Nightclub fire - República Cromañón 2004

This week’s nightclub fire in Brazil, in which 231 people lost their lives, is being mourned throughout the South American country while officials attempt to discover the causes of the fire. Initial reports suggest that it started when a member of the band playing at the Kiss Club in Santa Maria lit a flare on stage. Issues with the fire safety certificate and blocked fire exits may have contributed to the scale of the disaster. It is all an awful reminder of the República Cromañón nightclub fire in Buenos Aires in 2004 which killed 194 in very similar circumstances.

Until Brazil, the fire at the República Cromañón nightclub in the Once neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, was the fourth deadliest in the world. 

The migrants who didn’t make it to Buenos Aires

When the Italian transatlantic steamer the Sirio foundered off the coast of Spain on a hot afternoon in August 1906, 300 passengers, most of them Italian and Spanish migrants on their way to a new life in Argentina, lost their lives in tragic circumstances.

The disaster has a lot in common with the recent Costa Concordia incident. Both ships ran aground caught sailing too close to the coast and both captains abandoned ship before their passengers had the chance to be rescued. But the Sirio was not a cruise. It was a ship which spent her life transporting migrants to the New World and a new life.

Was the 1978 World Cup in Argentina fixed?

Daniel Passarella lifts the cup

On 25 June 1978 Argentines sang their lungs out in celebration of their national team’s victory over the Netherlands at the World Cup final in Buenos Aires. There was a controversial start to the final. The Dutch side was forced to stand around on the pitch waiting for Argentina, who used stalling tactics, to emerge from the dressing room five minutes late. But after the typically unpunctual Argentine arrival, the home side won the match 3-1 after goals from Mario Kempes and Daniel Bertoni took the game away from the Netherlands in extra time.

The tournament, and especially the victory, sparked nationalist pride. The euphoria engulfed Argentina and helped its military dictator, General Jorge Videla, draw attention away from the atrocities which his government was committing at the time of what is known as Argentina’s Dirty War.

Cristina, Respol YPF, The Adonia and British imports

As Cristina and her government step it up a gear in their dispute with the United Kingdom, this week pretty much banning the import of British products and turning away a cruise ship because it had previously visited the Falklands/Malvinas, they have now begun to antagonise Spain too hinting more and more at the possibility of state intervention at the Spanish oil and gas company, Repsol YPF.

Disaster on El Sarmiento

With fifty fatalities, over six hundred injured and at the time of writing, the recent re-emergence of two of the three unaccounted for passengers more than 48 hours after the accident, the crashing of the Sarmiento train at Once station in Buenos Aires is the worst train accident in Argentina since the 1979 head on collision of two trains near Benavidez station when over 140 people lost their lives.

The dramatic and distressing images of carnage and trapped passengers that were broadcast live over Argentine television were sometimes hard to watch as the severity of the incident became more and more paramount with the increasing numbers of official dead.

The Sarmiento train is the one that I use most weekends in Buenos Aires to visit my wife’s family who live in Moreno and we have many friends who use the service to commute to Capital for work. We therefore spent a number of hours confirming that no one with whom we were acquainted was involved in the accident. But as my wife’s sister said on her Facebook page shortly afterwards, ‘it could have been any of us who use the Sarmiento on that train. May this serve once and for all to end the negligence.’

El Subte



Present map of the Subte, the underground of Buenos Aires

So it’s been over a month since control of the city’s underground rail system, known as El Subte, was transferred from the Federal Government to Mauricio Macri’s Buenos Aires City Government, and although full control isn’t expected to be handed over for at least a further couple of weeks, the effects of the change are already being felt.

On January 6, fares were dramatically raised from $1.10 per journey to $2.50, a hike of 127%. This gave rise of course to protests and pandemonium which saw Metrovias open up turnstiles on day one of the new price to let everyone travel for free. While during the weeks leading up to the fare increase, lengthy queues built up at stations throughout the city as users stocked up on as many $1.10 tickets as they could cram into their pockets. Many even turned the exercise into a business opportunity selling ten journey tickets online for $20, undercutting the new $25 price and making a cheeky $9 profit in the process.

Argentina's football league to be called The Crucero General Belgrano First Division

With the thirty year anniversary of the South Atlantic conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom approaching, both countries have recently become more and more fixated on political rhetoric and squabbling.

This squabble is of course demeaning to the British and Argentine soldiers who gave their lives in the war and is also degrading to the Islanders whose voice seems to be heard less and less. UK headlines say 'Fernandez said this’ and the ‘Argies are doing this’, while on a daily basis in Argentina papers are dominated by ‘Cameron calls us this’ and ‘the pirates are robbing us of this’.

It is clear that talking about the islands serves both Cameron and Fernandez well politically. But unless the UK Premier has the intention of becoming uncharacteristically anti-banking and changing the name of the Barclays Premier League, then for now CFK has got one up on her British counterpart.

Holiday time

The crowded beaches of Mar del Plata

Today’s edition of Clarin includes an article that proclaims that Buenos Aires is becoming a tropical city. According to Osvaldo Canziani, a doctor of Argentine Meteorology, the average minimum temperature in the Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires has increased by 2.7°C in the last century and has been joined by more humidity and south-easterly winds.

But as porteños struggle to deal with the increasingly hot weather this summer, some days of which have seen temperatures reach 44°C, there are thousands and thousands of lucky ones who have escaped the city and made the typically porteño excursion to la costa.

Corruption in Argentina

The culprits of ten years of bribery on a grand scale in Argentina have finally been charged by prosecutors in the USA.

The accused, all former executives of Siemens AG who reside in Germany, Switzerland and Argentina, are reported to have paid over $US100 million in bribes to Argentine officials between 1996 and 2007 in an effort to win a one billion dollar contract to produce national identity cards in Argentina.

Argentina and Spain

After losing to Spain in the final of the 2008 Davis Cup in Mar del Plata, Argentina repeated the loss this last week when they were beaten by the Spaniards in Seville, an event which saw the home side win its fifth Davis Cup since 2000.

Rafa Nadal saw off Argentina’s Juan Martín Del Potro 1-6, 6-4, 6-1, 7-6 to give his country’s tennis fans something to sing and dance about in true Andalucian style.

Juan Martín del Potro and his team however, had not been without support during the competition and the Olympic stadium in Seville had its fair share of Argentines waving their blue and white flags and banging their drums.

Whenever Argentina participates in a sporting event in Spain, it can always count on a large presence of supporters, owing to the fact that Spain has a rather large Argentine population.

Post election

So Cristina Fernández de Kirchner walked off with rather a decisive victory in last month’s presidential election, obtaining 53.96% of all votes and avoiding a second round of voting (in Argentine presidential elections if one candidate achieves more that 45% of votes or more than 40% with a 10% advantage over their closest rival then there is no second round of voting). Cristina, and her Vice-president elect and Economy Minister Amado Boudou took 23 of the 24 provinces of the country, losing out only in San Luis to Rodriquez Saá, and turning their victory for the FPV into the biggest since the return of democracy in 1983.

There were, of course, the customary celebrations with thousands partying in the streets and plazas throughout the country and Cristina delivering an emotional speech to the thousands of Peronistas in Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires after her victory was official.

But a week or so later the time to party is over and CFK and Boudou are, some might say finally, considering the real issues which the country faces.

Los Pumas and Argentine rugby

A valiant effort from Argentina was not enough to prevent the All Blacks from progressing to the Semi-Finals of the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

After Los Pumas’ mesmerizing performance at the 2007 World Cup in France, it is fair to say that expectations for this year’s competition were not as high as might have been anticipated.

The national side has not made a great deal of progress during the last four years but after a closely fought opening 9-12 defeat to England, Argentina went on to win its next three group stage games against Romania, Scotland and Georgia to qualify for a quarter final match-up with the hosts, New Zealand.

Schoklender and The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo

Former financial manager Sergio Schoklender

The scandal that has rocked the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Foundation continues with Magistrate Norberto Oyarbide announcing last week that raids by Argentine Police have successfully uncovered several “financial caves” which the foundation’s former financial manager Sergio Schoklender used for money laundering.

Schoklender and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo have been a major feature in the Argentine press during the recent months since accusations were made at the end of May about irregularities in the foundation’s finances.

Schoklender, imprisoned in the 1980s with his brother for the massacre of their parents, is accused of mismanaging millions of dollars from the Kirchner government funded ‘Shared Dreams’ programme, whose mission was to build homes for the poor. He is alleged to have built himself a luxury lifestyle complete with a collection of sports cars, yachts and villas.

Google doodle Borges

Google has celebrated what would have been the112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges with a homepage doodle to celebrate the famous Argentine writer’s achievements; in particular his surreal approach to literature.

The doodle is a montage which shows an elderly man staring at a colourful labyrinth of staircases, forking paths and a library, which when clicked on returns search results for the Argentine maestro of the written word.

It makes particular reference to the Borges’ story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ published in 1941 which the author described as a hypertext novel. Hypertext is the computer text which links readers immediately to other texts and so many consider the work as one that captures the spirit of what would eventually become the internet.

BA Cast - Mandatory vs. Voluntary Vote

I was recently invited by Daniel Karlin and Fernando Farías from BA Cast - The Buenos Aires Podcast to participate in a chamullo on whether voting ought to be Mandatory or Voluntary.

The Primaries

So Cristina Fernández de Kirchner came out well on top in the primary elections that took place on 14 August and looks to have set herself up for somewhat of a comfortable victory come the actual Presidential elections this October.

CFK obtained 50.07% of the votes, way ahead of her closest rival, Ricardo Alfonsín, the UCR candidate and son of the first democratically elected president post military dictatorship Raúl Alfonsín, who got 12.17%.

It's a tad cold

How cold does it get in Buenos Aires?

Well some of the coldest nights I’ve ever spent anywhere were during the three weeks I stayed in provincía just two hours outside of the capital city in Zona Oeste, where a poorly insulated house in open countryside made escaping the freeze impossible. The damp, eat at your bones, bitter cold was worse inside the home than it was outside; and that's enough to make battles with the weather more than tough wherever you are.

In small villages and rural neighbourhoods all over the province, that is the cold reality of winter during July and August for many of the seven million inhabitants of Gran Buenos Aires. In the centre of the city however, it of course does not get so chilly and you can generally guarantee temperatures of three to four degrees higher than in the countryside.

Volcanic ash and Bariloche

Ash from Chile’s Puyehue volcano continues to cause disruption in Argentina over a month since the initial eruption on June 4.

Flights at Buenos Aires airports Ezeiza and Aeroparque were again cancelled last week while provinces in the south of the country remain in a state of emergency.

Election time - Mauricio Macri seeks four more years

Lefty filmmaker Pino Solanas

It’s mayoral voting time in the city and the walls and billboards are splattered with the candidates’ posters for Buenos Aires Chief of Government (Jefe de Gobierno).

In its present format the position is a fairly recent one. It was created in 1996 following a reform to the Argentine constitution when the city of Buenos Aires was given autonomous status; thus the city’s official name Cuidad Autónoma de Buenos Aires.  

The Nation’s House of Congress is responsible for setting the limits of the city’s autonomy but there are often political and judicial conflicts where the line between nation and city gets blurry.

River Plate and the Copa America

A tough week for Argentine football was concluded Friday last with a lacklustre performance from the national team against Bolivia in the opening game of the Copa America, hosted this year by Argentina.

The game at El Estadio Unico de La Plata, which took place on a freezing night, followed the opening ceremony and saw Argentina luckily claw back from 1-0 down to draw the match.

But at least it was on the field problems which dominated the weekend headlines.

That was not the case when River Plate lost a decisive match on Sunday 26 June to be relegated to the second division for the first time in its 110 year history and off the field antics helped the event become international news as hard-core fans rioted to cause absolute mayhem.