venezuelan caudillo.

Chávez is gone, but will Chavismo survive? Oddly, the Caracas caretaker government prohibited mourners from snapping photographs of the autocrat in his open casket but, according to his designated successor Nicolás Maduro (pending elections), Venezuela will mummify the corpse for public display in a monument worthy of Lenin or Mao. This would make a great supplementary chapter for Heather Pringle’s remarkable study The Mummy Congress, but the Venezuelans could look for precedents closer to home – the Chinchorro mummies of Chile, for instance, or Evita Perón in Recoleta (though Evita’s cadaver is not on public view, the crypt is).

None of Chávez’s strongest ideological allies, most notably Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Cristina Fernández of Argentina, has the charisma to assume his role on the global or even the regional stage. More than that, none of them has the petro-dollars that Chávez used to buy his way onto the scene (Ecuador is an oil exporter, and OPEC member, but a relatively small one). President Fernández, for her part, believes just as strongly in patronage politics but has even fewer options – not only has she had to undertake emergency measures to keep dollars from fleeing the country, but she was also in hock to Hugo – as the conspicuous presence of his "Bolivarian" PDVSA, in the Buenos Aires barrio of Retiro, would indicate. Not so long ago, Argentina was self-sufficient in oil but, after decades of mismanagement, it now has to import.

When "No" Is A Positive

In 1988, when Chilean general Augusto Pinochet Ugarte decided to try to dignify his dictatorship with the title of president through a yes-or-no plebiscite, I was not the only one to think he might actually win. Though I was not in Chile at the time, I had first visited the country in 1979, six years after the violent coup that ousted constitutional president Salvador Allende Gossens; having gotten to know a pretty broad cross-section of Chileans, I wondered whether an apparently weak opposition could convince the electorate to dump the dictator.

Many Chileans recalled the three years of Allende’s Unidad Popular government as a time of disorder and shortages, and genuinely worried about its return. Even many UP partisans wondered whether they could defeat the dictator, and not only because they thought the results might be rigged. This past Saturday night, in San Francisco, I finally got to see director director Pablo Larraín’s Oscar-nominated No, which attempts to explain how the opposition campaign won the day.

From my first days in Santiago, I recall an earnest young man, friend of a friend, whose goal was to become the top salesman of a new soft drink. Ironically enough, in an early scene in the movie, Gael García Bernal’s fictional adman René Saavedra unveils a promotional TV spot for a soft drink called “Free.” After that, he becomes a reluctant recruit for a difficult task: to give the “No” campaign against Pinochet – allowed just 15 minutes of airtime nightly – a positive spin.

Using a great deal of period footage, often filming with vintage equipment, Larraín shows the challenges of confronting an authoritarian government, with virtually unlimited resources and the ability to intimidate its adversaries. Nevertheless, Saavedra succeeds even as he alienates some of his own potential allies. Astonishingly, the “No” campaign was overwhelmingly good-humored.

According to The New York Times’ Larry Rohter, No has drawn some criticism for emphasizing a TV public relations campaign to the exclusion of behind-the-scenes activities by political parties that, having been banned for a decade and a half, managed to register and motivate their supporters, and get them to the ballot box. On the face of it, that’s a fair criticism, but that’s not the story (or the aspect of the larger story) that Larraín chose to tell.

My criticisms of No are a little different. Politically speaking, Chile is a very centralized country, and the film is very Santiago-centric – personally, I would have liked to see something about how the campaign played elsewhere in the country. As it is, the only glimpse we get outside the capital is archival footage of a beaming Pinochet being serenaded by schoolchildren on a visit to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), in what was clearly a propaganda stunt.

On balance, the verdict for No is “Yes” - it’s a movie well worth seeing, but it also begs the question of what Larraín will do next. Three of his four feature-length films comprise a de facto trilogy that chronicles the trauma of the 1973 coup (Post-Mortem), life under the dictatorship (Tony Manero), and escape from that past (No). It’s worth adding that Tony Manero was the first of the three, though chronologically speaking Post-Mortem should go first.

There is little direct continuity among the films, with no shared characters. Chilean actor Alfredo Castro plays wildly different roles in all three: an apathetic loner in Post-Mortem, a homicidal Travolta wannabe in Tony Manero, and René Saavedra’s politically timid studio boss in No. Whatever Larraín’s next project, the odds are that Castro will literally play a role.

Chile and Its "Crazies"

Yesterday was a big day for me, primarily because the new fourth edition of Moon Handbooks Chile finally went up on the publisher’s website, an unmistakable sign that the book is actually on sale, both online and in stores. That said, I’m a little bewildered by the website blurb that promotes an itinerary of “10 Days Skiing in the Andes,” which I never wrote and which does not appear in the book.

While I do cover skiing, though I only rarely visit Chile in winter, a ten-day skiing itinerary doesn’t make a lot of sense – most Chilean ski resorts, such as Valle Nevado and Portillo, specialize in week-long packages, which would already occupy the bulk of any ten-day visit. Valle Nevado, for that matter, is so close to Santiago that it’s almost equally convenient to stay in the capital and commute to the slopes on a daily basis, so the an “itinerary” is pretty much superfluous. I’m at a loss to explain how this got into the blurb.

That said, though I personally prefer to improvise my own travels, the new edition does

suggest itineraries including “Santiago, Valparaíso and the Wine Country,” “Adventure in the Andes” through the southerly lakes district, and “Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.” In addition, there’s a three-week road trip option called “Driving the Carretera Austral” of Northern Chilean Patagonia.

The cover shot, by the way, is sprinting vicuñas in front of Volcán Parinacota, in Parque Nacional Lauca, where I lived for most of a year while researching my M.A. thesis on llama and alpaca herders there. The mockup here omits any mention of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), though the legend "Including Easter Island" does appear on the actual cover.

Is That Abalone?

When I first visited Chile, in 1979, I was surprised to see something called locos mayo on restaurant menus in the city of Arica. Since the word loco means “crazy,” it piqued my curiosity sufficiently to ask what they were and, to all appearances, they turned out to be oversized abalone. Though listed as an appetizer, the portion was more than sufficient for lunch, at least (at the time, I was not so mayo-averse as I am today – Chileans really overdo it, in my opinion, and I always ask them to hold the mayo on sandwiches (“sin mayonesa, por favor”).

Chilean abalone can be hard to find, as they are often in veda (quarantine) because of scarcity – there is a closed season and, even when they’re legal, the quantity is relatively small. The name has often confused me, though, but my Santiago friend Liz Caskey gives a rather disturbing etymological explanation: “because locos must be tenderized (beaten) with a stick, a saying of how they used to treated mentally ill patients ("locos"). Even if that’s an anachronism, it’s not a pleasant thing to contemplate.

Dan Perlman of Casa Saltshaker, my other go-to source on food matters, refers to locos as false abalone, and has seen them, frozen, in Buenos Aires supermarkets. There are no abalone in the Atlantic and, in fact, none in Chilean seas either: according to Dan, Concholepas concholepas are “murex snails” and, unlike true abalone, they are carnivores rather than herbivores.

My own preferred dish is chupe de locos, a thick soup that’s more like a casserole. The restaurants at Santiago’s Mercado Central are likely to have it when it’s in season; the one depicted here comes from the Valparaíso restaurant SaborColor.