Pedaling the Pampas

The Plusmar bus line crosses the Pampas from Retiro to Olavarría.

After I spent a week adapting to a five-hour time change and recovering from the hangover of perhaps the most miserable flight of my life, my wife arrived in Buenos Aires and, after a couple more days, we took the bus to her hometown of Olavarría for the first family reunion since the pandemic struck. Leaving our Palermo apartment early, we caught a 7 a.m. bus that, in the morning rush hour, took more than two hours just to get beyond the city limits. After that, it was another four hours across the interminably flat Pampas in comfortable conditions—many of Argentina’s long-distance buses have seating comparable to business class on an airplane.

The Olavarría terminal early in the morning.

Rodolfo tends his rabbits at the chacra.

After María Laura’s sister Estela picked us up at the Olavarría terminal, most of that day and the next consisted of lunches and extended family dinners with her and her brother Rodolfo, at whose house we stayed. On the Friday, though, we rose early and, after a quick breakfast, we climbed aboard borrowed bicycles for a ride to Rodolfo’s countryside chacra, where he raises rabbits, chickens (and eggs), sheep, and even a few pigs. It’s about 12 miles (20 km) outside town but, despite the endlessly flat terrain, the ride proved more strenuous than I anticipated.

There were few landmarks along the route, but this roadhouse on the paved highway was one.

Estela and María Laura at the gate to the chacra.

Accustomed to the hills of the Oakland and Berkeley, which can be steeply challenging, I expected this ride to be a breeze—and in a sense it was, as gusty headwinds slowed our progress over the bumpy sand and gravel backroads (mostly used by farm traffic). Because of those conditions, my average speed was probably lower than most of my usual rides, which usually include downhill segments that allow for coasting at higher speeds. Only one short segment was along a paved highway, where we used the firm grassy shoulder to avoid speeding trucks and SUVs.

Our route from Olavarría to El Aromo and back

In the end, our route covered 21.96 miles (35.3 km), according to the Strava app that I use for cycling. What startled me a bit is that the Health app on my phone recorded this as the equivalent of walking 20.3 miles (32.7 km), which is one indicator of the fatigue levels we all felt on returning to town and the calm waters of the Arroyo Tapalqué, part of a pleasant greenbelt just outside Rodolfo’s front door. After dismounting, though, it was siesta time.

The ride ended at Rodolfo's house in town, alongside the Arroyo Tapalqué greenbelt.

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.

Saved from Soccer? My Argentine Nephew Pitches and Hits

Baseball has always been my favorite spectator sport and, as an adult, my main recreational sports passion has been slow-pitch softball, though I’ve only played sporadically the past couple years. Even in Buenos Aires, I’ve played a bit of baseball and softball, though they are clearly niche sports here.

At present, a perplexing leg injury keeps me from swinging the bat, running the bases and chasing down fly balls even if the opportunity presented itself. This weekend, though, I experienced a pleasurable respite from the endless 24/7 of scoreless soccer games that’s Argentina’s usual sporting fare - on a visit to my wife’s hometown of Olavarría, in Buenos Aires province, I got my first opportunity to see my nephew Mariano Peruilh play fastpitch softball in a tournament that has drawn half a dozen teams from quite a distance away. It was rather like finding an Olympic-size swimming pool in the Atacama, as the photograph above suggests.

The six teams in the tournament include Mariano’s own Estudiantes Black Jack and their co-hosts the Koalas Racing (one of five teams in Olavarría’s local league; the next nearest teams are in the port city of Bahía Blanca, 302 km to the southwest). One of the tournament teams is the Indios de Bahía Blanca (which is also the hometown of NBA star Manu Ginóbili), but there are also Mayú of La Pampa province (431 km west of Olavarría), the Tigres of Pilar (368 km northeast) and Don Bosco of Paraná, Entre Ríos (723 km north). Surprisingly, there was no entrant from the Argentine capital.

Paraná is the traditional hotbed of Argentine softball, a city of 200,000 people that has at least eight fields, three of them lighted (in the photo above, a local player crosses the plaza in front of the city's cathedral). Mariano once moved there to finish high school in hopes of honing his softball skills to make the national team as a pitcher. That’s not yet happened, but he’s young enough (19) that it's still a possibility.

Olavarría’s Club de Estudiantes has two well-kept fields, one complete with a press box and concessions (with choripán instead of hot dogs). With temperatures above 90° F (about 34° C), we spectators were fortunate that dark netting shaded the stands. In these conditions, the catchers had it particularly tough but, in general, the quality of play was good to excellent.

On this particular day, Mariano (pictured above and below) started strong on the mound and at bat, establishing an early 3-0 lead with a pair of crisp run-scoring singles off a hard-throwing Tigres pitcher. At the same time, though, he cost his own team a potentially big inning with a base-running gaffe and then made a fielding error that led to a two-run double; an inning later, he surrendered a prodigious home run that tied the score. At that point, unfortunately, I had to leave because of another family commitment, but Estudiantes got him a couple runs to win by a 5-3 score. In the next game, against their local rivals the Koalas, he got the save in a 2-0 shutout.

I had to take the bus back to Buenos Aires very early Sunday morning, so I missed the second day (which included a home run derby). Mariano's team didn't fare so well on Sunday, and will have to beat Bahía Blanca early this morning in order to face the Paraná powerhouse in the afternoon semi-finals.

Dynamic Update, Tuesday, December 9: I read in this morning's El Popular, Olavarría's hometown paper, that Estudiantes lost their semi-final game to Mayú of La Pampa and then lost to Bahía Blanca in the third-place consolation game (in which Mariano hit a three-run homer). Mayú beat Don Bosco of Paraná for the championship.

Uproar in Olavarría?

My wife’s hometown of Olavarría (pictured below), in the middle of the Pampas of Buenos Aires Province, is historically a cow-town that’s also prospered thanks to a cement plant that exploited some of Argentina’s largest quarries. In recent days, though, it’s drawn international attention because a young man, raised by a couple in the countryside, turned out to be the grandson of the high-profile president of the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), formed to rescue the children of their own disappeared children from Argentina’s 1976-83 Dirty War.

Earlier this year, on learning that he was "adopted," Ignacio Hurban took a DNA test that determined he  was Estela de Carlotto’s grandson Guido Montoya Carlotto. I won’t go into the usual details of the story, which has been covered extensively in English as well as Spanish, but I’d like to offer a slightly different perspective that I’ve gleaned in conversations with my wife, from a local’s viewpoint. This is a sensitive topic in her family because her brother’s first wife disappeared barely a month after their son’s birth, and I will decline to include any names that are not already widely known (though I will add that my nephew, despite losing his mother shortly after his birth, has grown up to be a remarkably well-adjusted young man).

Many children of the disappeared ended up in military families – to be raised by their parents’ assassins – as depicted in the Oscar-winning film The Official Story (ceremony above, emceed by the late Robin Williams, who mispronounces the surname of Argentine actress Norma Aleandro). Ignacio Hurban’s adoptive parents, though, were a modest couple who worked on a well-known landowner’s cattle ranch. That’s raised questions as to whether the landowner himself was in league with the military murderers, and the potential culpability of the local physician who signed off on a falsified birth certificate.

In related news, in September Olavarría will be the site of the trial of four military men accused of kidnapping and torturing political activists at nearby Monte Peloni, one of the dictatorship's documented detention centers. The landowner, who died a few months ago, had connections to those four.

Argentine Icon? The Statue of Liberty on the River Plate

Frequently, relations between the United States and Argentina have been contentious. The 19th-century author, educator and politician Domingo Sarmiento admired the US but, in the 20th century, many public figures have distrusted the “Colossus of the North.” After World War II, US ambassador Spruille Braden accused Juan Domingo Perón’s government of having been pro-Axis, but Perón cleverly turned Braden’s accusations into a winning presidential campaign slogan, “Braden or Perón,” in 1946.

Many Argentines accused the US of complicity or open support of the 1976 coup against Perón’s widow María Estela Martínez (Isabel) and the subsequent 1976-83 Dirty War that resulted in perhaps 30,000 extra-judicial deaths. Still, after 1976, President Jimmy Carter’s representatives, most notably Tex Harris in Buenos Aires and Patricia Derian in Washington, strenuously investigated the dictatorship’s human rights abuses (in 2004, Harris received a decoration from Argentina’s Foreign Ministry for his efforts).

Ronald Reagan’s administration reversed their work, pandering to the Argentine junta early in his presidency and giving mixed signals on the 1982 invasion of the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands. The Reaganites eventually threw US support to Britain’s counter-invasion of the South Atlantic archipelago, but Henry Kissinger and the vicious Jeane Kirpatrick remained enthusiastic supporters of the bloodthirsty Argentine regime. President Carlos Menem, now widely reviled in Argentina, had warm relations with the US, but subsequent governments, including the current administration of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, have kept their distance at best.

Given this historical ambivalence, I was surprised to read, in a tweet from the US Embassy, that there were five replicas of New York’s Statue of Liberty in Argentina, most of them in Buenos Aires province. I quickly corrected them as, when I visited my wife’s hometown of Olavarría in 2010, my brother-in-law casually mentioned the presence of such a statue in the riverside Parque Mitre near his house.

Despite the frequent distrust of the US government that I hear in the Argentine press and media, as well as from politicians, I have never personally experienced any anti-American sentiment. Still, I was surprised to learn of the abundance of such a US icon in the country, and wonder whether there might be even more of them. That said, Argentina has a similar icon in La Libertad Argentina, pictured above on the obverse of a 500,000-austral note from the hyperinflationary 1980s.

Moon Handbooks Chile, in Los Altos

In about a month – Wednesday, July 17, at 7 p.m., to be precise – I will offer a digital slide presentation on travel in Chile at Santa Clara County’s Los Altos Library (13 S. San Antonio Road, tel. 650/948-7683). Coverage will also include the Chilean Pacific Islands of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Juan Fernández (Robinson Crusoe), as well as southernmost Argentina (Tierra del Fuego and the vicinity of El Calafate) that appear in the book. I will also be prepared to answer questions about Argentina and Buenos Aires. The presentation is free of charge, but books will be available for purchase.