Rays from the setting sun spill through the cracked windowpane of an open garage. The tiny dust particles catch in the soft light, swirling ethereally around cars used in the time of our great grandfathers. Phonographs, paraffin lanterns, antique water pitchers, wooden wheel barrels, time appears to have stopped long ago. However, its 2008 and one of Uruguay’s oldest estancias near the town of Carmelo is in its sixth year running as a refurbished luxury bed and breakfast.

The estate dates back to 1732 when an esteemed Spanish architect built the nearby Narbona chapel. In the early 1900s Italian immigrants moved in, bringing with them vines transported from the best terroirs in Europe and the tradition of making delicious cheeses. In 2002, owner and developer Pacha Canton had the vision to refurbish and bring back to life the historic estancia. He found some of the best interior designers, staff, and cheese and wine makers, to emulate the life and flavours of the early 1900s.

Photo by: Sanra Ritten

The rooms adornment of crystal chandeliers, plush white cushions, and simple elegance borrowed from another time is important but it’s the spectacular food that sets the place apart from just another up-scale boutique hotel. Behind the scenes of the relaxing, elegant bed and breakfast, there are people artfully making fresh pastas, artesian cheeses and Tannat. The gastronomy of Narbona is what makes the place so interesting, the history and work behind each delicious morsel and drop of wine.

The view from the two guest rooms overlooks Narbona’s greatest asset: the vineyards. Nine hectares of the emblematic Uruguayan grape, Tannat, stretch out over the rolling hills into the horizon. While Narbona does produce a Viognier and Pinto Noir, its Tannat is arguably the best.

Photo by: Sanra Ritten

Carmelo is one of Uruguay’s biggest wine producing regions and its wines have special characteristics due to it’s unique geographic location. It is located just two kilometres from Punta Gorda, where the Río de Uruguay ends and the Río de la Plata begins. The temperature of the Río de la Plata at this latitude is significantly warmer than anywhere else due to the proximity of the Río Paraná estuary, which brings warm water from the centre of South America.

While Tannat grapes are picked in the middle of March in other parts of Uruguay, they are not picked until the end of the month in Carmelo due to the warmer river temperatures. These extra 15 days allow the fruits to further mature, thus producing wines of higher quality.

Other factors of course play a part in distinguishing the Tannat from Narbona to those of others, from the calcite rich soils to the deeply rooted tradition of hand picking the grapes.

Photo by: Sanra Ritten

Uruguay, the small country that it is, is actually the world’s largest producer of the grape. Originally from the south-western part of France, it grows well in South American soil. Even though it best pairs with Uruguay’s favourite food, beef, Narbona’s infamous parmesan cheese can hold its own against the rather tannic, deeply coloured red wine.

Jorge Jaen, the master cheesemaker, has been working at Narbona since its conception and before then he made cheese with his Uncle for 20 years. Each day, about 3,000 litres of milk are taken from the 100 cows on the property and made into fine quality mozzarella, colonia and parmesan cheese.

Photo by: Sanra Ritten

The parmesan cheese from Narbona is special and has a unique flavour because unlike most, it is guarded in the cooling rooms for four years. Technically parmesan cheese can be stored for just 10-12 months and even most other high quality parmesan cheeses in Argentina are only stored for two years. The extra time sitting on a shelf in a temperature-controlled room intensifies the hard Italian cheese’s pungent flavour and flaky texture.

For those interested Jaen, or his apprentice, will give tours of the tambo. One can see the hoses that pump the milk fresh from the cows, the sterilised rooms where the fermentations are added to make the different cheeses and the salt baths where the cheeses bob around for days on end. The tour ends with a tasting in the storage rooms where the smell from the rounds and rounds of maturing queso is so intense it’s almost intoxicating.

Photo by: Sanra Ritten

Back in the restaurant’s kitchen, the chefs pair the cheeses with their culinary soulmate: fresh pastas. Egg fettuccines, ham and ricotta stuffed sorrentinos or spinach and cheese canelones, nothing is more delicious than hearty servings of homemade pasta with freshly grated parmesan cheese fit for an Italian king.

The menu at the restaurant is simple – pasta dishes, platters of meats and cheeses or salads straight from the organic garden – yet decadent: very much in tune with the rest of Narbona. It is a place to relax and enjoy the simple things in life of the very highest quality.

Photo by: Sanra Ritten

Narbona could have been the country house of an aristocratic family of South America in the early 20th century. So be warned, don’t go there with a peasants (ie backpackers) change purse. For more information or to make reservations check out www.fincanarbona.com .

It’s long past midnight high up in paradise, and Atilio Csik’s hand-rolled cigarette has cast a wispy haze across his mountain cabin. Atilio washes down the smoke with a gulp of red wine, then continues to regale three eager city slickers with a patient profile of his life in the mountains.

He’s no raconteur – preferring to explain the right of public access to rivers and lakes rather than to wax on about the adventures that have coloured his 28 years in the mountains – but he plainly likes conversation. At 1:30am, with only a few amber lights still glowing, Atilio finishes his wine, and sets off to bed. He will wake up long before sunrise the next morning, setting off on one of his occasional journeys out of the mountains and in to town.

Photo By: Eric Benson

Every day of the year, Atilio’s home, a wooden cabin perched above the Río Azul, is open to throngs of hikers seeking a warm meal, mate, and a place to the rest their heads. Refugio Cajón del Azul, the public name of Atilio’s home, is set against the startling beauty of the Andean Comarca of the 42nd Parallel, a mountainous area west of El Bolsón and Lago Puelo that has become of one Argentina’s most treasured wilderness sanctuaries.

In 1960, the Club Andino Piltriquitron (CAP) was founded to help open these mountains to those who felt their call most strongly. CAP began with only a few refugios (the name given to these South American alpine hiking huts) but has now swelled to become a confederation of 11 with a network of trails crisscrossing the peaks and valleys of the region. Most of the CAP refugios are privately owned and operated, gaining entry into the CAP network based on their adherence to the group’s governing philosophies, which emphasise conservation and low-impact, non-exploitative, alpine tourism.

Photo By: Eric Benson

On an early December trip to the region, I made the trek up Piltriquitron, carelessly underestimating the snow and freezing winds at the top. I arrived back at the refugio with a growling stomach and numb fingers. Inside, I found a crackling fire, oven-cooked pizza, and the refugio’s own home-brewed beer.

Camping is all well and good, but stumbling off the frigid summit of a mountain into a cabin where you can get a hearty pizza and a few pints strikes me as the ideal mix of stark nature and rugged civilisation.

My experience in Atilio Csik’s refugio, Cajón del Azúl, was no different. Cajón del Azul lies a three-hour trek from Wharton, a place that is nothing more than a four-way intersection an hour’s bus ride from the centre of El Bolsón. The hike up is spectacular – the trail winds along the side of the strikingly turquoise Rio Azul as it cascades down from its glacial source.

Photo By: Adam Bloch

Thirty minutes into the hike, you find yourself making a perilous crossing of two bridges that, in my mind, have come to define the word ‘rickety’ (think ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’, subtract a few planks from the bridge and stop worrying about the crocodiles).

Once you cross these treacherous obstacles, you find yourself deep in the forest, occasionally peeking out at the river and the rest of the Comarca range as you make the steady ascent towards the refugio.

The final approach to Cajón de Azul evokes a sense of fairy-tale wonder. You’ve been navigating perilous bridges, scrambling over rock faces, and trudging up and down an endless series of heavily wooded hills, and suddenly you find yourself in a bucolic clearing with a vegetable garden, a bright green lawn, and an immaculate log cabin.

Photo By: Eric Benson

It has a perfect, somewhat eerie beauty. When I knocked on the door, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a grinning wolf dressed in an old woman’s rumpled garb.

Cajón del Azul does have its own grinning wolf, but he’s of the most benevolent sort. Atilio, with his wizened face and full white beard, has a mythic air about him that is reinforced by the romantic arc of his life story.

The scion of Hungarian immigrants in Buenos Aires, Atilio left the bustle of the city behind at the age of 27, purchased the property on which Cajón del Azul currently sits, and began a life that of rugged isolation that would put Henry David Thoreau to shame. For 12 years, he lived exclusively off the land, raising crops, livestock, and his own family, before converting his home into a refugio in 1992.

Like Refugio Piltriquitron, Cajón del Azul is a careful mix of wilderness and bare bones humanity. There’s electricity, but it depends on a series of old car batteries. The lights in the central room range from dim to dimmer as the batteries slow lose their charge. Every few hours there is a brief blackout before Atilio or one of his staff members hooks a new battery into the system. Then, the flickering towards darkness resumes again.

Photo By: Eric Benson

There are hot showers at Cajón del Azul, but they’re only available for a few hours at night. The oven is wood burning, and specialises in pouring out rich stews and warm bread – the perfect complements to the starry mountain night.

This fairy tale existence, however, is in peril. Tourism to the area is unrestricted, and in the height of the January season, Atilio has found himself playing host to as many as 280 guests. It’s his policy never to turn a hiker away, a decision that reflects his idealistic hospitality, but also results in overcrowding.

Lest anyone think that financial concerns drive this inclusiveness, Atilio says that when the place is packed, he lowers prices if he doesn’t think the experience is up to par. I didn’t need to hear this to know that the bottom line had little to do with the workings of Cajón del Azul.

When my hiking companion asked if he could buy one of the Cajón del Azul T-shirts that Atilio and his three staff members were wearing, Atilio gave a soft smile and replied that he regretted that he couldn’t please my friend, but that ‘he didn’t like engaging in that sort of commerce’. My friend was never so pleased to have been refused service.

Despite this anti-commercial posture, Cajón del Azul and the rest of the CAP refugios have embraced tourism even as worries mount that the growing numbers may compromise the area’s splendour.

Photo By: Eric Benson

“The era of massive tourism coincides with the era of greatest risk to the forest,” Atilio said in our late night conversation – he pointed to the increasing number of fires that have torched the region in the last 15 years, many due to human carelessness, and to the growing incursion of foreign plants that has crowded out fragile local species.

Protecting the Comarca from the full brunt of human development relies on the continued collaboration of public and private forces. All the land in the Comarca is privately owned, much of it by cattle and sheepherders who use the high plateau as pasture area. Yet, all of the land in the Comarca is under the stewardship of the provincial government. If a landowner in the Comarca wants to do so much as fell a tree on his property, he must consult with a provincial officials before legally carrying it out. It means a lot of hassle, but also a real commitment to conservation.

Even in this carefully controlled zone, the balance of tourism and nature is a constant concern. In the last ten years, three new mountain houses have cropped up within an hour’s walk of Cajón del Azul, threatening to inflate the already high number of visitors.

One of the new mountain houses, Refugio El Retamal, is a year-round CAP refugio that is a kind of sister facility to Cajón del Azul. The other two houses, La Playita and La Tronconada, occupy a more shadowy area in the Comarca landscape.

Photo By: Eric Benson

Neither La Playita nor La Tronconada has been granted entry into the CAP, and both advertise their presence with the commerce-promoting signs that Atilio shuns. One of the bylaws of the CAP is that refugio owners should ‘impede the creation of other similar mountain houses in the areas serviced by already existing refugios ’. It would be silly to cast the owners of these new mountain huts as crass capitalists, but their decision to do business on the mountain poses another risk to the delicate balance between access and exploitation.

While the Comarca is an increasingly popular summer destination, it’s worth remembering that its exposure to humanity is limited almost completely to a two-month window. In the winter, Atilio spends his time in almost complete isolation at Cajón del Azul, working on carpentry projects and relaxing amid the snowy splendour. The only interruptions to his solitude are visits from his daughter and the friends and neighbours who occasionally make the snowy trek from El Bolsón. It’s rare though, that Atilio sees more than 30 people in these winter months.

The fairy tale charm of the refugios of the Comarca stems from the solitude that they maintain even as tens, even hundreds, of hikers file in and out of their walls. There were 40 other guests staying with me during my night at Cajón del Azul, but as the lights flickered and the last wisps of smoke drifted off of Atilio’s cigarette, it could have been the dead of winter. These mountains, threatened as they are by human incursion, have the spectacular power to make you feel small without feeling lonely. Here, I’ve experienced joyous solitude amid the pleasures of company – a feeling that maybe only a wooden cabin on the side of a mountain can bring.

A massive ‘white elephant’, a road that stops in mid air and a man made island with a building on it that looks like it belongs in The Smurfs.

What is it that connects these things? The answer is that they are all unfinished constructions that can be stumbled across on a wander around Buenos Aires.

In recent years Buenos Aires, and indeed the rest of Argentina, has been experiencing a development boom. It has in fact been described by property developer John Boyle as the largest in the nation’s history.

But it is the regularity with which ambitious projects seem to be left unfinished that grabs the attention of so many. Dramatic empty buildings with no windows or doors, unfinished developments that seemed so impossible that it is a marvel that the project was ever approved, even roads that stop in mid air… All can be seen in Argentina’s capital and all lead to one big question: how is this possible?

The San Telmo Road to Nowhere. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

The economic crash is often cited as a major cause of Argentina’s unfinished projects, and this does make for a poetic explanation. A decaying shell of a building is certainly a dramatic symbol of Argentina’s rapid economic demise in 2001. Unfortunately however the economic crash does not always represent a reasonable explanation. The dates quite simply do not add up.

Poor financial management is a frequently speculated explanation, as is financial and political corruption. Some have even suggested that Argentine culture is to blame, saying that the laid back, unrestrained nature of society is partly responsible for the premature abandonment of these projects.

This argument, although popular, has been described by sociologist Adrian Krupnik as ‘risky’. Indeed, as fellow sociologist Guillermo Jajanovich puts it: “To refer to the mentality of a nation in the hour of explanation of unfinished projects is not constructive or accurate.”

So what really lies behind this phenomenon? Even if for no other reason than pride, you would think that to be in charge of a development and then leave it unfinished, would seem like an unattractive idea. Money and politics certainly have some part to play in it and through the exploration of some bizarre and dramatic examples I hope to find a more worthy answer than ‘oh, that’s just Argentina’.

White Elephant

White elephant – ‘A supposedly valuable possession whose value is outweighed by its cost.’

The building, now known as the ‘white elephant’, that resides in the shantytown in Barrio General Belgrano had the potential to be anything but. Built during the first Perón era it was designed to be a hospital for people suffering from tuberculosis. Newspaper Clarín stated that, standing 15 storeys tall, the hospital would have been the biggest of its kind in Latin America. Instead the building was never finished; in fact it was not even adorned with windows or doors.

The White Elephant. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Eduardo Lonardi’s ‘capture of Córdoba’ in 1955 which instigated the downfall of President Perón also signalled the end of work on the massive hospital. An understanding of why the newly empowered military was motivated to halt the construction of the hospital is a difficult thing to achieve. However, the story of the ‘white elephant’ is nonetheless extremely useful in exposing an element of Argentine politics that has played a large part in leaving so much of this city unfinished; the continuity, or rather, as Jajanovich puts it, discontinuity of political process.

Instability has never been too far away from Argentine society. Just a momentary glance around you and the results of the economic ups and downs are easily seen, but it is the political turmoil that is so significant here. From 1816 and the declaration of independence to the modern day, Argentine politics has seen a tussle between democracy and dictatorship: Yrigoyen-Uriburu, Perón-Lonadi, so on and so forth.

People living around the White Elephant building. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

In fact, between 1929 and 1976 alone there were six military coups. Even when power was not being won and lost through coups, the form of government was still changing at a rather high frequency. As Jajanovich says, there has often been ‘a lack of continuity of the democratic regime’. This historical context alone illustrates the simple fact that governments, ideologies and personnel were frequently being displaced. It is perhaps unsurprising that numerous projects have remained unfinished in the light of such political inconsistency.

Not To Plan But Not All Bad

While the hospital was never finished, and this was undoubtedly a loss to the city of Buenos Aires, it is interesting to note that 53 years later the space is being put to good use. Initially the ground floor became a home for 54 families who had been hit hard by the economic struggles that have haunted so many in Argentina in recent times. However on the 4th December 2007, the ‘white elephant’ was passed over from the porteño government into the hands of Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organisation that was started by mothers of the disappeared following the dirty war. The Madres have since made the run down building home to a health centre and two schools, including the Universidad Popular that allows people from one of the city’s most impoverished neighbourhoods to gain a higher education.

The White Elephant. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

The impact that the Madres have had should not be underestimated. One resident described her gratitude by saying: “We give thanks to the mothers because everyone passes by here saying that they are going to do things and they never do.” However on top of this it perhaps illustrates another ‘Argentine characteristic’ that is more positive than empty buildings and unfinished constructions. That is that very rarely are these unfinished projects left to decay. The ‘white elephant’ is just one example of something positive being found in the aftermath of a failed project.

The Road To Nowhere

Nestled in the corner of San Telmo near Parque Lezama is a motorway that splits into roads going in different directions. The right hand one continues happily on its way and is the well known and well used ‘Autopista 25 de Mayo’. The left hand side stops in mid air. No details are spared. The slabs of concrete, the steel cables are all there as if construction was stopped half way through a working day.

So why or how did this happen? The answer turned out to be very difficult to track down and very, very simple. Initially the Ministry of Urban Development’s explanation was straightforward:

“There is no road that stops in mid air. It doesn’t exist.”

“There is no road that stops in mid air. It doesn’t exist.” Photo By: Kate Stanworth

For obvious reasons this was not a satisfactory explanation. Before long however, the secretary to Sergio Levit, head of Urban Development, soon rang back to offer a more detailed explanation.

“The road was going to connect ‘Autopista 25 de Mayo’ with another motorway but then it was decided to be unnecessary.”

For a moment this seemed to be a normal and decent explanation. But then it began to strike me as odd. Is it normal to begin construction on a major motorway before deciding whether or not it is absolutely necessary? But there is honestly no more to the explanation. No corruption, no economic problems or financial mismanagement. Bad planning and bad planning alone is the cause of this dramatic road in San Telmo.

Or perhaps it is just a different, and it must be said less efficient, outlook on construction. The connecting road was necessary and construction began; it was then decided it was not so necessary and construction stopped: simple.

As Jajanovich pointed out, not all urban projects and developments can be explained according to strictly political causes.

A Sporting Island?

The ‘Ciudad Deportiva de Boca Juniors’ – or as it is now known ‘Ex-Ciudad’ – is another example of a project, which although did not materialise as planned, has not gone entirely to waste.

In January 1965, Boca Juniors were granted 40 hectares of the Río de la Plata in order to build a ‘sporting island’. The land was gifted to Boca Juniors although not without conditions. Law No. 16.575 stated that Boca Juniors ‘must build a stadium with a minimum capacity of 140,000, auxiliary fields, basketball courts, tennis courts, a gymnasium, swimming pools and athletic tracks.’ The decree, which was ratified by the senate and congress, went on to say that if Boca Juniors were to fail to achieve the required construction then the land would once again become public land.

Ex-Ciudad Deportiva de Boca. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

In 1979, 14 years after government decree gave the land to Boca, it was decided that Boca Juniors had ‘fallen in breach of Law No. 16.575’.

This is when things start to be handled in a manner that is less than straight forward. The land was indeed repossessed and passed back into government hands. However Boca were allowed to continue with the construction and upon completion were to receive ownership of the land once more. The previously mentioned construction obligations were changed so as not to include the stadium itself and to top it all off, the land that they would now receive was increased by 19 hectares to a total of 59.

Fast forward another three years, to 1982, and Boca have been handed legal ownership of the land despite the fact that still nothing has been finished. One representative for the Association for the Reserve, whose involvement is due to the fact the island sits next to a nature reserve, summed up the fact that the government requirements on construction were ignored by all parties when he nonchalantly said: “We already know, this type of clause is never fulfilled.”

The bottom line is that today, over 40 years later, the island is still not finished. It is the events over the last 40 years however that give insight into why it was not finished and perhaps to why other constructions have gone the same way.

Boca Juniors press department simply stated that ‘it happened ages ago, no one here remembers it now’. But what really caused this project to go unfinished? The fact that the land was obtained without charge and was sold for US$22m could certainly raise a few eyebrows as to who exactly profited. According to ‘Association for the Reserve’: “Many people who had invested in the sporting island were left empty handed.” But perhaps for some it was more profitable for the land to remain undeveloped.

Clearly, the political leniency played a major role; standards and requirements were repeatedly set and then repeatedly not met. Yet nothing was ever done in response to the constant failure to meet the demands. The fact that this was able to happen over a construction project between Boca Juniors, one of the biggest football clubs in the nation, and the national government does not bode well for smaller constructions amongst less powerful parties.

Just like with the unfinished road one must also question the merit of the original project. Put simply, the plan was to build a 40 hectare (today it is in fact 70 hectare) island and put a huge stadium along with other sporting sites on it. Apart from the fact that idea to replace the existing Bombanera stadium (a stadium described by pundits and fans alike as ‘the one and only’ or ‘irreplaceable’) was dubious, there is another question that comes to mind: who builds what would be the largest stadium in Latin America, and perhaps the world, on a man-made island? Land-based sporting arenas are difficult projects as it is, just look at Wembley in London or Slavia Prague’s stadium which took three decades to complete, one could certainly argue that the sporting island of Boca Juniors was always a plan made to fail.

Finally, there is that all familiar thread of political discontinuity running through this story throwing spanners in the works. The sporting island project was only truly killed by the arrival of a new Boca president, Martin Noel, in 1981 and it was all very simple. Noel was not as enthused by the construction of a stadium on an island as his predecessor Alberto Armando and so the dream was over.

Outside the White Elephant. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Boca Juniors Football Club shares a political timeline with the government of Argentina, a history of chopping and changing. In the 103-year history of the football club, Boca Juniors have had 32 presidential changes giving each president an average of three years at the helm. As can been seen with government projects such as the ‘White Elephant’, things are a lot harder to finish when continuity and consistency is such a rarity.

Not To Plan But Not All Bad; Part 2

The outlook for this man-made island is not as bleak as it once was. The land has since passed hands once again, this time for US$51.5m, having been bought by the Argentine property company IRSA. They, in partnership with George Soros, have published plans to turn the island into a ‘city within a city’. With a moat of sorts already in existence, IRSA plan to make a high security, high spec community where the rich and famous can live away from the hustle, bustle and poverty of the city. The plans are controversial for obvious reasons, but once again it is an illustration of a project growing out of the ashes of another.

Ironically, to date this project has also been delayed. This time by the economic problems following the crash in 2001.

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

In the book ‘The Rest’, Ruben Szuchmacher explores the phenomenon of unfinished constructions talking about individual culpability and saying “we feel their acts, their decisions, their negligence.” It is certainly true that single people have had a great impact; plans changed or ended on the whim of individuals.

But is it that simple? The ‘spectacular crash’, as historian Blustein puts it, bought ‘social and political chaos’ which cannot be underestimated in the more recent examples. Yet it seems to be the political systems, or lack of consistency within the political systems, that has most contributed to this ‘Argentine tendency’.

Perhaps then, with the period of stability that the nation is now enjoying, empty buildings and unfinished roads will become a thing of the past.

In February 2007, a fire in Buenos Aires’ worst shantytown highlighted the problems of housing in the capital. A year on, despite government pledges, little has been done to improve the living situation of the country’s most poor and vulnerable, and the housing deficit is bigger than ever.

During the early hours of 8th February 2007, a fire ravaged Villa Cartón, a shantytown built under a motorway flyover in the neighbourhood of Villa Soldati, in the south of the capital. Despite nearly 400 families’ homes being destroyed, no one was seriously injured, although 170 people were treated for the early symptoms of asphyxia, minor cuts and light burns.

Just after the fire at Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Whilst the fire did not destroy the entire villa, the government decided to bulldoze the remaining houses and re-locate all of the shanty dwellers, saying nobody should live in such conditions.

Then-mayor, Jorge Telerman, said at the time: “The fire has exposed our worst problems to us. People are living in undignified conditions… there are limits that should not be passed.”

Just after the fire at Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Construction work soon began on temporary accommodation, and the families were moved to giant emergency tents in Parque Roca as an interim measure whilst the building was underway. It was emphasised that these prefabs were to be a temporary measure, to last for a maximum of six months, and permanent houses would be built.

Some residents at the time were cynical of the pledges, as the decision to relocate the inhabitants of the cardboard shanty had been made before the fire, but it no timetable had been set in stone. One resident, Silvia, said her family had been waiting for a new home for months, and there was only movement after the fire destroyed her home.

Mirta, another resident, echoed Silvia’s fears, adding “the government will build us temporary homes then forget about us,” pointing out the victims of two smaller fires in 2006 were still waiting for the houses promised to them by the government.

Unfortunately it seems both Silvia and Mirta’s predictions have come true.

Returning to meet the former Villa Cartón residents now, it is difficult to say if the temporary housing they are living in is better or worse than the higgledy-piggledy shantytown they used to call home. The rows of pre-fabricated houses look stark in the bright summer light, and inside the houses are hot. Some residents have cut windows out of the sides of the homes to create a bit more air, but only the ones on the ends of the rows have that advantage. The corrugated roofs keep the heat in during the summer, making for stagnant motionless air, but keep do not work the same way in the winter, which they say is far colder and worse, with the homes remaining freezing.

Most of the homes consist of a single room, and in some cases two or three families share this space. The bathrooms are located outside, and whilst basic they seem good enough, until one of the residents, Mabel tells me there has been no running water for five months. It stopped working one day, she says, and despite numerous pleas to the government to come and fix the problem, nobody ever came.

Just after the fire at Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Work has started on the permanent homes, but the residents are cynical about how long it will take for them to be ready – after all, the prefabs were supposed to be a short-term solution, and most of the families have been living there for almost a year.

“We have been abandoned. They say the homes will be ready in six months, but everything is supposed to be done in six months. We were only supposed to be here six months. We think it will be more likely to be two years – work has barely begun on the new homes,” says Lydia, who is currently sharing her home with two other family, making for 12 people under one roof, with no room for privacy.

Just after the fire at Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Mabel echoes her thoughts, adding that the location of the community is a big issue for most of the residents – they are now on the far side of Parque Roca, next to the Riachuelo river, on the very edge of the capital. The prefabs are out of sight, and, the residents believe, very much out of mind. The situation also makes it difficult for those who work – not many buses go by the community, and the ones that do are not regular and don’t run on weekends.

Safety is also big worry for the residents, as the rows of prefabs are isolated behind the park – when the buses aren’t running they take shortcuts through the park but there are many stories of people being threatened on their way home, and tales of rapes and killings that have taken place there, although not to any of the residents. Going out at night is not much of an option, they explain, as getting home is difficult and dangerous.

The last government intervention was in August, just two months after Telerman’s re-election campaign ended in defeat to Mauricio Macri.

And the promises of the previous government have not been kept, and Telerman’s ‘battle against marginalisation’, an ambitious 18-month plan to remove all of the capital’s shantytowns, has been all but forgotten.

Some may call the idea of eradicating the city’s problems in 18 short months ludicrous – after all, problems that have been around for over 100 years will not disappear overnight.

Just after the fire at Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

A history of overcrowding

Buenos Aires has a long history of housing problems. In fact 100 years before the fire in Villa Cartón made the problems hit the headlines, albeit briefly, was the only ever Tenants’ Strike in the history of Argentina.

Back in 1907, the same problems existed in the city: the impossibility for vast sectors of the population to access dignified housing, the high cost of renting, and scarce public policies aimed at supporting or defending the rights of those who didn’t own their own homes.

The problems of 100 years ago and today have similar roots – mass migration to the capital, although a century ago this was in the form of immigration from Europe. Between 1870 and 1930, six million foreigners arrived in Argentina.

These new arrivals came with high hopes of being able to find land to cultivate, but by the turn of the century the prices had gone up due to the production and export of meat and cereal, and the majority of the land was owned by few, generally in the form of large industrial farms.

So the immigrants ended up living in the large cities, mostly Buenos Aires, and working in manual jobs. The cities, however, were not prepared for this influx of people, and the lack of living space soon became a problem.

‘Conventillos’, large houses on one or two floors, with many rooms, mostly measuring 4×4m around a central patio, quickly became a solution. Single rooms would be rented out to an entire family, and the family would sleep, eat and do everything in that one room. The bathroom would be shared, although according to the 1904 census, 22% of the conventillos didn’t have any sort of sanitation or a bathroom.

A prefab home for the former residents
of Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Despite these appalling conditions, the census showed that 10% of the capital’s population lived in conventillos, and the rooms were much sought after. As a result, the owners were able to enforce strict house rules, inspecting the properties at any moment, with the smallest infraction leading to eviction. The tenants had little option but to put up with the rules, as housing was expensive and scarce.

Until August 1907, that is, when the municipal government announced that taxes would increase in 1908. As a result, landlords immediately raised rent in anticipation of these extra overheads. The residents of one conventillo in Barracas decided it was too much to demand more rent for such dire living conditions, and refused to pay their rent, declaring a strike and handing over a document demanding certain conditions be met before they would start paying again, including the suspension of three months deposit, lower rent and better sanitation. The momentum quickly caught on, spreading across the country. In Buenos Aires alone, some 120,000 people participated, around 10% of the city’s population.

The landlords refused to back down and so did the tenants, and the standoff intensified, culminating in the death of a 15-year-old boy at the end of October in a confrontation between the strikers and police. Around 15,000 people joined in his funeral procession across the capital, and again the police responded violently. The government brought in a residency law, deporting the ‘anarchistic’ ringleaders.

Towards the end of November, the movement died down, with each conventillo coming to its own arrangement. In many cases the demands were met by the owners, whilst in others the tenants were left on the street.

Same today?

Wind the clock forward a hundred years and what has changed?

As shown in the case of the residents of Villa Cartón, there is still a huge housing deficit, affecting the poorest people. Migration to the cities continues, either from the countryside across Argentina, or from other South American countries, notably Paraguay and Bolivia. The Argentines coming from the countryside are generally of indigenous or criollo descent, and in some cases have been evicted from their land with little or no compensation to make way for farming. The immigrants from Argentina’s northern neighbours also make up a large proportion of the current residents of many of the main city’s shantytowns.

Prefab houses for the former residents of Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Arguably, residents have gone from conventillos to shantytowns, and in a way their situation has worsened as now they have less power – before the withholding of rent would be a trump card they could use to make changes happen. As nobody pays rent to live in a shanty, the most poor and vulnerable are very much dependent on policy changes for improvements to happen. And these are not forthcoming.

In fact, the situation has deteriorated so much that in July 2004 a three-year housing crisis was declared by the Buenos Aires city government. It has been extended and is still in place today.

In October last year, a report on the housing crisis that had been made by the Buenos Aires ombudsman was released. It said: “The number of families who are residing in informal or irregular houses is extensive and growing by the day. In 2002 it is calculated that more than 100,000 people were living in emergency shantytowns, 200,000 are in taken buildings, 70,000 are living in tenement houses, (of which 50% are in an unstable condition for lack of paying the rent), 70,000 are living in lodgings and 120,000 subsidised housing.”

And the problem is growing. In 2006, 19,000 more families were added to the number listed as having housing emergency.

In 2004, the government created a Emergency Housing Fund, to deal with the crisis. Another initiative was PAFSIC, a programme for families who find themselves on the streets, which providing a subsidy of $450 per month over the course of six months, to help them get out of the emergency situation. Critics say this is not a long-term solution, and at the end of the six months, many families have not found a viable housing option and find themselves on the street again. As soon as the six months is up, the families are just added back into the statistics. Others point out that for such a paltry sum, it is nigh on impossible to find a safe place for a family to live.

In essence, there is no serious national housing policy, aimed at making real changes and preventing this cycle. This can be shown by the statistics: the number of people applying for the PAFSIC scheme since it was started in 2006 has risen almost 600%. Many point out that it would be cheaper for the government to build and provide housing than to keep paying subsidies.

And yet whilst the solutions remain far-off, evictions continue – many of them government-backed. According to another report by the city ombudsman on 21st September 2007, an estimated that 2,300 families more would be evicted by the end of the year.

The report states: “The situation of collapse that we are seeing now is the result of years of inefficient policies which have demonstrated a lack of capability to take on and resolve this problem. Essentially, it is the result of a way of looking at this problem as something climatic, an episodic product of a temporary situation.”

Shared dreams

However, one project is stepping up to the challenge. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organisation set up by women after their children were disappeared during the last dictatorship) have a building project.

This started in Villa 15, based in Mataderos in the west of the capital, in 2006. Since then, 24 homes have been created and another 48 are nearly finished. The momentum has spread, with 500 homes under construction in Piletón, and close to 300 underway close to Parque Roca, as a permanent solution for the residents of Villa Cartón.

The Madres lobby the government into using its money for social housing, and then run the building projects, with people from the shanties themselves working on the construction, under the guidance of experts.

This provides many of the residents with training and a real sense of purpose in constructing their own future, whilst providing a permanent solution to their housing woes.

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

However, the number of families provided with a housing solution via this means is paltry in comparison to the numbers of families still being evicted and living in unstable situations.

Since 1996 there has been talk of the ‘urbanisation’ of shantytowns, and nothing has happened. Telerman’s battle against marginalisation came to nothing, and workers from the Madres grumble that Macri has so far shown even less interest in resolving the housing crisis, currently being tied up in battles with the uniones.

But unless the government is willing to spend some money on improving the situation of the most poor and vulnerable, history may repeat itself again, and in another 100 years time we may well be in the same situation.

On the corner of Plaza and Olzabal in Buenos Aires there is a park hedged on two sides by the exposed brickwork of the adjoining buildings. It’s midday, overcast, a light breeze is shaking the park’s only tree. Otherwise nothing, no one. But if you look more closely you are not alone. To the right of the tree, a man is standing on a crate, running a pole up and down a wall. You can barely make him out against the grey-brown edifice. He is not tall, even when standing on his tip-toes. His clothes and face are slathered in paint. A giant white circle is taking shape two stories above him – a head, a planet, the pap of a flower? It is difficult to say. This diminutive, almost slight young person is Blu, one of the most innovative artists working on the streets today.

Soon his Italian friends join him. First Ivan and Lorenzo who are recording the experience on a video camera for the Italian film production company Mercurio. They hope to refine almost 80 hours of footage into a documentary film about a trip devoted to Blu’s painting that has taken two months and spanned Central and South America: Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and now Argentina. “We’ve got 80 hours of little kids playing football and dogs fighting,” jokes Ivan. And then there is Sibe, a gamine, a girl with short black hair, an infectious smile; she is often reading a book in the grass while her boyfriend Blu paints.

She has watched Blu’s early graffiti in his hometown of Bologna, Italy develop into the immense mythical figures that now distinguish his work. “We’ve come to find inspiration in the streets of Latin America,” Lorenzo tells me.

Blu paints from sun up until sun down. There is an almost primordial rhythm to his work. He is finishing his piece at the park on Olzabal as dusk settles. The white circle, the head, is now attached to a body stooping towards the playground, its feet brushing the tree branches. We can only look up at Blu who is perched on his ladder, thinking. Marc Schiller, the founder of a prominent website devoted to urban art called woostercollective.com, tells me that Blu is ‘a spiritual leader in the street art movement…someone who instinctively understands his surroundings’. A boy kicks a soccer ball towards the tree and runs right into Blu and the painting. “What is it?” he asks, slightly delighted. “What do you think?” says Blu.

All of Blu’s pieces inspire shock. As if the wall suddenly crept up on the person instead of the other way around. This is their peculiar power – to reinvigorate the space, to give each wall a life. In the enormous piece on Ozabal the figure kneels uncomfortably. This is a theme in Blu’s work, which, until now, appeared on walls mainly in European cities. Blu paints men, giants contorted into awkward poses, twisted so far in one direction that they’ve split apart. These bodies are almost formless – what seems to matter is not the figure but this moment of breakage when all the demons come spilling out. In one picture, on a wall in Zaragoza, Spain, a corpse-white man unravels his intestines into the shape of heart. In another, in Genoa, a giant man has peeled off his face to reveal a hollow grooved interior out of which smaller men struggle to climb. Rib cages become prison bars. Eyes become headlights. For Blu the human body is a kind of malfunctioning machine. It excretes and regurgitates and defecates. It breaks down—it is prone to decay. This makes his work, with its tendency towards the grotesque, immediately recognisable. Blu paints humans who have lost control of their own bodies.

The notion that humans are autonomous or somehow self-contained is exactly the illusion street art seeks to shatter. Painting becomes a communal activity. Women carrying groceries stop to ask questions. Games of football start. Local artists from Doma TV stop by to swap ideas. The police show up. Blu relishes these interruptions. He says they are the reason he makes art in the street.

A few days later I start to understand what he means. Blu is creating one of his most striking paintings at a vacant lot on Holmberg in the neighbourhood of Belgrano. It is also one of his largest – stretching the entire length of the building, almost half a city block. In the image a giant man, lying on his back, has parts of his body cut away, exposing a kind of enormous indoor city. The whole neighbourhood is suddenly different. The dogs are barking. A woman strides onto the patch of grass where Blu is working. “What is this?” she asks, almost frantically. “Is it a factory?” “I’m just the artist,” Blu says with an impish little grin. The picture draws every conceivable type. A group of construction workers are standing on the corner. They’re smiling with their arms folded. “I don’t know much about art,” one of them says, “but I like it a lot.” An elderly nun pats my head. A man with wild white hair yells something from a moving car. Ronald Kennedy, a retired architect, is using the occasion to lecture his nephew about the nature of art. “It looks like a train station. The little men inside are the big one’s friends,” says the 11-year-old. “It’s very good,” he pauses emphatically, “the picture has movement.” The adults burst out laughing.

To paint on a wall in Latin America is never an innocent act. The wall is a place for political slogans. It is the surface against which partisans are shot. Even Blu’s work, which is not obviously political, draws strangers together. “This type of thing would never have been possible under the dictatorship,” explains Ronald. The danger involved in painting walls underscores the fact that Blu is not a normal artist. Blu is an artist on the run. Running between the rooftops, above our heads. He is stretching out on a ladder to reach a high wall or crouching on an electrical crate to reach a low wall. He does not ask permission. He simply paints. “To do something without asking permission…it’s a way of expressing yourself,” he tells me. In Europe it is very difficult to paint. Lorenzo recounts a story about police vans in Germany. In the countries they’ve visited in Latin America the difference between legal and illegal art is less clear. “In Guatemala and Mexico City we were more concerned about tagging over gang graffiti than with the police.” In the end the streets welcomed them; the murals they made with local artists and street kids in places like San Jose, Costa Rica attest to the lasting impact of their trip.

When they arrived in Buenos Aires, the last stop on their voyage, Blu noticed the walls first. This is how he experiences a new city. He skips the great monuments and museums, the wide pedestrian thoroughfares; he looks instead for the dingy remainders, the points at which the city falls apart. “How are the walls in Buenos Aires different from those in other cities you’ve visited?” Each city, he says, has completely different walls. “In Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, the walls are very low because an earthquake razed the city in 1972. But street art adapts to these circumstances. Nicaragua has a ton of artists working in the street.” In Guatemala – a richer country – it is too dangerous. Walls are not used for painting. “And Buenos Aires itself?” Blu gestures up at his painting on Holmberg. “Take this wall,” he says. “I am attracted to it because it is complex, it has a history. A building was destroyed to create this wall.” He draws my attention to an old porthole window that is now the giant reclining man’s eye. “This window is ancient, they aren’t made anymore. This was the starting point for the piece.” “So your work is a kind of collaboration with the pre-existing structure?” “Yes and no. Because in a sense each wall already tells the whole story, it’s all there, I only happen upon it.” Each time he finds a wall it is an accident, a completely fortuitous event. In Europe things are kept tidy for the tourists. But in Buenos Aires these walls that bear their scars on the surface are still waiting to be discovered.

When Blu finds his wall he improvises. There are no plans. Yet as his painting becomes more intricate, as the arms and legs and head take shape, it begins to look as if it had always been there. It is too gigantic for this stooping garrulous man to have painted. At most he’s colouring in. He could be the man hired to paint over the graffiti.

The picture resurfaces the wall, the wall resurfaces. Porteños walk past their block on Holmberg as if for the first time.

In a quiet moment, sipping a beer, Lorenzo, Sibe and Ivan stop to consider whether the giant man on Holmberg is done. Blu is there too. He is serene, very quiet. He is saving himself for the paint, the paint which covers his whole body. He not only understands these walls. He wants us to change the way we inhabit them. In this sense his art inherits its aspirations from the modernist avant-gardes. It seizes on their notion that art might alter and reorder everyday life in the city for the better. Today you need a ticket to see the Surrealists. But Blu’s work will never get lost in the museum. His art shares the same fate as the wall — it will live and die on the street.

Related

BluBlu.org

That’s the problem with small towns: the lack of choice. The long, enthralling drive from Salta had left us peckish, but a lack of options meant we had to wait for the curiously named ‘Los 3 Chinos’ restaurant to open at who-knows-what hour. No choice but to watch the handful of village kids spill onto the dirt football pitch. No choice but to watch lightning flash innocuously above the vast mountains. No choice but to place our beer on the jagged mud wall and amble onto the arena for a kick of the ball.

We had joined Ruta 40 that afternoon in Cachi, and made a tough decision not to stay in that beautiful, spotless town of cobbled streets and adobe houses whose low roofs ducked modestly beneath the grandeur of the sierra. We had given the romantic evening air of Cachi’s Plaza 9 de Julio a miss, and with it the chance of seeing the dying sun bathe the façade of Iglesia San José in deepening shades of gold.

Photo By: Elizabeth Clancy

But we did not regret swapping this for the play of morning light in Molinos, after the street-game laughter of boys and girls had given way to peaceful slumber in a $30 hospedaje. Taking its cue from Cachi, Molinos cast a calming spell that remained unbroken as we followed the Río Calchaquí south to Cafayate.

The winding, crushed-rock road commanded a slow pace, ideal for soaking up scenery and spotting roadside hitchers such as the San Carlos farmhand off home for siesta or the two girls escorting their wizened abuelita to a doctor’s appointment.

Photo By: Elizabeth Clancy

Along the route, the river kept the valley floor green and fresh, where elsewhere the elements had battered rock into otherworldly shapes, most notably the pink arrowheads of the Quebrada de las Flechas.

In Cafayate, we ditched the car in favour of bikes hired for the cost of an empanada, back-tracking up Ruta 40 to taste limey torrontés wine at the 150-year-old Bodega La Banda before a sobering dip in the retro town pool.

Where Molinos appealed for its simplicity, Cafayate was full of places to stay and reasons to linger. Indigenous stallholders sold everything from ceramics and Andean rugs to ponchos woven from the wool of the baby llamas we would later see roaming the puna between the mining town of San Antonio de los Cobres and the shimmering salt pans of the Salinas Grandes.

Photo By: Elizabeth Clancy

Instead of having to wait for the 3 Chinos – who, incidentally, never showed up – we could take our pick of places to delve into north-eastern cuisine.

Upon good advice, we ended up with local malbec and barbecued baby goat at a packed house at El Patio, where dreams evoked by the timeless landscapes were sung over the relentless strumming of a guitar.

Photo By: Elizabeth Clancy

‘Patagonia’s most present characteristic is its endless expanse of nothingness, both an attraction and a lesson in boredom for the overland traveller’, I read as the plane veered its course towards El Calafate.

Having found a direct flight out of Ushuaia for the same price as a 2-day bus/ weather-dependent ferry/bus/overnight stop in ‘wind-pummelled service town’/bus option, I had, happily, forfeited the first leg of the Ruta 40 that starts in Río Gallegos.

Instead, watching the ill-defined gravel road snake its path through the wide, brown Patagonian plains proved no better introduction to the utter sense of isolation that both the route and its setting inspire.

And anyways, I’m told that this is where it starts to get exciting. From here the road runs parallel to the Andean cordillera (range), crossing some of Argentina’s most inaccessible parts and passing by some of its archaeological and geographical gems.

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

None of these sparkle more brilliantly than the glaciers around El Calafate. This lake-side town is text-book ‘tourist’ – overpriced, overcrowded and tacky – it’s the nearby Perito Moreno and Los Glaciares national parks that pull the crowds.

By day the streets clear as visitors are either day-tripping to the parks or cramming themselves into the main street’s put upon supermarket, frantically stocking up on biscuits for the long journey out of town.

Obviously, you don’t come all this way not to go on a glacier safari. Taking a boat up close to the 60m-high wall of Perito Moreno or overlooking the snout of Upsala glacier – South America’s largest – it is hard to find the best camera angle or the right word to do the hunks of ice justice. Time to wheel out the big-gun adjectives – magnificent, awe-inspiring, breath-taking – that sort of thing.

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

A three-hour side-step by bus takes you towards the jaggedy, granite peaks of the Fitz Roy Range and into the hills and meadows of El Chaltén. I found myself happy as a pig in clover in this magical little place – climbing mountains, camping in the wild, swimming in glacial lakes – this is the kind of setting where even the grubbiest of souls can get a good spring clean.

A week later I arrive back in El Calafate. My R40 adventure was about to begin.

There are three ways to tackle the road: hire a car (requires patience and cash, lots of – this is a very long drive and this option is frighteningly expensive); go on an organised four-day road trip (Overland Patagonia offer the trip from Nov – Mar for $950, food not included); or take the cheapest option and buy a bus ticket for $220 with El Chaltén Travel bus company – quite literally the only one that dares to go where others think it’s best not.

Divided into two 12-hour journeys, the first runs to Perito Moreno (town), where everyone, very cosily, stays at the same hostel that is booked and paid for when you by the ticket. Then you take another bus that heads toward the blessedly (trust me, it will seem this way when you get there) tarred and oh so sealed highways around El Bolsón, and then Bariloche.

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Two hours into the first journey, I’d seen three Australian water pumps, two cars, a whole lot of steppe (shrub like plant that covers the ground) and the emergence of a battle of the wills on board the bus. Rude Dutch man opens roof window, it is hot and he needs to cool off. Nice French lady is being rained on by dust pouring in from outside, she shuts the window. Round One…

… Round Seven. I cast my mind back to a friend in Buenos Aires who laughed out loud in my face when I told him of my plans to take this part of the Ruta 40. With an irritating self-righteousness he had informed me that ‘they don’t have any buses that can manage that road, you have to go round it via Comodoro Rivadavia and Puerto Madryn on the Atlantic coast’. Ha! Look who has the last laugh now friend, I say to myself, seven-hour bottom ache just setting in and finding it hard to manipulate my lips into a smile, let alone shut them, after having inhaled so much dust.

Just in time before the rocking in chair/tugging at hair stage of boredom took hold, we make a stop at a rickety wooden estancia (farm), one of the very first I’d seen in over eight hours of travel. We all feast on home-baked (no shops round here) pie, go to the loo and scan the barren, dusty land looking for life. Nope, none there.

In fact, the only signs I spotted were the elderly couple who run the cafe, an ominous cow’s skull presiding over the doorway and a couple of pet monsters, sorry guanaco’s (deer-like creature native to these parts) – one of which attacked me and sent me running back to the dreaded bus.

Later that night, we arrived in the pretty, lake-side oasis of Los Antiguos – world-famous for its annual cherry festival. With a sense of timing that so often accompanied me on my travels, I had arrived a day late: cherry town one day, cherry-pip town the next. But, thankfully, by the time I left town I had easily managed to devour my fair share of the glorious red fruit.

Trips to see the rock art at the ‘Cuevas de Las Manos’ (Hand Caves) can be arranged from here or from Perito Moreno (town) which is just a half hour away and back on the R40. Dating back to 7370BC, these polychrome rock paintings cover recesses in the near vertical walls with thousands of imprints of human hands. One of them has six fingers! See if you can spot it.

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Heading back to the hostel in Perito Moreno that evening, I catch sight of a big painted wall on the main street. The picture is of a man waving his fist triumphantly in the air under the words ‘Perito Moreno is radical!’ It doesn’t take me long to realise that this is political propaganda, not a message from the local tourist board. Luckily, the bus north leaves early.

The second leg of the journey was much like the first – lots of steppe and few cars. Interestingly, I saw a dead armadillo on the side of the road.

Good reading intentions were soon set aside. My ‘Complete History of Latin America’ and my friend’s copy of Cervantes in Spanish quickly found their rightful places wedged between the seats with the biscuit crumbs. It was time to surrender to the onboard entertainment programme, this was no time to be fussy. A quasi-religious teen-snowboarding movie and two Vin Diesel films coloured/ruined the journey, but nicely passed the time.

That evening we pulled up in the town of El Bolsón – fruity, beery and lovely. After a couple of weeks spent drinking raspberry juice and working on a chacra (farm), it was time take the last leg of the R40 to Mendoza via Bariloche. Here, the road is like any other and several bus companies do the job.

Leaving in the late afternoon we traveled far enough north to see the sun set over Chile’s perfect conical volcanoes. If there is one thing you remember about Patagonia, it’s the sky. Endless streaks of amber and red soon disappeared into the twilight, revealing yet another night’s sky dripping with stars.

Nearing Mendoza the next morning, I woke to a syrupy-sweet coffee and the awesome spectacle of mighty Aconcagua – the tallest peak in the Western Hemisphere – looming in the distance.

For El Chaltén bus timetables www.thetravellersguru.com
For Ruta 40 Travel Packages www.overlandpatagonia.com

By Kristie Robinson

During October and November 1947, 1,500 indigenous people from the Pilagá tribe were killed in a campaign that started near the town of Las Lomitas and spread throughout the province of Formosa.

Despite the discovery of common graves more than two years ago, the Argentine government is still refusing to recognise the killing took place, and ‘official’ history taught in schools in the area makes no mention of the fact that half of the aboriginal race was wiped out in under a month.

Five common graves have been found in Formosa province, yet there is no state funding to help the anthropologists continue excavating. One of the lawyers fighting to open an official investigation into the massacre is Carlos Alberto Díaz, who even goes so far as to call the killings ‘genocide’, lamenting that in Argentina, despite much progress, there are still ‘human rights for white people, and different human rights for the indigenous’.

Click to view slide show – Photos by Kate Stanworth

The Past

In 1947, Argentina’s famous president Juan Domingo Perón had been in power for a year. He and his starlet wife Eva Duarte, more widely known as Evita, were popular and optimistic about making sweeping social changes.

Much of the country was poor, and Formosa was no exception. The indigenous communities living there, the Wichi, Toba and Pilagá, were very much at the bottom of the pile. As their territory was nationalised, these nomadic tribes, traditionally hunter-gatherers, found they had less and less room to work as they previously had done. Unaccustomed to living in one area and working the land, many faced severe poverty and starvation.

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

When the Pilagá people were offered work on the sugar plantations in neighbouring Salta province, they felt it would perhaps be a way to provide for their families and accepted the labour. The entire community of over 3,000 people walked more than 200km along the railways tracks to Salta. The trek lasted many days.

Upon arrival at the plantations, they found the owners refused to honour the wage they had been promised. Additionally, instead of being paid in pesos, the work would be paid in ‘bales’, a sort of voucher system in which the salary could only be spent on certain products in certain places, highlighting the subordination of the indigenous workers to the landowners.

The Pilagá refused to work under such conditions, and had little choice but to turn around and make the long journey back to Formosa. 1947 was a very dry year, and there was scare food to be found along the way. When the more vulnerable started falling sick, the group decided to head to Las Lomitas, where Luciano Córdoba, the local priest, had always been good to them.

They stopped in a place known as Rincón Bomba, a settlement just outside of the town, right in the heart of Formosa province.

After a round journey of some 500km, may of the tribe were weak and ill. The caciques (tribal leaders) went to speak to the authorities of Las Lomitas and ask for assistance. At first the local community, a mixture of criollos and people of European descent, was open to helping the Pilagá, providing them with food and supplies.

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

However, by the middle of winter, the rains had not come and provisions were scarce for everyone. The local community became hostile towards the aboriginals. The governor of Formosa was told of the problems and asked the central government for humanitarian aid. Perón responded by sending a train up to Formosa with three wagons, one with food, one with medicines and one with clothes for the Pilagá. The train arrived in Formosa city, but due to bureaucratic hold ups sat for ten days in the station. The Las Lomitas police chief pressed for the goods to be forwarded on to the town, and after another delay, the train arrived. By this point there was only two wagons – the one with medicine never arrived, most of the wagon containing the clothing was empty and all of the food was in a bad condition, decaying and rotten, having been kept in an un-refrigerated container for two weeks.

Despite the state of the produce, when it arrived at the beginning of October, it was given to the Pilagá people anyway. Already malnourished and weak from their long journey, many could not cope with the rotten food and within hours of consumption began to fall ill, and die. Some 50 people are believed to have died due to poisoning overnight.

In the meantime, the Pilagá had been doing rain dances to try and bring the rains that were desperately needed to enable them to live off the land. The strange rituals frightened the townspeople, however, and rumours spread that there would be an indigenous attack. Díaz explains: “Such rumours were common during the beginning of the 20th century, and often used as an excuse to oppress or even kill the aboriginals.”

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

When two of the caciques went to talk to the head of Las Lomitas, angry at their treatment, it only seemed to confirm the fears of the residents. Such an attack was deemed to be imminent, and overnight the Pilagá found themselves surrounded by gendarmes (the border police), with three or four posts of machine gunners, and two mortar stations.

According to Díaz, at around dusk on 10th October 1947, the sub-commander of the gendarmerie gave the order to start firing at the community, and by dawn some 200-250 Pilagá had been killed.

Despite intensive investigations on Díaz’s part as to why the gendarmes started firing, it is still unclear. It could be there was a misinterpreted order and once one post of gunners started firing, the others retaliated. What is known, however, is that the indigenous people were very much second class citizens during this time, not seen as having rights as humans on any level, and there was pressure from the local community for the authorities to sort out the ‘indigenous problem’ that was on their doorstep.

Click to view slide show – Photos by Kate Stanworth

After the shootings, it seems to have been decided that there should be no witnesses to what had happened, and therefore no survivors were to be left. A month-long hunting campaign began to track down and kill survivors. By 5th November, when the genocide ended, an estimated 1,500 Pilagá had been killed.

According to survivors, the ones who escaped death were all the people who had chosen to flee north, towards Paraguay, when the killings began in Rincón Bomba. Those who fled east, west or south were caught up with and mostly died.

“We were lucky. We went the right way,” says Rosa Fernández, one of around 20 survivors still living in Formosa. She was just 12 years old at the time.

Others tell of the gendarmes catching up with them and ‘playing games’ whilst executing their kin. One such ‘game’ included shooting at a line of Pilagá people from the side, to see how many skulls one bullet could penetrate.

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Marta Gomez recalls how her family was caught along with other people from her community and they were rounded up into a circle, to be shot by the machine gunners. They were saved by a man called Cureste, a local leather trader who had a good relationship with the Pilagá. He arrived on his horse and stopped the gendarmes, saying to them ‘if you are going to kill them, you will have to kill me first’.

They were spared, “but this was on the condition the cacique, who was with us, handed over his daughter, who was a virgin, to the gendarmes for the night,” Marta adds, looking at her hands. Cureste advised him to do it, as his presence as a white man would not guarantee their safety. The girl, who was just 12 or 13 years old, was handed over. She survived, and so did the rest of the group but ‘she was never the same again’.

Then at the beginning of November, just as quickly as the genocide began, it was all over. Ambrosa Gonzalez, who had fled with her mother and another woman some 80km north towards Paraguay, says: “Two men arrived on horses, a white man and an indigenous man. They told us the persecution was over and to come back to Las Lomitas.”

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

When asked if they believed the men, she says quietly “what choice did we have?” They had not been killed outright, and the presence of the indigenous man on horseback gave them some hope, and so they returned to the town.

Ambrosa will not look any of us in the eye. In fact, she barely lifts her eyes from the ground the entire time we are talking. I notice her black skirt, and Marta explains Ambrosa has worn black daily since the massacre, as a sign of respect for the family members she lost. She also refuses pass by the place where the massacre took place, instead taking the long road to Las Lomitas. “I saw my grandmother be shot there. I don’t want to see that place,” she says.

The indigenous man on horseback who helped find the survivors is Ceferiano Gomez. He tells of how he went around finding Pilagá people and bringing them back, trying to regroup the community.

Ceferiano says the Pilagá lived in fear for many years that it could happen again, and the gendarmes used this as a regular threat to the Pilagá for the following decades. The authorities also took all of the tools they had, for fear of reprisals, and the aboriginals couldn’t work, fish, hunt or do any of the things they were accustomed to.

Click to view slide show – Photos by Kate Stanworth

He tells of how the practice of raping indigenous girls also became common, with the threat of the murder of the family if they did not hand over their daughters. “Many daughters were kept hidden or taken to more remote Pilagá communities to be brought up. Other times families would lie and say the daughters were sick, but they were generally taken for the night anyway, to be ‘broken in’.”

The campaign led to around half of the race being wiped out, entire families lost. “There are few survivors. Our race has almost expired,” says Melitón Dominguez, son of a cacique, of his people.

Whilst in Las Lomitas the massacre is widely acknowledged to have happened, and the Pilagá tell this history to their children, outside of Formosa it is almost entirely unknown.

Two years ago, on 28th December 2005, the first grave was found, and a few months later in March 2006, the first mass grave found, with more than 30 bodies.

Lawyers Carlos Alberto Díaz and Julio César Garcia first heard of the massacre in 2005. They were incredulous that something could have happened and they, educated Argentines living in the neighbouring Chaco province, had not heard anything about it. They started investigating, travelling from their base in Resistencia to Salta and Formosa to research the killings. They found some newspaper archives from the time, and there was a small amount of coverage. But even in the clippings that acknowledge something took place, the number of Pilagá murdered is widely underestimated, and all contain the ‘official’ history: that the Pilagá started attacking the town and so the gendarmes retaliated.

The Present

The Pilagá community is still obviously marginalised and poor. The houses in Rincón Bomba are made of mud and sticks and, in some cases, rubbish – plastic sheets are walls, and filled plastic bottles act as anchors, holding the sheets down.

I am surprised to see electricity lines running from Las Lomitas. They are obviously a new addition, as the trees that have been chopped down to make room for the power cables are still green with leaves, lying on their sides next to the lines. Juan Luis, our translator, explains that as the elections approached, the local deputy ensured that visible improvements were made to the community. I comment that at least there is no longer a dictatorship, so if nothing more every four years they are going to see changes. He laughs, but somehow it’s not very funny.

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Despite the government’s seeming inability to provide the Pilagá with a basic standard of living and basic rights, there are individuals who have become advocates for them. Nazar, the local priest who has lived in the area for over 35 years, is works actively with the communities around Las Lomitas, and played a key role in helping the indigenous get rights to the land in 1984.

When asked about the situation of the aboriginals living in Formosa, he says: “The dominant class is still racist, and the indigenous fear that if they speak out they will have rights taken away again. The people they would be speaking out against are the ones who give them their benefits, their education, attend them when they go to hospital.

“In many ways the colonial system the Spanish Crown imposed some 500 years ago still exists.”

What changes are needed then, I ask. “People need to wake up. There needs to be a collective conscience, rights for everyone regardless, and people need to be willing to fight for them,” he replies.

Díaz agrees. He says when people talk about human rights they think of the dictatorship of the 1970s, and think things have changed for the better. Rights for indigenous are still unconsidered by the mainstream populace.

As he has found, even getting the massacre officially recognised by the authorities has proven a nightmare, something he believes is due to the fact that it was indigenous blood spilled.

Positive changes are happening however – last month on the 10th October anniversary the Pilagá were able to officially commemorate the massacre, and placed a monument for their people who had been killed. It is the first time such an act has taken place, and was seen as a milestone.

Nazar says: “Things are changing slowly. The monument is a big step forward, and ten years ago that would never have been possible. The community would not have been able to do it.”

However, as Díaz says, until things progress legally, there is still a long way to go. Even if it is too late to prosecute the perpetrators of the crime, the survivors, and Pilagá community in general, still deserve answers. None of them are aware why the massacre ended when it did, why the order was given to stop the genocide, or even what triggered it in the first place. Questions like these are ones Díaz and his team are trying to resolve, through an official investigation. But they are aware that as the likes of Melitón and Ambrosa grow older, time to provide them with the answers they deserve is running out.

The gendarmerie were asked to comment on the massacre, but did not respond.

Aliens live among us. No, I’m not being euphemistic, referring to the ghastly tourists who swarm upon Buenos Aires and indeed the rest of South America in the hope of ‘finding themselves’. I am talking actual extraterrestrial, Encounters del Tercer Tipo, high possibility of ‘probing’, aliens. And they are right here in Argentina. Specifically Córdoba.

Photo By: Olivia Ketch

Over the town of Capilla del Monte, amongst the gorgeous sierras, where condors swoop, gauchos are real gauchos, and alfajor factories make the air sweet, looms Mount Uritorco, an ‘energetic center’, towards which many UFOs are said to gravitate.

Everywhere in Capilla, on office walls, are posted photographs of ‘sightings’. Everyone here has seen a UFO, or believes whole-heartedly in their existence. On 9th January 1986, the mountain became the subject of much scrutiny when 11-year-old Gabriel Gomez and his grandmother Esperanza saw a large luminous object in the sky. According to official accounts, the following morning they found a huge fire and soot imprint, 122m in length and 64m in width, on the side of Mt Pajarillo, near Uritorco and forming part of the same small mountain chain.

Since that day, Mount Uritorco has become one of the most mythically important locations in the world, written about in thousands of papers, on the internet, in books, and of course, visited by thousands upon thousands of people who come searching for enlightenment, exercise, and maybe a peek at ET.

Photo By: Olivia Ketch

Rare light visions have been seen around Uritorco for centuries. One rational explanation for the phenomenon could be that under certain meteorological conditions, the rock, rich in quartz, favours electric discharges of sparks, also known as St Elmo’s fire. Capilla itself is otherwise an ordinary small colonial town, so clearly the tourist board is monopolizing on their claim to fame.

During my investigation, I managed to get an audience with Jorge Suarez, the director of the UFO Information Centre in Capilla del Monte. What struck me most was the zen-like quality to his character. He has written five books on Mount Uriturco, and has studied UFOs for over 20 years – a veritable alien-guru. Open-minded skeptic that I am, it was hard to swallow everything he said with a straight face: “The angels in the Bible were aliens? Oh of course – they were only given wings in pictures because people couldn’t think how else they would be flying…”

Right.

I asked him what he thought about the theory that extraterrestrial creatures have built a city called Erks under the mountain, which serves as the base for their operations on Earth, and is also apparently the gateway to the fifth dimension. He paused before admitting that although there is no proof, unlike the watertight grainy photos and first, second or sometimes third-hand testimonials for the UFOs, he does personally believe in it.

Photo By: Olivia Ketch

The mountain stands at just under 2,000m, so obviously it’s not Everest. At the departure point for the hike, on the outskirts of the town, street vendors offer stones with special ‘healing powers’ and dream catchers hang from the trees. This is not a place for philistines. Pay your $10 entry fee and leave your skepticism at the base of the mountain. Signs painted on the rock pointing upwards to the hill might as well say ‘Enlightenment lies this way, brave soldier, trek on’.

My hiking companion, a sprightly, energetic Argentine, actually confessed that he hadn’t wanted to bring his credit cards with him in case Uritorco’s ‘magnetic forces’ wiped all of his information. Cue lots of jokes about how the Erks were funding their earthly operations. And then an awkward silence in which everyone resolved to check their bank balance as soon as they got back down the mountain.

Despite the dreamy, hippy vibe, the climb isn’t in any way laid back. It’s a hefty four-hour trek, though my companion had me bounding up the rocks rather impressively for the first hour or so. He lost me when it started getting a bit more difficult, preferring to clamber on ahead, thoughts of nirvana no doubt spurring him on.

He left me, be damned ten-a-day smoker that I am, struggling up the rocks, falling over, and at one point getting so frustrated with the stupid path that I gave way to a furious hissy fit in which I pounded my walking stick on the ground and shouted rude words into the ether. A passing marathon runner advised me to ‘Have a rest, Señorita’. Ever the lady-like hiker, I responded, quite truthfully, that I was ‘quite all right; it’s just the path is pissing me off!’

Photo By: Olivia Ketch

The sierras themselves are jaw-dropping. And quiet… Every so often I would stop, catch my breath, promise ten-fold to quit smoking, and take in the view. I felt detoxed, fresh-aired, liberated, at one with nature, and very, very sweaty. Still no aliens though.

The summit is unassuming; a cross marks the highest point, festooned with bits of material, trinkets, a small shoe, a sleeping dog. I scanned the horizon for a good half an hour, double-checking every bird, every cloud: literally every flying object. Alas, I could identify every single one. So down we went, where I fell over some more, had another hissy fit, and got left behind again by my extremely keen Argentine hippy.

I once read an interview with Bill Bryson in which he commented that one of the best things about being a travel writer was that even if nothing happens, you can usually write something about it. With this in mind, I am slightly less disappointed that my strangest encounter in Córdoba was with a chivalric Peruvian businessman. Maybe the timing was wrong, maybe there was too much light and I wasn’t far enough into the wilderness. Maybe, oh just maybe, they don’t quite exist…

But I have an open mind. Ish. And I will always wonder when I look up into the sky at night, is the verdad really out there? As Suarez maintains, it is a bit ludicrous for human beings to believe we are alone in the cosmos. But, as he also mentions, the Earth itself is a ‘wonder’, so why do we need to look elsewhere?

Capilla del Monte, four hours from Córdoba city. See www.capilladelmonte.gov.ar for more information

Centro de Informes Ovni (UFO Information Centre)
Int. Cabus 237
Capilla Del Monte
Córdoba
03548 482 485

See www.ciouritorco.com.ar for more information or email cioluz@hotmail.com .

Related

Inexpicata – The Journal of Hispanic Ufology

More than 57,000 people have contracted disease this year – nearly double the 25,107 cases reported in all of 2007, according to the Associated Press.

This week 1,200 soldiers from the armed forces will be deployed to set up three field hospitals, while an additional 500 will spray insecticide and place poison in standing puddles of water where the mosquitoes breed, according to Brazilian health care secretary Jose Noronha.

He said: "The number of deaths is totally above expectations that could be considered reasonable."

Locals have been enlisted in the fight against dengue. Over 2,000 citizens have been tasked with inspecting houses and destroying street waste.

"We have been collecting carafes, cups, all kinds of recipients where mosquitoes could reproduce," said Luiz Ventura, a volunteer who took part in the initiative.

The World Health Organization believes a death rate at or below 1% of the population is acceptable. In Rio just over 5% of cases result in death.

Dengue fever is a viral disease spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and currently has no vaccine.

Related

Gymnastics World Champ Diego Hypolito Confirmed With Dengue In Brazil (International Herald Tribune)

Dengue fever in Natal (Brazil Travel Blog)

Dengue fever is caused by a virus, which is transmitted by a mosquito (AEDES AEGYPTI). This mosquito is dark, with white stripes on its back and legs, and smaller than a common mosquito. These mosquitoes breed in clean, stagnant water. The mosquito is considered a “day” mosquito. It bites during the day and likes warm, humid places.

Signs and Symptoms of Dengue Fever

After the infecting bite, dengue symptoms develop within 3 to 14 days (on average, 4 to 7 days). Victims typically experience a sudden high fever, headache, generalized weakness, and intense muscle, joint, and low back pain (hence the term, "break bone fever"). A subtle rash appears in up to half the people affected, although some have a bright red rash with scattered clear spots. Treatment is purely symptomatic. Dengue is usually self-limited, with an average duration of 6 days. Most persons with dengue do not need to be hospitalized, but those with persistent fever should seek medical attention as soon as possible

Hemorrhagic Dengue Fever (DHF): and dengue shock syndrome (DSS) are rare but severe forms of dengue that may occur in people who previously have been infected with one strain of dengue virus and are later infected by a different strain (there are 4 strains). DHF and DSS begin like classic dengue but progress to abdominal pain and vomiting. The most severe cases, if left untreated, can progress to bleeding at sites of minimal trauma, circulatory failure, shock, and death. DHF and DSS ordinarily affect only people who live in endemic areas, but there have been rare cases reported in travelers. Because of this, travelers who previously have had an episode of dengue fever and who will be re-entering a dengue-endemic area should be aware of the increased possibility of acquiring these severe forms of dengue and should seek medical attention as soon as symptoms appear. Travelers with persistent fever should be seen by a healthcare professional. Severe abdominal pain, persistent vomiting, an abrupt change from fever to hypothermia with profuse sweating, extreme exhaustion, lethargy, or mental status changes signal the development of shock and require immediate intensive care level medical attention.

How can you prevent the disease?

There is no vaccine for Dengue. Prevention is based upon taking careful measures to reduce the possibility of mosquito bites. Travelers are strongly encouraged to wear light clothing which completely covers arms and legs, and to apply an effective insect repellant, such as those containing DEET, to exposed areas of skin. The control of Dengue epidemics is based upon reduction of the mosquito population. Dengue may be more likely to occur in urban setting due to drainage issues. Eliminating standing water in your home and environment including flower pots, tires, puddles, non-chlorinated pools, etc., and screening windows, and wearing insect repellent are strongly recommended.

For further information on Dengue Fever, see the Centers for Disease Control’s website at: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/diseases/submenus/sub_dengue.htm