Back when I was a teenager, I was mesmerized by the book Alive!. You may know the true story about the crash of a plane of 45 rugby players and students, stranding the survivors high up in the Andes for 72 days of winter. The conditions were impossible to survive but several did. A bit heavy in moments, most shocking were the tales of resorting to eat the flesh of the dead companions as a last resort for survival. But it ends happily, like a good 70′s book should.

However, when you survive a near death experiences, life goes on, and so do its experiences and challenges. I’ve had friends successfully and unsuccessfully pass through these experiences, and have learned from them. And recently I came across this blog from Pedro Algorta, one of the survivors of that crash in the Andes, who until recently had kept his past hidden. You need to browse for what interests you, and most entries are in Spanish, but there are some gems including Pedro’s memories of the experience, related thoughts about life since, and tales from other companions from that time.

http://survivorwalk.blogspot.com

Un sobrevivente del choque del avion Uruguayo en la cordillera de los Andes en el año 1972. Su blog cuenta sobre sus recuerdos de eses dias, sus pensiementos com habia siguido una vida después, y cuentos de algunos compañeros del evento. Es una perspectiva como la vida sigue después de sobrevivir una experiencia “near death,”como hay mas de un fin feliz.

Almost exactly 4 years ago I moved from the US to Argentina. I had planned my trip for just after the presidential election in part so that I could vote. I had been expecting and hoping for a victory by John Kerry. I supported Kerry more out of my hate for the Bush administration than for caring much about John Kerry’s presidency. I said goodbye to several friends at an election celebration at a neighborhood bar that ended with a mood of shock and hopelessness.

A few days later I arrived in Buenos Aires with my tail between my legs. It is not easy to adapt to a foreign culture and an unfamiliar language, but also with a public that has so much contempt for the country I come from. The first term of GW Bush was arguably against the will of the public, but the re-election (though also suspicious) has been seen as the public’s endorsement of the war and all the other fucked up shit he has done. Some friends in the US suggested that I tell everyone here I was Canadian. I couldn’t do that, but when asked where I was from I would say “New York,” not the United States specifically. And that would quickly be followed with something like “sorry, but I hate Bush more than you do.” Continue »

Yo circulo por una plaza cerca de mi casa con mi perro casi todos los dias. Y el domingo pasado estuve con Clyde (mi perrito) cuando una vecina me llamó. Aunque no tenía muchas ganas de hablar debo comunicar algunas veces. Se llama Blanca ella y es buena onda, pero con más ganas esta mañana que yo. Como sabe que trabajo en la internet siempre hablamos sobre su pagina de Mercado Libre donde ella tiene su negocio como vendedora. Esta vez me pregunta sobre mi conocimiento como un yanqui. Continue »

Many so called “pro-lifers” mistakenly equate abortion rights with favoring abortion. That is far from the truth. The right to abortion is about putting the decision in the hands of the pregnant woman (and her god, if she believes in one) rather than the government imposing its values on her. Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor of Catholic faith, has always been personally against abortion but a supporter of the right to abortion. This is an important example. To support abortion rights, one does not have to choose abortion — and many pro-choice people are anti-abortion — but respects the choice a woman makes, whether she keeps her baby or not.

A timely example is in the current presidential campaign. This was a quote from CNN about Sarah Palin concerning her pregnant teenage daughter:

Sarah and her husband, Todd Palin, issued a statement saying they are “proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents.”

Notice the word “decision.” That is an important one. It sounds to me that vice-president-elect Palin supports her daughter’s right to make the decision. I have heard similar wording to her personal “choice” in keeping her own baby with Down Syndrome.  Those are the words of a supporter of abortion rights.

I returned from a 6-week trip to the US the other day. I have been looking for an opportunity to write about the presidential campaign there in this space. Unsure of what exactly to write,  I have had the idea of something with the view of an ex-patriot filtered through an international perspective. This is an important difference because I have the context of living in Latin America, and of a country that is simply not the US. Here US foreign policy has a lot more weight than domestic issues.

The opportunity has come already with the passing of the Democratic Convention and the ground-breaking acceptance speech by Barack Obama last night. This speech really disappointed me. It made me sad.

Reluctantly, my boyfriend Guillermo watched the speech with me. Well, he watched “CNN en Español” on TV and I used my laptop and headphones to get the untranslated version from CSPAN.com. (I just prefer to avoid dubbing when possible. If it were the president of Argentina speaking, I would listen to her in Spanish rather than an English dubbed version.) Continue »

One of the things about the city of Buenos Aires that appeals to me is how the city retains an individual character. In many cities I see a homogenization taking place. New York is a prime example, in that since the Guliani and Bloomberg administrations took hold, the city has not only gotten safer on a police level, but safer on a character level. Tourists from any midwest US region now can walk Time Square and feel at home with all the theme restaurants and big name stores. There are less and less neighborhood mom and pop hardware stores and more locations of Home Depot, Blockbuster, Starbucks, Bed Bath and Beyond, The Gap, etc.,…

A side effect of globalization, nowhere in the world is free of this trend. In Buenos Aires, McDonalds, Burger King, and various chain stores from Spain, France, and Chile are filling the cityscape more and more. Walmart already exists in the suburbs, and the first Starbucks recently opened here. Gentrification is happening here like everywhere too, with working class families getting pushed out or trendy developments. Historic low-rise colonial buildings that give the neighborhood its character are being demolished to make way for clean-lined hermetic luxury apartment towers. In San Telmo, the neighborhood where I live, one historic building was undergoing renovations when the contractor “mistakenly” removed the entire building rather than just part of one floor as the permit allowed. Now in place of a rundown historic building that was home to various low income families there is a fenced-off empty lot with a stop-work order. Continue »

I feel like I am saying the all-too-obvious when I say that Barack Obama’s candidacy is important for racial reasons. In the general campaign he himself has emphasized what he offers aside from his African heritage. Hillary Clinton and John McCain too have mostly tiptoed around the race issue. As a liberal white male I too feel a little awkward speaking about race. I don’t know first-hand what it is like to be a person of African descent growing up in the US, nor do I know what it is like to be a white working class person in West Virgina or Texas.

After a week of so much buzz about Barack Obama as the inevitable nominee, I was at first confounded by why he had not tried harder in West Virginia, and why Hillary Clinton was able to win by a margin of over 40%. Polls have shown that race played a much larger role in this dominantly white, working-class state than in other places. Most people do not admit they are racist, and I am not so naive that racism has not been a factor in many voters in every precinct in the US, including people of all races and backgrounds. But I saw a result of an exit poll from West Virginia, where 1 in 5 openly admitted that race was a factor in their vote. The bottom line is that there are too many people who cannot accept there being an African American in the White House, regardless of other issue. Continue »

Recently I have been discussing various current events in Argentina. There has been the farm strike, the persistent smoke from extensive prairie fires, plus other tidbits. These two themes are still quite present with a new rural strike beginning yesterday. We’ll see if the meat disappears from the neighborhood markets again. Meanwhile, the fires from the farms way to the north of Buenos Aires are still affecting the city. Yesterday morning the smell was strong, with my eyes burning, and a heavy smog color in the air.

However, I wasn’t entirely sure if that color in the sky was from the fires in the north or from the eruption of a volcano in Patagonia. This is a major geological event. El Bolsón, a town in the south that I love in the heart of the Patagonian Andes, has been covered in ashes. Over Buenos Aires, 2000 kilometers to the northeast of the volcano, there is a big cloud of ash at 3500 meters altitude. In the city there is a hazy feel in the sky, but not too much else; but this cloud is strong enough that airline flights to the US and other places have been suspended.

Here in Argentina, airline travel is nowhere near as important as in the US and Europe. The pending meat shortage is given much more importance in the newspapers. Still, what was really talked about most yesterday was the early elimination from the Liberty Cup playoffs of the second most popular soccer team in Argentina, River Plate.

Me, we’ll I am whining about the high inflation here with three-peso empanadas, and also the paving over of the distinctive tiled sidewalks here with concrete. The latter will be the subject of my next installment.

One morning last week I first noticed the smell of a campfire. Then the other afternoon as I set out to walk with my dog Clyde there was a thick smoky haze in the air and a strong smell of fire. Enough to irritate my eyes and lungs. I asked a neighbor on the street where the fire was and he said it was to the north, a couple hundred kilometers. This week, the city of Buenos Aires is shrouded in smoke quite a bit, all depending on which way the wind blows. Continue »

First I must state my personal disclaimer. I believe that there is no such thing as “bias-free journalism.” If a journalist or newspaper is doing their job, they must interpret what they see and also decide what or what not to put on paper. All writing demands decisions like this. A journalist’s personal perspective decides what is relevant and what is not, and chooses the words; and each journalist and each newspaper has its own perspective or bias. That’s not something sinister, it’s good reporting. Continue »