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.

Cartoneros

As the evening arrives to Buenos Aires, they begin to appear. They trawl the streets of virtually every neighbourhood of the capital. They get in the rubbish and tear up all those black sacks and plastic bags of refuge emptied from the city’s apartment buildings onto the pavements; and they cause what is let’s face it, a rather ugly mess. 

They are however a hard working lot and like it or lump it, they’re providing a service.

The tens of thousands of cartoneros, perhaps best translated as cardboard people, make their living by extracting recyclable materials from the city’s rubbish.

Generally working in teams, whose members will commonly include children as young as seven or eight, they roam the streets from the early evening until the early morning, pushing carts from one corner to the next and ransacking the rubbish bags that are left for the binmen, in search of paper, plastics, metals and anything else they can flog.

You can't light up here che

Argentina has become the eighth country in Latin America to ban smoking in public places. The legislation, which was passed in the Senate last August, was approved by Congress this week by 182 votes to one.

The law means that all enclosed spaces including bars, restaurants and offices will be 100% smoke-free and will therefore limit smokers to lighting up outdoors or in their homes.

It will also ban tobacco advertising and will force cigarette manufactures to place warnings on their packs, prohibiting the use of words such as ‘light’ and ‘mild’ which give smokers a mixed message. From its second year the law will even stipulate that a cigarette cannot contain more than one milligram of nicotine and 10 milligrams of carbon monoxide.

Give us back the Malvinas and you can have my vote

FIFA vice-president Julio Grondona - My hands are clean

“I think there is corruption everywhere,” said Argentine Julio Grondona, the head of AFA (Argentine Football Association) and vice-president of FIFA. 

But in an interview with the German press on 31 May he denied personally having taken a bribe during the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids and confirmed “I have never asked for anything.”

Except that one little time of course when,

“I told the English, look let's be brief, you can have my vote if you return the Malvinas Islands which belong to Argentina.”

May Revolution

The Cabildo at Plaza de Mayo

The May 25 national holiday in Argentina commemorates the events that culminated in the country’s May Revolution, which in 1810 was the prelude to Argentina’s eventual independence from Spain.

Towards the end of the 18th century revolution was doing the international rounds. Independence for what became the US demonstrated that the colonies in the Americas could go it alone, and the French Revolution in 1789 encouraged many to question the concept of the divine rights of kings.

The Spanish monarchy of course was not so convinced by the liberal and anti-nobility ideas coming out of France, and despite actually aiding the thirteen North American colonies who won freedom from British rule in 1776, was not disposed to relinquishing control over its own colonies in the Americas.

Beef for everyone

The headline of last Thursday’s Clarín was accompanied by a less than flattering snap of a baseball capped Cristina Kirchner at the launch of her plan to provide cheap beef for everyone in what was once the beef epicentre of the planet.

Only one problem – her Carne para Todos (Beef for Everyone) plan will only cover about 0.15% of daily consumption. More like beef for a few said Clarín, the national newspaper with a long standing anti Kirchner reputation.

Cristina’s grand scheme will see a massive total of five refrigerated vans driving round the city selling 13 different cuts of beef at prices fixed by the controversial Secretary of Commerce Guillermo Moreno. The vans will distribute a total of 10,000 kilos of beef, which as Clarín highlighted, is a miniscule amount when one considers 6.6 million kilos of beef are sold each day in Argentina.