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.

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.”