An hour and a half later I am on the ground, head pounding, breathing in the humo. The cover of the Clarín newspaper shows someone gagging and declares: "The Worst Atmospheric Contamination in History."
Some things, such as slight overstatement, haven’t changed in
Within an hour, I have heard three theories purporting to explain the humo. (1) It’s a political protest by the farmers, who set their crops on fire to protest against a new tax on soy exports. (2) It’s the government, which set the crops on fire in order to turn public opinion against the farmers after they went on strike against the export tax. (3) It may be the farmers who set the fires but it’s the fault of the government, which is deliberately refusing to extinguish them.
The truth, I learn later, is that the fires are the result of a radical shift in
It makes for a powerful symbol: the proud gauchos suffocated by soybeans.
Soy isn’t the only force displacing the cowboys this week; so is the annual Buenos Aires Book Fair, the reason for my trip. The fair is held in La Rural, the huge agricultural exposition grounds where
Besides the smoke, there are many other changes to note in this city. Last time I was here, the shops were empty, the streets were filled with protests, and the International Monetary Fund was calling the shots. This time, Argentina is no longer in debt to the IMF, the economy is booming and, in far-off Washington, the IMF is facing its own debt crisis, provoking self-imposed structural adjustment as the organization lays off hundreds of staff and dips into its gold reserves.
Today there is less "Yankee go home" graffiti and more… Yankees.
At the book fair, an audience member asks me if I think he should sell his dollars. I accuse him of being a disaster capitalist, preying on the
In between festival events, I am beginning work on a documentary of my book The Shock Doctrine, directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, the team that made The Road to Guantánamo. We are picking up that road a few decades earlier this time, in
In 2002, the military still controlled ESMA, while the human-rights groups, such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, were outsiders to
Things have definitely changed. Now Buenos Aires has an official memorial wall, made up of 30,000 individual bricks – each representing one of the disappeared. The monument was unveiled by then President Néstor Kirchner less than six months ago. The version of history protected and nurtured by the mothers, grandmothers and children of the disappeared is at last becoming Argentina’s accepted history.
We see the most dramatic change of all upon our arrival at ESMA, the human rights groups control it now, and they are turning the haunted houses into a new kind of school, one focused on the kind of country that the desaparecidos, most of them leftwing activists, were trying to build when they were erased.
There will always be those who deny the atrocities that happened here. But the past in Argentina is finally getting clearer, despite the smoke.
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