Smoking Again: Chile's Volcán Hudson

In August of 1991, barely six months after I visited the Argentine town of Los Antiguos for the first time, Chile’s nearby Volcán Hudson expelled a mass of ash and gases that left large areas of Patagonian farmland and pasture under a layer of volcanic debris. It killed thousands of sheep and cattle that were unable to reach pasture or water, and also affected the fruit crops, particularly cherries, grown in Los Antiguos and nearby Chile Chico. Even today, the effects of Hudson are visible along the southern sector of the Carretera Austral, whose Bosque Inundado (“Sunken Forest”, pictured below) is a result of the lahars (mudflows) that submerged the area’s native forests.

Now the 1,905-meter Hudson is at it again. Three days ago, Sernageomin (Chile’s counterpart to the U.S. Geological Survey) issued a red alert that includes evacuation of the surrounding area, 137 km southwest of the regional capital of Coyhaique. The area is only thinly populated, so loss of life is unlikely, but Hudson’s last eruption continued for nearly three months. Given the proximity of the Carretera Austral, it’s possible that this could disrupt overland travel during the upcoming tourist season.

If the 1991 eruption is any precedent, it could also affect air traffic in southern Chile and Argentina, which has already had to work around the eruption of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano, which began last June 4 and has not completely ceased.  From Buenos Aires, my friend Nicolás Kugler writes that “It is easy to notice even here that the usual post-pampero pristine blue sky is not as clean as it is used to be before the Puyehue eruption. And ashes on the balcony and on most cars are a common sight now.” The pampero is a southerly wind that usually brings cool, clear weather to Buenos Aires and northern Argentina.

At least Volcán Chaitén, in northernmost Chilean Patagonia, has settled down since its 2008 eruption and, though I personally wouldn’t invest in property so close to a caldera that’s blown so recently, people are moving back into the area. Still, Chile’s volcanoes bear watching for anybody bound south this coming summer.

Moon Handbooks Patagonia on the Road

Continuing this afternoon, my promotion tour for the new third edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia will feature a series of digital slide presentations on southernmost South America. In addition to covering the capitals of Buenos Aires and Santiago, the gateway cities to Patagonia, I will offer a visual tour of the Chilean and Argentine lakes districts, Argentina's wildlife-rich coastline and Chile's forested fjords, the magnificent Andean peaks of the Fitz Roy range and Torres del Paine, and the uttermost part of the Earth in Tierra del Fuego. I will also include the Falkland Islands, with their abundant sub-Antarctic wildlife.

Today, at 2 p.m., I will speak at the San Mateo County Library, 1110 Alameda de las Pulgas, Belmont, CA 94002, tel. 650/591-8286.

There will be two events on Monday, October 31. At 2 p.m., I will be at the Santa Clara County Library, 13650 Saratoga Avenue, Saratoga, CA 95070, tel. 408/867-6126. At 7 p.m., I will be at REI Saratoga, 400 El Paseo de Saratoga, San Jose, CA 95130, tel. 408/871-8765. The following evening, also at 7 p.m., I will be at REI Fremont, 43962 Fremont Blvd., Fremont, CA 94538, tel. 510/651-0305.

The season’s last event will take place Thursday November 3, at 7 p.m., at the Lafayette Library, 3941 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette, CA 94549, tel. 510/385-2280. Under the auspices of the World Affairs Council East Bay Chapter, this is the only event that will charge admission - $15 for WAC members, $17 for all others. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for a wine tasting and tango demonstration, both included in the admission charge.

For those planning trips to the south, there be will be ample time for questions and answers. Books, including my other titles on Argentina, Chile and Buenos Aires, will be on sale at all the events.

Appreciating Palermo: A Real Estate Tale

Nearly a decade ago, my wife and I purchased an apartment in the Buenos Aires barrio of Palermo, near the botanical gardens and the city zoo. It was then, and still is, an area of high-rise residences that only vaguely resembles what it was half a century ago, when the Argentine elite occupied handsome mansions known here as petit hotels. Only a handful of those survive, one of them now housing the Museo Evita (pictured above).

The other major landmark is La Colorada, the red brick building that, at the time of its construction in 1911, housed the directors and managers of Argentina’s British-owned railroads. Designed by architect Regis Pigeon, its raw materials arrived as ballast on the boats that then carried grains from the Pampas back to Europe. With its original exterior exposed – most city apartment buildings are covered with concrete, stucco or some other smooth surface – La Colorada still stands out today.

Our own modest property, a second-story apartment in a utilitarian building that dates from the mid-1970s, has some handsome details like parquet floors, but it hardly matches the elegance of La Colorada’s marble staircases and central skylight. Directly across the street, though, the Palacio Bellini is a better indicator of trends in a neighborhood that, according to the daily Clarín, is now one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods for its access to green spaces such as Parque Las Heras.

When we bought our property, we knew it was a desirable location, for its access to parks, public transportation, restaurants and other amenities, but we never imagined it would become this desirable. We are just three short blocks from the Museo Evita, and barely a block from La Colorada and the Palacio Bellini. And we wonder whether, at some point, our simple but comfortable pied-à-terre will become the target of developers who want to buy us out.

Moon Handbooks Patagonia on the Road

Continuing tonight, my promotion tour for the new third edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia will feature a series of digital slide presentations on southernmost South America. In addition to covering the capitals of Buenos Aires and Santiago, the gateway cities to Patagonia, I will offer a visual tour of the Chilean and Argentine lakes districts, Argentina's wildlife-rich coastline and Chile's forested fjords, the magnificent Andean peaks of the Fitz Roy range and Torres del Paine, and the uttermost part of the Earth in Tierra del Fuego. I will also include the Falkland Islands, with their abundant sub-Antarctic wildlife.

The next event will take place tonight, October 26, at REI San Francisco, 840 Brannan Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, tel. 415/934-1938. On Saturday October 29, at 2 p.m., I will speak at the San Mateo County Library, 1110 Alameda de las Pulgas, Belmont, CA 94002, tel. 650/591-8286.

There will be two events on Monday, October 31. At 2 p.m., I will be at the Santa Clara County Library, 13650 Saratoga Avenue, Saratoga, CA 95070, tel. 408/867-6126. At 7 p.m., I will be at REI Saratoga, 400 El Paseo de Saratoga, San Jose, CA 95130, tel. 408/871-8765. The following evening, also at 7 p.m., I will be at REI Fremont, 43962 Fremont Blvd., Fremont, CA 94538, tel. 510/651-0305.

The season’s last event will take place Thursday November 3, at 7 p.m., at the Lafayette Library, 3941 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette, CA 94549, tel. 510/385-2280. Under the auspices of the World Affairs Council East Bay Chapter, this is the only event that will charge admission - $15 for WAC members, $17 for all others. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for a wine tasting and tango demonstration, both included in the admission charge.

For those planning trips to the south, there be will be ample time for questions and answers. Books, including my other titles on Argentina, Chile and Buenos Aires, will be on sale at all the events.

Kirchnerville: The Necropolis of Patagonia

The late Tomás Eloy Martínez’s sardonic comment that his fellow Argentines are “cadaver cultists” who honor their greatest figures not on the date of their birth but on the date of their death never grows old. Last February, when I visited the Argentine city of Río Gallegos, the canonization of former President Néstor Kirchner, who died suddenly last October 27, was already well underway. Barely three months after his death, artificial floral tributes and banners that looked more suitable to a political rally surrounded the Kirchner family crypt (pictured below).

Apparently, though, the family sepulcher is not good enough for San Néstor. Next Thursday. October 27, on the first anniversary of his death, he will move to a new custom-designed crypt. Fifteen meters wide, 13 meters deep and 11 meters high, it will be by far the largest in the cemetery, with a single armored door entrance in the shape of a cross.

It might seem extreme to install an armored door on the tomb of a popular president, but remember that this is a country in which, in 1987, thieves entered the Chacarita tomb of General Juan Domingo Perón and literally stole his hands (pictured above, while still attached to Perón). The culprits then demanded a US$8 million ransom for returning the hands; the head of the Peronist party refused to pay the ransom, and the whereabouts of the stray body parts are still unknown.

Occurring four days after Sunday’s presidential elections, which Kirchner’s widow Cristina Fernández is likely to win the dedication of the tomb will not be part of the campaign, but neither will it be apolitical. Guests of honor will include ex-President Ignacio Lula de Silva of Brazil, and current presidents Jose Mujica of Uruguay, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (presuming his very public battle with cancer does not affect his travel schedule).

Moon Handbooks Patagonia on the Road

Continuing tomorrow, my promotion tour for the new third edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia will feature a series of digital slide presentations on southernmost South America. In addition to covering the capitals of Buenos Aires and Santiago, the gateway cities to Patagonia, I will offer a visual tour of the Chilean and Argentine lakes districts, Argentina's wildlife-rich coastline and Chile's forested fjords, the magnificent Andean peaks of the Fitz Roy range and Torres del Paine, and the uttermost part of the Earth in Tierra del Fuego. I will also include the Falkland Islands, with their abundant sub-Antarctic wildlife.

The next event will take place tomorrow, October 21, at 6:30 p.m., at the San Mateo County Library, 620 Correas Street, Half Moon Bay, California 94019, tel. 650/726-2316. On Saturday the 22nd, at 5 p.m., I will be at the Travel Bug, 839 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, tel. 505/992-0418.

On Monday, October 24 at 7:30 p.m. I will at Distant Lands, 56 S. Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91105, tel. 800/310-3220. The following day, Tuesday October 25 at 7 p.m., I will be back in Northern California at REI Berkeley, 1338 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley CA 94702, tel. 510/527-4140. On Wednesday, October 26, I will be at REI San Francisco, 840 Brannan Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, tel. 415/934-1938.

For those planning trips to the south, there be will be ample time for questions and answers. Books, including my other titles on Argentina, Chile and Buenos Aires, will be on sale at all the events. Admission is free but seating is limited, so it’s a good idea to get there early. REI Berkeley takes reservations online and will hold your seat for you.

Butch Lives? Bolivia's Cassidy Movie

Everybody’s seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and I myself have written about their life in Argentina before they died in a Bolivian shootout. Their cabin in Cholila, in the Patagonian province of Chubut has become such a popular pilgrimage site that, at some point, it wouldn’t surprise me to see cardboard cutouts of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the windows.

There have been many tales of their escape from Bolivia, including one that Butch returned to the United States and spent his late years under another name in Spokane, Washington. All of these have been effectively debunked by Buck and Anne Meadows, in several editions of Digging Up Butch and Sundance, but there’s a new Butch story out in cinematic form that depicts an aging Butch – portrayed by Sam Shepard – brought out of retirement in Bolivia.

I haven’t yet seen Spanish director Mateo Gil’s Blackthorn, but Buck has sent me some commentary that I think is worth passing on. “Blackthorn is fictional, not that there's anything wrong with that, most movies are, but as a drama, not very entertaining. Plodding and preachy, though the Bolivian scenery is breathtaking.  The film will most certainly deliver a jolt to tourism there.  Rachel Saltz's review in The New York Times last week pretty much identifies Blackthorn's dramatic problems.  That said, a lot of critics liked the film.

“Although there are dozens of folkloric stories of Butch's (and Sundance's) resurrection in various parts of the world (inventoried in "Butch and Sundance: Still Dead?") there are no tales of his continuing to live in Bolivia.  Likewise, the idea of an ex-Pinkerton agent (played wonderfully by Stephen Rea in the movie) residing in Bolivia is fictional.  In interviews, Blackthorn director Mateo Gil said that they made a decision to depict Cassidy as a social bandit.  That they did. The viewer all but expected Cassidy to pull Das Kapital out of his saddlebags.

“The real bandit, though, was just that, a bandit, who robbed banks and other financial institutions because, as Willie Sutton said, "that's where the money is."  Finally, a major plot point revolves around the workers expropriating the mines in the late 1920s; in fact the mines were not expropriated until 1952, and then not by the workers but by the government.”

“Coincidentally, the was a major mine payroll holdup in the late 1920s, in Pulacayo, by the Smith gang, a trio of UK and Americans, ex-mine workers.  They were all captured and went to jail.  Bolivian filmmaker Antonio Eguino worked that story into his 2007 film, Los Andes No Creen en Dios, an adaptation of Adolfo Costa du Rels's novel.”

Despite Dan’s critique, I’ll probably see the film myself – I’m a sucker for Westerns, even counter-factual ones, especially if they involve South America and Butch Cassidy. I might wait until it’s out on DVD, though.

Moon Patagonia on the Road

Starting tonight, I take the new third edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia on the road, with a series of digital slide presentations on southernmost South America. In addition to covering the capitals of Buenos Aires and Santiago, the gateway cities to Patagonia, I will offer a visual tour of the Chilean and Argentine lakes districts, Argentina's wildlife-rich coastline and Chile's forested fjords, the magnificent Andean peaks of the Fitz Roy range and Torres del Paine, and the uttermost part of the Earth in Tierra del Fuego. I will also include the Falkland Islands, with their abundant sub-Antarctic wildlife.

The first event will take place at 7 p.m. tonight, October 18, at Wide World Books (7 p.m), 4411 Wallingford Avenue North, Seattle, Washington 98103, tel. 206/634-3453.  Tomorrow, Wednesday, I will be Village Books, 1200 Eleventh Street, Bellingham, Washington 98225, tel. 360/671-2626, also at 7 p.m.  On Friday October 21 at 6:30 p.m., I will at the San Mateo County Library, 620 Correas Street, Half Moon Bay, California 94019, tel. 650/726-2316. On Saturday the 22nd, at 5 p.m., I will be at the Travel Bug, 839 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, tel. 505/992-0418.

For those planning trips to the south, there be will be ample time for questions and answers. Books, including my other titles on Argentina, Chile and Buenos Aires, will be on sale at all the events. Admission is free but seating is limited, so it’s a good idea to get there early.

Beyond Beef: Buenos Aires Fruit & Veg

In poorer neighborhoods of large US cities, franchise fast food burgers and other junk food are easy available, but it’s often hard to find fresh fruit and vegetables. The diet of their residents suffers accordingly, and obesity is rampant. Surprisingly, that’s not the case in Buenos Aires and other large Argentine cities, where there seems to be a greengrocer on almost every corner – even if, ideologically speaking, rich and poor alike are carnivores. As the photograph above (taken in La Boca, one of BA’s poorest neighborhoods) shows, there’s an abundance of fresh produce.

Traditionally, green salads are an Argentine staple; apples, oranges, grapes, pears, strawberries and the like are standards of the household diet, and also serve as the basis of many restaurant dishes and desserts. Now, though, according to the city daily Clarín, the offerings are getting more diverse. Items such as mangos, passion fruit, and plantains are appearing on corner fruit stands well as adventurous restaurants. In my own prosperous Palermo neighborhood, tasty red bananas have begun to complement the everyday yellow Cavendish that’s the world’s most common variety.

In part, according to the article, this new diversity is a function of immigration from tropical South American countries such as Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela. Peruvian cuisine, in particular, has had a powerful impact on the Buenos Aires dining scene; the same is true in Santiago de Chile, though Argentines and Chileans can’t handle spicy food as well as the Peruvians can.

Possibly the best place to see what’s available is Caballito’s Mercado del Progreso (pictured above and below), where chefs from around Buenos Aires come to acquire items still not easily found elsewhere. One of the city’s last full-block markets, it dates from 1889 and couldn’t boast electricity until the 1950s. Today, in addition to the usual meats and cheeses, and common produce, it displays countless crates of Andean oca, arugula, baby spinach, daikons, seriously hot peppers and turnip greens, among other items. Those aren’t usually associated with Argentine cuisine, but they’re working their way in.

Moon Patagonia on the Road

Starting Tuesday, I will take the new third edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia on the road, with a series of digital slide presentations on southernmost South America. In addition to covering the capitals of Buenos Aires and Santiago, the gateway cities to Patagonia, I will offer a visual tour of the Chilean and Argentine lakes districts, Argentina's wildlife-rich coastline and Chile's forested fjords, the magnificent Andean peaks of the Fitz Roy range and Torres del Paine, and the uttermost part of the Earth in Tierra del Fuego. I will also include the Falkland Islands, with their abundant sub-Antarctic wildlife.

The first event will take place at 7 p.m. Tuesday night, October 18, at Wide World Books (7 p.m), 4411 Wallingford Avenue North, Seattle, Washington 98103, tel. 206/634-3453.  The following night, I will be Village Books, 1200 Eleventh Street, Bellingham, Washington 98225, tel. 360/671-2626, also at 7 p.m. On Friday October 21 at 6:30 p.m., I will be at the San Mateo County Library, 620 Correas Street, Half Moon Bay, California 94019, tel. 650/726-2316. On Saturday the 22nd, at 5 p.m., I will be at the Travel Bug, 839 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, tel. 505/992-0418.

For those planning trips to the south, there be will be ample time for questions and answers. Books, including my other titles on Argentina, Chile and Buenos Aires, will be on sale at all the events. Admission is free but seating is limited, so it’s a good idea to get there early.

Serving the South? A Buenos Aires Subway Extension

Except for La Boca, Buenos Aires’s southern neighborhoods get relatively few foreign visitors and, for first-timers, that’s understandable. Barrios like Barracas and Parque Patricios have far lower profiles than, say, tourist-friendly Recoleta and San Telmo, but even repeat visitors rarely reach what one history-oriented tour company has called “The Other South.”

The origins of Parque Patricios were less than auspicious.  At various times it was the site of slaughterhouses, a cemetery for yellow fever victims, and a garbage dump that gave it a reputation as the Barrio de las Quemas (Barrio of the Incinerators). Alternatively, it was the Barrio de las Latas (Barrio of the Tin Cans, for the scrap metal that covered the outer walls of its precarious shanties).

By the early 1900s, though, authorities tried to create a “Palermo de los Pobres” with broad open spaces – if only to brake the weekend invasion of working class families into areas frequented by gente decente (“decent people”). They designated the French landscape architect Charles Thays to get to work in the barrio’s namesake park, but his efforts never achieved the enduring success here that they did elsewhere in Palermo’s Jardín Botánico and elsewhere in the country.

One challenge was to house the workers, and the prestigious Jockey Club went so far as to build a handsome barrio obrero (workers’ housing) to mitigate militant labor discontent. That, however, could not stop a 1919 strike against the Pedro Vasena steel plant that led to police and paramilitary slaughter of hundreds of workers throughout the city, in what is now commemorated as the Semana Trágica (“Tragic Week”).

Today, that relative neglect persists in poorer neighborhoods. For more than a century, the Subte (as the underground railroad system is popularly known) has underserved the southern barrios and, inmost areas, it stops far short of the city limits, beyond which a far larger population must rely on buses and generally inferior surface rail systems to get to their jobs, or shopping.

Within the Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires (the “Autonomous City” is a self-governing federal district that, unlike Washington DC, has voting representation in the Argentine Congress), things for the transit-challenged are slowly improving. About a week ago, the system opened a new station at Parque Patricios (pictured at top, courtesy of Wikipedia).

Municipal officials are making a big deal of this, but the glistening new station is only the seventh of 14 projected stations on the crosstown Línea H. It is just four blocks from the previous southern terminal at Estación Caseros and, for the time being, its northern terminal is at Avenida Corrientes. This leaves the prosperous northern barrios of Recoleta and Retiro still remote from those in the south.

There’s something to be said to providing service first to those who must depend on public transportation, unlike those who have their own automobiles or can afford taxis, but it still leaves the transit-dependent without easy access to their jobs in those northern barrios. In Chile, as I wrote in an earlier comparison, Santiago’s exemplary Metro has managed to expand far faster, and more efficiently, over a much larger area, than the Subte has.

Speaking of Garbage…

Buenos Aires no longer burns or dumps garbage in Parque Patricios or other any part of the city, but its disposal continues to be a serious issue. According to the city daily Clarín, however, authorities are placing priority on a plant in the provincial suburb of José León Suárez that, by 2012, will recycle up to 20 percent of the 5,000 tons of trash that Buenos Aires residents generate every day. Much of its success, though, depends on a long delayed plan to get them to separate their household debris and, given the bureaucratic inertia let alone the need to educate the populace on the issue, the date sounds wildly optimistic.

Triple Crossing: a Novel of Intrigue

More than a decade ago, I covered Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, as well as Baja California, for another guidebook publisher whose name I always decline to mention in this blog. On moving to Moon, I reluctantly excluded Uruguay and Paraguay from my new Argentina title because of the additional work they entailed, though I’ve been able to incorporate parts of Uruguay into my Buenos Aires title for Moon.

Unfortunately, I had to give up Baja, for which Moon already had a more than capable author. In that time, I haven’t returned despite my affinity for the peninsula – given its relative proximity to my Northern California home, it felt more like a vacation than my months-long odysseys through the Southern Cone countries. I even enjoyed cities like Tijuana and Mexicali, despite their shortcomings, and the fact that I once had my car stolen in the beach town of Rosarito (recovered, with minimal personal property loss, by a conscientious Mexican insurance investigator).

While I’ve not returned to Baja California, and rarely cross the Argentine border into Paraguay, I recently took a vicarious voyage to both places in Sebastian Rotella’s new novel Triple Crossing. In his fiction, it’s a voyage to the unfortunate dark side of drug barons, money laundering and violence in Southern California, Tijuana and the Triple Frontera zone where the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay converge at the confluence of the Paraná and Iguazú rivers.

Rotella, a former Los Angeles Times bureau chef in Buenos Aires and investigative reporter along the US-Mexico border, now writes for the public interest website ProPublica. Praised by Michael Connelly and Luis Alberto Urrea, among others, his novel draws on those experiences through the character of Valentine Pescatore, a Chicago-born Border Patrol agent of Argentine extraction, who somewhat involuntarily infiltrates the inner circle of a Tijuana drug lord. The descriptions of life inside the gangster’s compound are riveting, and the accounts of bureaucratic infighting and corruption on both sides of the border – not to mention incidents of genuine heroism – are a tribute to Rotella’s understanding of the complex issues in play.

When things get too hot in Tijuana for Pescatore’s crime boss, he gathers up his gang – including Pescatore, who is surreptitiously reporting to a DEA agent with whom he is also romantically involved – and flies them to the shadowy Paraguayan city of Ciudad del Este until the heat dies down. Without revealing details of the showdown there, I’ll note that the book’s title is a clever pun on the area where the three countries and two rivers come together (pictured above), and the complex network of alliances and betrayals that can take place there.

Surprisingly, the portrayal of both Argentine and Brazilian officials comes off pretty positive – as perhaps they might compared to the notoriously corrupt Paraguayans – but that seems a little naïve on Rotella’s part. Still, it’s an absorbing read and the next step might be to option it for a movie – in an area where Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow already has a project underway.

Twainian Whoppers: On Argentine Inflation

It’s election season in Argentina, and most observers consider President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s re-election on October 23 a near sure thing. Given that the country’s GDP is growing at an eight percent rate, the highest in all of Latin America, it’s even possible that the president’s Victory Front, a faction of the Peronist party, could obtain majorities in both houses of congress.

Despite the haplessness of the other major parties, that doesn’t mean a lack of drama. Unfortunately, most of that drama is the creation of the government itself, in political maneuvers that smack of cheap electioneering. Most notably, it’s their response to criticism on the issue of inflation: the government insists that this year’s figure will be only 8.9 percent – which most other countries would consider high – but the consensus among private consultants and the International Monetary Fund is that prices are rising between 25 and 30 percent annually.

That would give Argentina the world’s second-highest inflation rate, lower only than that of Belarus (41 percent). It’s not so much the disparity between official and independent figures that’s cause for concern – that’s been a fact of life ever since the government replaced professionals with political appointees in the state statistics agency INDEC more than three years ago.

While this lends new meaning to Mark Twain's famous comment about "lies, damned lies and statistics," it’s truly troubling that the government has chosen to punish the bearers of bad news, fining several private consultants 500,000 pesos (roughly US$125,000) each for publishing figures that contradict the official line. Not only that, it has issued subpoenas to six newspapers – Ámbito Financiero, Buenos Aires Económico, Clarín, El Cronista, La Nación and Página/12 – for contacts of reporters and editors who have dealt with the topic over the past five years. This could, conceivably, lead to their being called as witnesses against the consultants and even the IMF.

The press, in turn, has denounced this as intimidation on the part of the government. According to the Associated Press, some economists “now secretly give their data to the congressional freedom of expression committee each month” but, if this month’s elections result in a government majority in both houses, even that outlet could disappear.

Appropriately enough, all this happened in a week in which more than a million books await release from Argentine customs. These hostages are victims of the government’s plan to print more books in Argentina – still a huge market for print - but Argentine publishers complain that domestic costs are higher and the quality lower than books printed elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the president restated the policy at the inauguration of the new Museo del Libro y de la Lengua (Museum of the Book and Language), alongside the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library, pictured above) in Recoleta. In Buenos Aires, a city whose annual Feria del Libro (pictured below) is one of the world’s biggest book fairs, it makes no sense to restrict the movement of books across borders. Otherwise, the motto of “a city open to the world of books” is a sad irony.

Moon Patagonia: October on the Road

Later this month, I will take the new third edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia on the road, with a series of digital slides presentations on southernmost South America. In addition to covering the capital cities of Buenos Aires and Santiago, the gateway cities to Patagonia, I will offer a visual tour of the Chilean and Argentine lakes districts, Argentina's wildlife-rich coastline and Chile's forested fjords, the magnificent Andean peaks of the Fitz Roy range (pictured below) and Torres del Paine, and the uttermost part of the Earth in Tierra del Fuego. I will also include the Falkland Islands, with their abundant sub-Antarctic wildlife.

For those planning trips to the south, there be will be ample time for questions and answers. Books, including my other titles on Argentina, Chile and Buenos Aires, will be on sale at all the events.

Except for the World Affairs Council of the East Bay, all events below are free; the WAC charges $15 for council members and $17 for non-members; students get in free. This will be a wine program as well, starting at 6:30 p.m., and there may be a tango demonstration (to be confirmed).

Advance reservations are advisable for events at REI stores, which often fill up quickly. This can be done online.

Dates and Details

October 18 (Tues.):    Wide World Books (7 p.m)

4411 Wallingford Avenue North

Seattle, Washington 98103

tel. 206/634-3453

October 19 (Wed.):     Village Books (7 p.m.)

1200 Eleventh Street

Bellingham, Washington 98225

tel. 360/671-2626

October 21 (Friday):   San Mateo County Library (6:30 p.m.)

620 Correa Street

Half Moon Bay, California 94019

tel. 650/726-2316

October 22 (Sat.):       Travel Bug (5 p.m.)

839 Paseo de Peralta

Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501

tel. 505/992-0418

October 24 (Mon.):    Distant Lands (7:30 p.m)

56 S. Raymond Avenue

Pasadena, CA 91105

tel. 800/310-3220

October 25 (Tues.):    REI Berkeley (7 p.m.)

1338 San Pablo Avenue

Berkeley, CA 94702

tel. 510/527-4140

October 26 (Wed.):     REI San Francisco (7 p.m.)

840 Brannan Street

San Francisco, CA 94103

tel. 415/934-1938

October 29 (Sat.):       San Mateo County Library (2 p.m.)

1110 Alameda de las Pulgas

Belmont, CA 94002

tel. 650/591-8286

October 31 (Mon.):    Santa Clara County Library (2 p.m.)

13650 Saratoga Avenue

Saratoga, CA 95070

tel. 408/867-6126

REI Saratoga (7 p.m.)

400 El Paseo de Saratoga

San Jose, CA 95130

tel. 408/871-8765

November 1 (Tues.):   REI Fremont (7 p.m.)

43962 Fremont Blvd.

Fremont, CA 94538

tel. 510/651-0305

November 3 (Thurs.): World Affairs Council East Bay Chapter (7 p.m.)

Lafayette Library

3941 Mt. Diablo Blvd.

Lafayette, CA 94549

tel. 510/385-2280