Deadly storm in Buenos Aires

Last night a powerful storm hit Buenos Aires City and Province. Parts of our old Palermo neighbourhood were flooded to some degree, but other areas of the city were truly devastated.

At this writing, twenty-four hours later, eight deaths related to the storm have been confirmed, including one Subte worker. The entire subway system has been running at reduced capacity today, and all of Line B has been closed.






Many areas of the city and province remain flooded and about 500,000 residents are without power (in context: there are about fourteen million people living in metropolitan BA).




According to the BA City Government more than 155 mm of rain fell in various parts of the city within a two hour period after 6:00 p.m. This exceeded the record of April 8, 1989 when 142 mm fell, the highest for the month of April since records began in 1906.




As usual, the politicians have been active too. The Mayor returned from vacation in Brasil and promptly blamed the Federal Government for not having resources in place to deal with the storm.

A minister in President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's federal cabinet put the blame squarely at the feet of the mayor, accusing him of holidaying abroad while the city suffered. Rumours abound that the Mayor is ready to mount his entry into national politics.


Argentina is a highly political arena, and people enjoy their political discussions around coffee and dinner. In this tragic situation work now needs to be done to help residents of those areas flooded and to repair the damage throughout the entire city. It will happen, and quite possibly in spite of the politicians. It's unfortunate for the citizens of this great city that politicians have to find their photo ops and sound bites first, even in tragedy.




Which reminds me of a BC premier who did the same thing after Vancouver's infamous Stanley Cup riots. Yes, the common touch - in pearls and high heels.

Photos of BA from La Nacion and Clarin. Photo of sweeping up from The Sun.

It's spring!

It's springtime on the left coast. And for faithful readers in Argentina, that doesn't mean Chile. Nor does it mean that's it's September already.









We're on the upper left coast, past the Excited States of America, in Canada, and while the rest of this nation continues to have winter like conditions, its spring in Vancouver.

This Passover and Easter long weekend brought temperatures inland to over twenty. On the coast it's only slightly cooler and nice and warm, and everything is beautiful.

Argentina's disappeared: never forgotten

The terrible events of Argentina's dirty war remain close to everyday life. Criminal proceedings continue to this day. Mothers continue to seek the truth about what happened to their children. The stolen children are being sought, and in some cases, found.

Pagina|12, a  daily newspaper, runs memorial adverts that regularly appear in its pages. Placed by friends and family on the day their son or daughter, or uncle, or mother... disappeared, they are memorials and warnings both; that this will not be forgotten, justice will prevail.



Young men and women, often students, or workers, or teachers, or ...

Sometimes grandmothers, whose only crime might have been to rent a room to someone under suspicion.

The ads, usually in the lower left hand corner of an inside page, remind us, almost everyday.

In this advert, the young couple are Silvina and Daniel, detained in Cordoba in 1976. Silvana was six and one half months pregnant at the time of the arrest. In all likelihood, she was kept alive until giving birth when her child was then adopted, and she was dumped from a plane into the ocean.

Memoria, verdad y justicia

Memory, truth and justice

It's Canada, eh?

Sadly, it had to come to an end. Three winter months in the Yukon at the end of 2012 (see the Dawson  City Journal) followed by almost three summer months in Argentina. Two extremes:
in temperature and in lifestyle, as typified in the photos to the right and below, both taken at "high noon."





We arrived in Buenos Aires at the height of summer and watched as the season slowly changed to autumn. Returning to Vancouver we were met by the last elements of winter. Across Canada late spring snow storms caused travel problems and even here in Vancouver we awoke one morning to a light dusting of snow.









But it is spring on the west coast and it's a beautiful place. The trees are beginning to bloom, the flowers are coming up, the kites are flying in Steveston and we are at the beginning of a provincial election campaign! It's about time.

As for The Murray Chronicles: watch this space for more photos and stories of Argentina, Australia and closer to home! It's Canada, eh?

Film Review: No

There is a great deal of irony in this entertaining film from director Pablo Larrain. Based on the unpublished play El Plebiscito by Antonio Skarmeta, No follows our hero, the young marketing and advertising whiz kid  Rene, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, as he works his madmen magic. His magic is needed to help the No campaign in the historic plebiscite held in Chile in 1988.

Under international pressure, Augusto Pinochet, who came to power on September 11, 1973 in a CIA sponsored coup, decided to have a referendum to decide whether or not he should rule for another eight years. Democracy, planned and managed, is promised. The ballot choice is simple: Yes to eight more years of Pinochet, or... No.



Both sides in the campaign are allowed fifteen minutes of television time each night to present their case. Chile has been under a repressive regime for fifteen years; the opposition is fragmented, and the generals and the elite otherwise hold all media power. Except for fifteen minutes each night for twenty-seven nights.



In the film, the veterans of the anti-Pinochet movement want to focus on the brutality of the past fifteen years, the disappeared and state-sponsored terrorism. Our hero is unmoved. He proposes something "a little nicer." His solution: singing, dancing, comedy, sunshine, rainbows and a contagious little jingle. Rene is selling a product, like any soft drink, and that product is happiness.


The film is produced in beautiful Low-Def using two centimetre Sony U-Matic video tape, the same system widely used by television news in Chile during the 1980s, and it meshes brilliantly with the real circa 1988 video of protests and repression. The movie is visually appealing and the hand-held camera scenes add to this travel-back-in-time film. The documentary feel created by the low-def production values only enhances the artistic magic of the film.

The film  has received mixed reviews in Chile. Genaro Arriagado Herrera directed the No campaign and accused the film's director of simplifying history and focusing exclusively on the television ad campaign while ignoring the critical role grass roots voter registration played in actually getting out the No vote. The director responded by saying that yes, the film is a fiction, based on real events, including the brilliant ad campaign, complete with rainbows as in the poster from 1988.




There is great truth to Arriagado's accusation; in some ways the movie, though clearly showing the brutal nature of the Pinochet's junta, trivializes the dictatorship and its power. Chile at the time was not an open society where people could criticize the government. To vote in a plebiscite took great courage, and significant organisation to get out the vote regardless of the presence of international observers. The television ad campaign was certainly helpful, and important, but the courage and determination of both organisers and the citizenry was paramount in winning the vote.

Still, the movie is fun and highly entertaining. By the end of the movie we want to clap our hands together in time to that infectious little jingle, the same one used in 1988. The film celebrates the victory of the No side and so do we.

And in brilliant irony, the movie's final scene, after the massive celebration, takes us to another place, an advertising pitch for a new campaign, a new product, and we are forced to wonder if we should be celebrating the moment when political activism turns into marketing - rather than an open discussion of values and principles.

Lift yourself up. Watch No. 

See the movie trailer 

and learn more about the film at the following link:

www.nothemovie.com

Copyright 2013 by Jim Murray.