The 'disappeared' intelligentsia and activists would have been primed to lead the country today The tourists no longer come, workers are not being paid. Once a Latin-American utopia, Argentina is now 'sitting on a volcano', its economy ready to explode. Keith Duggan witnesses the beginning of the end
Summer evenings fall like a dense perfume over Buenos Aires and even though the fashionable parts of the city are still scented with taste and beauty, the people do not come. In the restaurants, waiting staff spread starched, white cloths and lay polished silver for phantom guests. The bellhops and concierge congregate in the marble foyers to greet long since cancelled bus tours. In the Recoleta district, the street artists smoke and wait impassively for tourists to barter for oiled impressions of the city at sunset or lush, beatific portraits of Evita. At the entrance to the nearby cemetery, where the icon herself lies in repose, an elderly gentleman and lady feign blindness and rattle coins in a tin. A young girl drops some pesos into the containers and receives a ribbon for her kindness. As she departs, she waves at the unseeing and they, involuntarily, return her gesture. Everyone laughs; in these hard times, their scam is just another example of viveza creolla - an old Argentine expression meaning "creole cunning", a salute to expediency, to getting by.
The Recoleta is an established selling point of Buenos Aires tourism, an ornate and solemn city of the dead, with streets of ostentatious crypts commissioned in better days by the portenos, the Argentine upper-class, as a manifestation of their prestige.
Like so much of the city however, this resting-place has an unkempt, half-abandoned feel to it. Where sightseers once queued,torn strips of ribbon cordon off several sections of the walking tour. All the main trails lead, inevitably to the Duarte family tomb, resting place of Eva Perón and even though most of the Recoleta is deserted, Argentina's first lady has drawn a number of guests.
Gathered around the black, stone monument is a parched band of American pensioners with name badges, lolling in the cloying heat as the guide runs through the history of the most famous inhabitant of this stone city. A few cameras click half-heartedly as Eva's fantastic life story is told in monotone, with no eavesdroppers to listen to how she attained idol status as champion of the poor and as the beautiful wife of Juan Perón, the great visionary; how half a million kissed her embalmed, eternally preserved body after her untimely death at the age of 33; and how her corpse suffered an undignified 18-year exile following the military coup in 1955. The tourists fan themselves at this airbrushed and saccharine version of history and then peer dubiously at their sandals and Nikes when told that Evita rests not in the mausoleum, in fact, but beneath them. They stare at the newer flagstones in gentle profundity, as if the great lady might offer some signal from below or a wave or, better still, a Coca-Cola.
The flowers that hang on the Duarte tomb are, in the best tradition of cliché, withered and the cemetery itself is in disrepair.
Vast sections are under reconstruction but for all the machinery, there is but one worker, a startling, dusty young man who materialises to attach a hose to a water-pipe before disappearing among the dead again. In the unreal heat and stillness, he may well be of them.
But all of Buenos Aires seems slightly illusory in these times.
"You must ever look under the water. Nothing is as it seems here, it is more complex, the Argentine is more complex," says Gustavo Gelnini.
This is how Argentines speak, in enigmatic shrouds, explaining away their last days in half-sentences.
Gelnini is an accountant but like most Argentine professionals he has a second occupation, running a restaurant with his father. Bright and funny, he sits most evenings in a ghostly salon that was teeming with life just a few years ago and shakes his head at the future.
"I am 39 and have lived through the crises of 1974, 1981, 1989, 1991 and now. This is the worst. I love this country, had some good times here. It was a good place to live - normal - Saturday nights you meet friends, go dancing, eat, watching the same movies, television. It was an accidental country in many ways and the problem is that we cannot find a political class to govern. All my friends are sinking and we are at an extreme point. This situation must explode and I do not think we will make it until the middle of the year."
With a national debt of $90 billion, a freeze oprivate savings accounts and spiralling inflation following the floatation of the peso, Argentines claim their country is failing. The simple explanation for the latest in a litany of failures is that the country's economy was not growing faster than the interest rates on the national debt. In 1991, when the peso was linked to the dollar and the country supported by the International Monetary Fund, Argentina experienced a boom - but warnings that this was a chimera were ignored.
Argentina lost its competitive stance, its agricultural exports fell away and the sharp rise of the US dollar in 1999 put unsustainable pressure on the local currency.
To combat the deteriorating situation, the Carlos Menem administration spent the latter half of the 1990s borrowing uninhibitedly and as the economy grew stagnant, so the debts spiralled. Since 1998, Argentina has been in free-fall, leading to the current political instability, with a succession of ill-fated presidencies leading to the fragile administration of Eduardo Duhalde.
Now, goods-trucks sit on the São Paulo-Buenos Aires highway, just across the border, as foreign firms refuse to take payment in the devalued peso. This week's supreme court ruling that the corralito on the personal accounts of citizens was unconsitutional has further compromised stability.
The super-rich have already fled, observing this latest flirtation with oblivion from holiday resorts abroad. There is as much Argentine capital outside the country as left within. Thousands of families have no income other than the pension of grandparents. Teachers and solicitors earn the equivalent of one week's European salary per month. Duhalde is the subject of scorn and bitterness but at least he is surviving, anxiously monitoring the massive street protests that regularly climax in the Plaza De Mayo in central Buenos Aires.
IT RAINED incessantly on the evening of the last organised gathering but tens of thousands showed up and got soaked through and banged pots and chanted before 1,400 police and were eventually tear-gassed. By midnight, the plaza was drenched and deserted, except for two teenage boys who had seen the trouble on television and rushed into the city.
The older boy, Luis, wears cut-off combat pants and a Ramones T-shirt. Like almost all Argentine young people, he looks like he has just walked off a Calvin Klein billboard. He and his friend are sorry they missed the excitement. In sound bites of disaffection that are common the world over, they vow hatred towards all authority but with more depth. At the protest of December 19th, which sparked off the rioting, the tear-gas canisters that were fired into the crowd had a best-before date of 1983. That seemed, to the disbelieving civilians, the perfect metaphor for Argentina. Nothing works properly.
It is a galling and perplexing situation for a nation that devotes itself to chasing perfection. Argentines are obsessive about their naturally striking looks and tirelessly seek to better their souls. They do not differentiate between a trip to the manicurist and a visit to the psychoanalyst. Introspection is the chief topic of conversation and Argentines constantly fixate upon their failure to shape a national type from the mix of genes, the rich Italian, Polish, German, Spanish and English ancestry that To Weekend 3