Bye-Bye, Buenos Aires Herald

In 1979, when I first visited Argentina, my Spanish was basic, and the country was in the depths of its worst dictatorship ever—one that “disappeared” and executed many thousands of its opponents. I was also naïve, but my own experiences in a brief visit to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego unnerved me despite the country’s stunning natural landscapes.

I doubted whether I’d ever return but then, two years later in Bolivia, I met the Argentine woman who would become my wife. A couple months after we parted in Chile, where I was researching my M.A. thesis on llama/alpaca pastoralism in Parque Nacional Lauca, I made my first visit to Buenos Aires, where she was studying literature.

Robert Cox (left) with Australian filmmaker Jayson McNamara, who shot a documentary about the Herald, in Cox's Buenos Aires apartment.

By that time, my Spanish had improved considerably, but I got to know the city and country partly through its venerable English-language daily, the Buenos Aires Herald. While the Herald’s relatively small staff could not match the broader coverage of high-circulation dailies like Clarín and La Nación, it had gained an international reputation by publicly reporting on the military junta’s record of brutality and repression (the Spanish-language dailies almost ignored those atrocities). That made its staff, such as editor Robert Cox and news editor Andrew Graham-Yooll, the target of threats against themselves and their families, and both had to go into exile.

Andrew Graham-Yooll, outside the Herald's old offices on Calle Azopardo

Even after the dictatorship ended, I continued to rely on the Herald as an essential digest of Argentine news. On visits to my wife’s provincial hometown of Olavarría, in the Pampas, the local newsagent would reserve me a copy and my late father-in-law—who barely recognized a word in English—would devour the Spanish-language version of its editorials. Later, as I spent more three decades traveling in the country, I got to meet the heroic Cox and Graham-Yooll, and other Anglo-Argentine legends such as food writer Dereck Foster and senior editor Michael Soltys.

I've also written for the paper on occasion, on topics such as Argentina's now discontinued tourism reciprocity fee and the Falkland/Malvinas Islands (for which, in one reader's letter, I was accused of being a CIA agent).

In recent years, the Herald had lost much of its critical edge, and also its readership as it went from a daily to a weekly. It finally closed its doors this week—sadly, without so much as a farewell edition. The best summary I’ve read in English comes from The Economist, which notes (and I agree) that online publications like The Bubble may pick up some of the slack. My own generation falls somewhere in between the Herald’s methodical heyday and The Bubble’s snarkier millennialism; I sometimes enjoy the latter, but I’ll always miss the former.

Reaching My Peak (in the Andes)

As I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, Mt. Rainier was always a looming presence – at least when the rainclouds cleared enough for us to see it from my hometown of Tacoma or the University of Washington campus in Seattle. Its 14,410-foot (4,392-meter) summit inspired me to think of climbing it one day, but that was something so far beyond my parents’ experience that, when they dismissed the idea, I never pursued it further. Rather, I had to settle for car-camping within Rainier’s shadow.

After moving to California, though, I became an enthusiastic hiker, if never a true mountaineer. I spent weekends and weeks hiking through the Sierra Nevada and, whenever possible, I’d climb the most accessible peaks. I never did any technical climbing, but I did reach the granite summit of 13,060-foot (3,981-meter) Seven Gables in the company of Bronski, my beloved first malamute (pictured above).

Then, in the early 1980s, I spent most of a year in northernmost Chile, researching my M.A. thesis on llama and alpaca herders in Parque Nacional Lauca. I lived in the tiny Aymara Indian village of Parinacota (pictured above), which sits at 14,400 feet (4,400 meters), near the snow-covered sister volcanoes known collectively as the Pallachatas (6,336- meter (20,782-foot) Parinacota and and 6,282-meter (20,610-foot) Pomerape).

That sort of mountaineering was beyond my abilities, but I kept an eye on nearby Cerro Guaneguane, an extinct volcano with no permanent snow (it's obscured by cloud in the background of the photo above). The base was easy walking distance from my accommodations with the Corporación Nacional Forestal (CONAF, which manages Chile’s national parks), but it still took me a while to work up the initiative to climb it. At that altitude, my throat was dry every night and even sleeping could be an effort. Parinacota now has a simple accommodations in Aymara-run Albergue Uta Kala (pictured below).

At 5,097 meters (16,722 feet), Guaneguane never presented the technical challenges that Mt. Rainier or Parinacota would have, but it’s not a casual hike. In the first instance, there’s the altitude but, living in the village, I was already acclimated. Secondly, there was the terrain – it was unrelentingly steep and, in many parts, soft. Hiking up volcanic ash often meant two steps forward and one step back, but the reward was spectacular panoramas of the snow-topped Pallachatas (pictured below) and the Bolivian altiplano (high steppe). It was, literally, the high point of my life.

Poachers Target Chile's Vicuñas, Andean Communities

In recent decades, one of South America’s greatest conservation successes has been the comeback of the wild vicuña (pictured above), the rare camelid that’s a close relative of the equally wild guanaco and the domestic llama and alpaca. Wild, however, does not mean fierce and, more recently according to the Los Angeles Times, poachers have begun to take a serious toll on these gentle and approachable creatures.

When I first traveled to Chile, in the late 1970s, there were only about 1,000 vicuñas in Parque Nacional Lauca (pictured above), which abuts the Bolivian border in the high Andes, east of the city of Arica. That number has risen as high as 17,000, but the Times article cites a figure of only 13,000. When I lived there for nearly a year in the early 1980s, while doing research for my M.A. thesis in Geography at Berkeley, sighting solitary vicuñas or troops of them was always a thrill as I traveled the high plains, whether riding in a bus, hiking, or riding a mule.

Still, at more 4,000 meters (14,000 feet) above sea level, this is a thinly populated area where a handful of rangers cannot monitor the herds along a porous border – when I lived there, Aymará Indian families regularly crossed to and back from Bolivia with no regard for immigration formalities.

Since the vicuña’s fine wool sells for roughly US$1,000 per kilo – on the black market – it’s become difficult to control ruthless poachers who shoot to kill and then skin the animals before selling the hides and wool to smugglers who ship them out of the country.  Park rangers are unarmed and, earlier this year, poachers killed two Carabineros police officers who had stopped them at a roadblock near Arica.

The Times story cites my friend Hernán Torres, a conservation consultant whom I met there in the early 1980s, to the effect that “Law enforcement officials in the Andes have simply been overwhelmed by the mafias who have the vicuña killed and skinned, and who then sell the fiber to China and Europe.”

The vicuñas are not the only victims. Chile and other countries now have programs that allow highland communities to manage the herds sustainably, trapping and shearing them at regular intervals. That’s become more difficult, less profitable, and potentially risky for those who continue to do so.