Boot Camp for fhe Good Life
By Zack McMillin ’07
It took our esteemed Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, Jim MacMillan of the Philadelphia Daily News, to write the appropriate caption for the Knight- Wallace Fellows’ eighth journey to Buenos Aires: “It’s boot camp for the good life.” He meant that in the way Teddy Roosevelt described “the strenuous life.”
We arrived by overnight flight through Houston unaccustomed to the (ahem) rigors that awaited us. Oh, the demand! Two-hour lunches. Three-hour dinners ending past midnight. Saddle sores from galloping across the pampas. December sunburn. Nonstop red meat, red wine and speed-shopping—or, as we called it, “An exploration of Argentina’s retail economy.” Sleep? Not much.
And that doesn’t begin to cover the real purpose of our trip—a jam-packed news tour of Buenos Aires featuring a lineup of seminars organized by Clarín, Argentina’s leading daily, with which KWF trades Fellowships for news tours providing insight into the character, culture and contradictions that make Argentina fascinating.
Thanks to Colonel Eisendrath and Sergeant Rieck, our time in Buenos Aires was an exploration where even inevitable snags deepened our understanding of the Argentine way of life.
“When things here go awry, people say ‘It’s a mystery’ and you never find out what actually happened,” said Eisendrath after itinerary items disappeared, morphed or were added unexpectedly. It was a phrase we would hear many times.
Our visits with politicians, social scientists, bankers, journalists and political activists provided a seven-day crash course on all things Argentine, from economics to journalism to art and culture.
After showing us a graph illustrating Argentina’s remarkable economic turnaround since the 2001 collapse and another predicting more robust growth ahead, a leading economist hedged his bets on the “mystery” factor. If this fails to happen, he added nonchalantly, “it would not be the first time medium- and longterm trends ended in the short term.”
2007 Fellows relax after a long week of seminars in Argentina.
Daniel Santoro, investigative reporter for Clarín and president of Argentina’s nascent press organization described how press conferences there routinely conclude with favored journalists being offered cash-stuffed envelopes. This, he said, is what is known as the “chain of happiness,” and not all the envelopes are refused.
La Nacion columnist and TV host Mariano Grondona explained that he hopes that Argentina will yet become a stable, fully reformed country, pointing to Spain as a model.
“In the seventies, Spain was seen as a symbol of regression,” he said. “Now it is a symbol of light.” To better understand Argentina, Grondona said, one must recognize the Spanish and Italian sides of the national character—the need for macho posturing inherited from Spain and the habit of endless debate representing the Italian side.
On a private tour of MALBA, Buenos Aires’ museum of modern art, many of us saw works we had never encountered, including a thrilling exhibition of renowned Argentine artist Atonio Berni.
In the offices of the Supreme Court we discussed everything from the backlog of cases (35 percent of prisoners in Argentina have not been to trial, and many wait two to three years) to the death penalty (no “official” executions since 1914, though many deaths have been caused by the state) to abortion (formally illegal) to violence in football stadiums.
Perhaps most moving was our time at the offices of Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo with a woman whose pregnant daughter and her husband were among hundreds “disappeared” by the military between 1976 and 1983. The woman spoke of her hope to one day discover her daughter and grandchild, of the “arrogance of highranking interlocutors” and recounted her own dramatic confrontation with a general.
“What are you going to do?” she asked him. “Kill me? I am not scared.”
At yet another riveting seminar, Carlos “Calico” Ferrer, a boyhood friend of doctor-turned-revolutionary Che Guevara, described his time accompanying Che on his second motorcycle journey across South America.
“He felt that lukewarm democracies are not the solution to extreme poverty,” Ferrer. “I think he found his soulmate when he met Fidel Castro and found his revolution.”
Après pampas gallop.
Eminent historian Rosendo Fraga provided an overview of Argentine politics that contained American resonances. He said he expected Argentine president Nestor Kirchner to run for and win the presidency in 2007—unless he puts his wife on the ballot instead. He also noted that, as in America, the Argentine economy continues to squeeze the middle class, only more so. To wit, in the 1960s, 60% of Argentines were middle class and 30% were lower class or impoverished. Today, 30% are middle class and 60% live in poverty.
The most emphatic theme of our visit to the Argentina Central Bank, was simple, surprising and upbeat: that neither Argentina nor Latin America would trigger the next world economic crisis, which was more likely to come from the developed world and, specifically, the U.S. Central bankers, we learned, are watching America’s economy with some concern.
In our final seminar, inside the Argentine Navy’s situation room, the chief public information officers explained how they were trying to execute a most challenging mission—to rehabilitate the public image of the Argentine military.
“We have to leave the past behind but we also must show it because we have to recognize history,” said Capitan Juan Pablo Panichini. “We used to raise the volume [with propaganda]. Now we lower the volume in order to hear.” It had been a week full of listening.
