My Long Good Friday the 13th

Yesterday was Friday the 13th and, whenever I'm in South America, I have to remind myself that it's not bad luck. In the Spanish-speaking world, Tuesday the 13th - martes 13 – is the day and date to fear. When marketed in the region, all those grotesque slasher movies had to be edited, with misleading subtitles, for cultural reasons.

I've never cared enough to sit through one of those movies, but I came perilously close to a disastrous 13th this week. I was due to fly from Los Angeles to Santiago on Thursday the 12th, arriving on Friday the 13th, and ultimately did - as the seatback video screen above shows - but not before getting a scare. It was not the slasher sort of scare, nor was it an airplane problem, but it briefly unnerved me.

On Wednesday I intended to drive to LA, spending the night at the house of friends before catching my Thursday afternoon flight. As it happened, I left the house a bit late to pick up my rental car at Oakland International Airport and had to rush through a couple errands before returning home for my luggage. I quickly loaded the car, gave the dog a bone in the backyard, and then headed south on the MacArthur Freeway.

About ten minutes out, for some reason, I experienced the uneasy suspicion I had forgotten something (for me, packing is the worst part of any trip). The feeling was strong enough that I left the freeway and started going through my bags with only a general notion that something was wrong. It became very specific, though, when I found an empty leg pouch that I had chosen as a backup to the one with my passport and US$2000 in cash - which was nowhere to be found.

I didn't quite panic but, not wanting to return home, I did another quick search before concluding that I had to do so. Another problem was that, before leaving home, I had dropped my house key into our mail slot, so I had no certain means of entering without contacting my wife at work - which I preferred not to do. Fortunately, just before I left, I had seen the next-door neighbor, who has an emergency key, but I have never entered her number on my phone. Thus, I had to drive back and hope she'd be there.

Fortunately she was home but, unfortunately, she couldn't find the key, and I was almost resigned to interrupting my wife at work. Then a near-miracle happened - another neighbor was walking her dogs and, when she heard about the situation, she volunteered the fact that she had a key to our house (I had no idea she had one, and my wife later said she'd forgotten about it).

So, a happy ending, except for the hour and a half it delayed my departure for LA (where my friends and I dined late – for them, at least - at a Brazilian restaurant). I shudder to think what would have happened had I arrived in LA with neither passport nor cash, which would have delayed my departure until at least Friday the 13th - or, for all I know, the next martes 13 (which takes place in September of next year!).

My arrival in Santiago, as indicated in the map above, was a more agreeable experience – though I only managed about two hours of sleep in a 36-hour period. I topped off my Friday the 13th here with a visit to MOVINight 2015, a major tasting event for the Movimiento de Viñateros Independientes – an alliance of small-scale bodegas producing, for lack of better world, craft wines. It was at the Centro Cultural Matucana 100 (pictured above), a great facility I had never visited before, and I managed to see a few friends and acquaintances there – thanks largely to Courtney Kingston, of Kingston Family Vineyards. I also got to sample an unusual selection of wines - there were also beers and even whiskey, which are not to my taste - and when I returned to my Santiago accommodations, that helped me catch up on my sleep.

Counting the Votes: Argentina's Runoff Nears Resolution

Recently I wrote about Argentina’s presidential election, which turned out to be an upset – not in terms of who finished first, but in that it will require a November 22 runoff to decide the ultimate victor, the semi-official favorite Daniel Scioli or the insurgent Mauricio Macri. That sounds fairly straightforward, but the process of determining who will eventually occupy the Casa Rosada presidential palace (pictured below) is not quite so simple.

Argentina elects the president by popular vote, but the first round had multiple candidates. By the country’s peculiar electoral rules, a single candidate needs only 45 percent to win outright, or more than 40 percent with a ten-point advantage over his (or her) closest runner-up. In the end, Scioli won 37.08 percent, Macri 34.15 percent, and dissident Peronist Sergio Massa 21.39 percent; several minor candidates totaled less than eight percent.

That raises potentially interesting questions as to how precise the results might be. There has been little or no indication of dishonesty in ballot-counting but, in an election with more than 25 million voters, a minor miscount could put a candidate above or below the threshold for victory. The margins were pretty clear this time, but it’s easy to imagine a future scenario that would require multiple recounts.

Still, the close race necessitated the runoff in which, again, it’s still possible the winner will not have a majority – even though there are only two candidates. While voting remains obligatory, dissenters can cast their vote en blanco – a blank protest voted that gets counted, and some certainly will. Leftist candidate Nicolás del Caño, who got barely three percent of the vote, has urged his supporters to do so.

Does it much matter who wins? Both candidates claim to be market-friendly, but that’s relative – it would be hard to be less market-friendly than outgoing president Cristina Fernández, who succeeded her husband Néstor Kirchner in the office (Scioli was Kirchner’s vice-president before winning the governorship of Buenos Aires province, the most populous in the country, and has Fernández’s nominal support). In an op-ed in this morning’s New York Times, Argentine journalist Uki Goñi (whom I know casually) analyzes the possibilities.

Both Scioli and Macri have indicated they will not reverse the current government’s generous social welfare policies, but take the issue of inflation more seriously. For foreign visitors, the most important change may be the eventual elimination of the “dollar clamp” exchange controls that make travel more complex – both candidates appear to agree on this.

As it happens, I may be in Argentina (though not in Buenos Aires) by the date of the runoff. Polls suggest Macri will win, but polls proved unreliable in the first round, indicating that Scioli would win easily, probably without a runoff. Still, whoever wins, he’ll almost certainly be superior to most if not all of the Republican clown car candidates who have paraded across North American TV screens in their recent debates.

Beisebol no Brasil? Brazilians Play Ball!

For more than two decades, I’ve been covering the Southern Cone countries of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and the Falkland Islands for various guidebook publishers. Because the seasons are reversed from my Northern California home, I’ve arguably experienced an endless summer – as a rule of thumb, I leave the Northern Hemisphere when the World Series ends and return in time for opening day. In South America, though, I’ve generally missed the presence of baseball, my favorite participant and spectator sport.

It hasn’t been a total loss. I’ve played both softball and baseball in Buenos Aires (where there’s a pretty good recreational league that includes teams of Cubans, Japanese and Koreans, as well as Argentines). In the Falklands, I surprised some Japanese fishermen by joining them in a game and catch and throwing curveballs – something they expected even less than somebody who could catch the ball. In Paraguay, I watched a sandlot pickup game (pictured above) in which most of the players were ethnically Japanese.

Venezuela, of course is South America’s baseball powerhouse, contributing many players to the major leagues though the economic crisis there has brought hard times to the game. Colombia is a distant second, but there’s an up-and-coming entrant – as of just a few days ago, Brazil can boast its first player ever in the World Series, reserve outfielder Paulo Orlando of the Kansas City Royals. At the age of 29 Orlando, who started playing with Japanese-Brazilians in his home town of São Paulo, is a late bloomer who played more than a thousand minor league games before finally reaching the majors this year. Seen above hitting a game-winning home run in July, he played in 86 games and showed speed and some power, with 14 doubles, six triples and seven homers.

Orlando hasn’t played much in this Series against the New York Mets, though, and he’s not even the highest profile Brazilian in the game. Catcher Yan Gomes, of the Cleveland Indians, plays the game’s most demanding position and, though he spent considerable time on the disabled list this year, the 27-year-old is just entering his prime (Gomes also spent much of his youth in Florida). São Paulo native Andre Rienzo, a righthanded pitcher for the Miami Marlins, has had limited success so far but is also only 27.

According to Gomes, baseball “is such a growing sport (in Brazil) right now, it’s amazing.” Whether Brazilian baseball will ever really take off in a country that’s obsessed with futebol (soccer) is open to question, but these three major leaguers demonstrate that the athletic talent is there to play this complex and difficult sport.

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.