Argentina's Sober Voters?

Just a couple days ago, I wrote about tomorrow’s Argentine election, and I have a little more to say today. Argentine politics is always interesting even though, arguably, it’s among most dysfunctional in the hemisphere, if not the world. As a baseball fan, I find it analogous to cricket – the skills may be similar and, though the rules sometimes seem impenetrable, I find some things to admire.

Of course, Argentine politics lends itself to satire, as a recent article in The New York Times noted (the video at the link includes English subtitles). The ostensible candidate, Omar Obaca, is an Afro-Argentine who, in the video above, promises to improve the hideously polluted Riachuelo of Buenos Aires by paving it, thus relieving traffic congestion as well. However improbable the election of Barack Obama might have seemed before 2008, the Obaca “campaign” achieves unreachable heights in that regard, and offers some real insights.

Some of Argentina’s election measures, though, are worth consideration. While the presidential election cycle there may not be the mind-numbing marathon it is in the US, it is long, but at least the Argentines know when to stop – the electoral code officially ended the campaign as of yesterday, so there are no rallies nor door-to-door electioneering nor TV or radio ads - so that voters, presumably, may reflect on the available choices. On top of that, from 8 p.m. this evening, the so-called ley seca ("dry law") prohibits the sale of alcohol, so that voters may make sober choices.

Of course, that doesn’t prevent people from stocking up before 8 p.m., and one could question whether Argentine voters have made sober choices in the past. Voting is obligatory, by the way – something I don’t necessarily agree with, but the US could certainly do more to encourage voter participation through easy, universal registration.

Dakar 2016? With Luck, DOA

In the early 1980s, when I was researching my M.A. thesis on llama and alpaca herding in the Chilean Andes, Horacio Larraín was my local mentor. Then a professor of geography at Santiago’s Universidad Católica, he helped get approval for the project (funded by the Inter-American Foundation). We still see each other occasionally, though he has since retired to the northern city of Iquique and the interior desert village of Matilla.

A longtime aficionado of the Atacama Desert, Horacio is (like me) concerned with the human and environmental destruction wrought by the annual Dakar Rally, which relocated from Africa to South America in 2009. Since then, Dakar has killed both participants and spectators, and damaged or threatened countless archaeological sites and ecosystems in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru. Last year, a Spanish competitor smuggled 1.4 tons of cocaine back toEurope; this year, there’s been only one death, but two participants – a Dutchman and an Italian – were arrested into Antofagasta for off-route wanderings that damaged an archaeological site.

I’ve only ever seen Dakar at its starting point in BuenosAires (as pictured above in 2010), but I know the Atacama and deplore what this senseless event has done to it. I rarely if ever do guest posts but, in this case, I have translated Horacio’s open letter as published on the website Piensa Chile (Think Chile), where you can see the Spanish-language original.

I have edited Horacio’s essay for brevity and taken some liberties for clarity in English (I am not a professional translator, though I’m confident I have conveyed the meaning), and all the hyperlinks are mine. The photographs below display some of the landscapes and features that Dakar puts at risk.

Open Letter: A Critical Opinion on Dakar and the Preservation of Cultural Resources

In recent years, we have fought a difficult battle against this Rally which is presumably a sporting competition, but which really destroys landscapes and cultural heritage. To summarize, this Rally is a competition and pleasure for the rich (the entry fee is US$240,000) to try out the latest model vehicles before they hit the international market.

This pseudo-sport competition contains the following essential faults that make it totally incompatible with serious and responsible protection of the natural and cultural patrimony of our Tarapacá region:

1) There’s a maliciously false idea that “there’s nothing in the desert” and that, for that reason, you can go anywhere and drive through any part of it. Archaeologists, paleontologists, geologists, paleoecologists and paleobotanists know perfectly well that the subsoil is genuine mine of findings of the past, but all of them hidden from view today. For that reason, a superficial glimpse (which they seem to request) can detect little or nothing.

2) Many times, specimens of extinct fauna from the Tertiary and Quaternary, with extraordinary scientific value (species new to science) have been found on the desert flats.

3) The Pampa del Tamarugal is marked by numerous ancient trails, full of history, as manifested by the cultural artifacts tossed or left along them. Thus we can learn about the nitrate industry and the borax industry, of their abandoned settlements and their ancient ways and circuits of exchange. The ancient routes constitute living history for anyone who knows how to read them. For us archaeologists, they are bearers of culture, genuine archaeological sites.

4) One of the oldest and most venerable routes, the Quahpaqñanor “Inka Trail,” crosses the Pampa, from Quillagua to the north along the Salarde Llamara. Some months ago, we verified that the Dakar heavy support vehicles of 2012 and 2013 followed this same Inka route for more than 30 km, a criminal act that we reported, as the Camino del Inka Study Group (Universidad Nacional Arturo Prat) to the National Monuments Council in 2014. We received no reply.

This inaction and apathy by regional and national authorities worries us. It especially alarms and disturbs us that, to hear their declarations, our repeated scientific proof seems to carry no weight with them, and they are demonstrating an unfortunate absence of cultural consciousness.

Even a schoolchild is capable of understanding our fears and shock, on seeing how they expose the vulnerable desert landscape and destroy its surface, on which there was life thousands or millions of years ago that’s hidden to our eyes today. We could cite numerous cases of noteworthy findings in the open flats, where there’s nothing visible today except for some stones.

The Pampa is not a desert lacking life and bygone human activity: it is an open book for anyone who wants and has learned to read it. And that, necessarily, is the job of the scientist who talks about the danger that these off-road competitions involve, that they respect nothing, they trample and destroy, competitors and spectators alike, leaving thousands of new marks, marks that unfortunately will last for centuries.

For us, Dakar is a true hurricane, highly destructive, whose only objective is to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the powerful automotive industry and appease that hunger for bread and circuses to a bored and deprived humanity that lacks any greater cultural stimulus.

My Own Perspective

The Atacama desert, and corresponding parts of neighboring countries, should not be ecological sacrifice areas to fossil-fuel “sports.” With luck, Dakar 2015 will the last of its kind, or one of the last, but that will require the governments in question to remove subsidies and forego the international publicity they think benefits them - not to mention the damage Dakar does to their countries.

For earlier commentaries of mine on Dakar, please go to this link. 

Grapes in the Falklands? At Government House Gardens

From the mid-19th century, it was customary for every arriving Falklands visitor to call at Government House, the imposing building on Stanley’s Ross Road West, and sign the register. By the time I first arrived in the Islands, in early 1986, that custom had disappeared in the aftermath of 1982's South Atlantic war, as increased political and economic activity brought many more new people here, and the practice became impractical. Succeeding governors, also, were publicly less gregarious than their predecessor Rex Hunt, who genuinely enjoyed socializing with the Islands’ population.

One Government House feature that always fascinated me was the large conservatory (greenhouse) that stretches across two-third of the building’s northern exposure. It includes one of the world’s southernmost grapevines, a “Black Hamburg” variety that, I am told, produces abundant fruit. It is certainly one of the world’s southernmost grapevines; to the best of my knowledge, the only more southerly one sprawls through the conservatory restaurant at the Hotel José Nogueira in the Chilean city of Punta Arenas. Nobody, though, has ever been able to identify the variety to me.

Yesterday, though, I finally got a chance to visit Government House – or at least the conservatory - in the company of head gardener Jeremy Poncet. I had previously met Jeremy in Stanley Harbour when he was an infant aboard the Damien II, a research yacht that his father Jerome and mother Sally regularly sailed to South Georgia and Antarctica (Jeremy’s brother Dion was born in South Georgia, aboard the vessel).

This is a seafaring family, but Sally put me in contact land-based Jeremy, who oversees ornamental plants, fruit trees and vegetable gardens both outdoors and in greenhouses. As the photograph above shows, this season’s tomato plants are flourishing, though he wonders whether ultraviolet radiation through the Ozone Hole over southernmost South America might be causing mutations in the foliage.

In reality, the Government House gardens produce more fruit and vegetables than the governor and his staff can officially consume, with the surplus going to island schools and for charity purposes. That includes the fruit of the prodigiously productively grapevine, seen here from inside the conservatory in the early stages of its springtime growth. Jeremy has pruned it and other exotic plants judiciously.

While Government House and its gardens are not a tourist sight as such, Jeremy is willing to conduct tours for visitors with an interest in cultivated plants in this challenging environment (today, even as summer approaches, we saw a hailstorm and even a few snowflakes). He can’t handle cruise ship crowds, but is happy to accommodate individuals and very small groups, his other duties permitting.

Clearing the Air: Pollution in the Southern Cone

Earlier this week, the World Health Organization released a report on air pollution in 1,100 cities around the world, which it says contribute to respiratory problems and 1.34 million premature deaths per annum. Unsurprisingly, it’s cities in densely populated Asian countries, specifically Iran, India and Pakistan, that have the world’s worst air quality, due largely to dirty fuels that include firewood and coal, and poorly monitored motor vehicles.

The WHO calculates its rankings on the basis of airborne particles smaller than ten micrometers, with a recommended upper limit of 20. By that standard, the Iranian city of Ahvaz has the world’s worst air quality, at 372 grams micrograms per cubic meter. At the other extreme, Santa Fe, New Mexico, registered only six micrograms per cubic meter and Washington DC measured 18.

By these standards, Southern Cone cities, particularly those in Chile, come off not so good but less than catastrophic – at least compared with their Asian counterparts. Chile, of course, is a mining country and, on top of that, its geography is unfavorable: like Southern California, Santiago and other heartland cities lie in a basin between a coast range and the high Andes, which traps particulate matter. This gives Santiago (pictured above, after a winter storm has cleared the air) the country’s second-highest figure, with a reading of 69. Only Rancagua, about an hour south, has a higher reading, at 74; Rancagua not only has a similar geography to Santiago, but suffers from its proximity to the huge El Teniente copper mine in the Andean foothills to the east.

Most heartland cities are in a similar plight: Talca (pictured above) registered 49 and Chillán 52. Of the northern mining cities, the port of Antofagasta (pictured below) was the most polluted, with a reading of 55, while Calama measured only 50 – despite the presence of the gigantic open-pit copper mine at nearby Chuquicamata. The southern city of Temuco had a surprisingly low figure of 49, given that its residents use so much firewood for heating and cooking.

While all these figures are higher than desirable, they’re not alarmingly high like the Asian and all are below the global average of 79. The figures also can be misleading because they are not geographically specific – the air quality in Santiago’s poorer western neighborhoods, for instance, is worse than the richer eastern barrios. While that’s deplorable in terms of environmental justice, at best, it also means it will not affect most visitors. It’s those who have to live there that suffer most.

Across the Andes, things are a bit better. I’ve long argued against the clichéd depiction of Buenos Aires (pictured above) as the “Paris of the South,” but in one sense that’s true – according to the WHO, its reading of 38 is identical to the French capital. Across the Río de la Plata, Uruguay’s capital of Montevideo (pictured below) checked in only a little worse, with a reading of 39.

Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires in Millbrae (San Mateo County)

Thursday September 29 will mark the last of four digital slide presentations on the fourth edition of Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires, at various branches of the San Mateo Public Library. This event starts at 1 p.m. at the Millbrae Library (1 Library Avenue, Millbrae, CA 94030, tel. 650/697-7607). There will be ample time for questions and answers, and books (also including Moon Argentina and Moon Chile) will be on sale (at a discount).

Next month, I will be on the road promoting the new third edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia. Most of the events will be in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I will also be appearing in Seattle and Bellingham, Washington; Vancouver BC; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Pasadena, California. Watch this space for details.