Down, but not Out in Buenos Aires

The peso had once been pegged to the dollar, one-to-one. The peso is now worth about 33 cents. Argentineans say that the middle class evaporated, most of them moving down, but some lucky few who had kept their savings offshore moving up. The job market is stale, with very few new openings. Indeed, jobs are apparently developed through nearly closed networks of families and friends; you can only get a job as good as your network - if you can find one at all.

Walking around the crowded streets of the city, eating in its full restaurants, I kept asking myself "is this what a depression looks like?"¹

What does it look like? Everything could use a new coat of paint, most people's coats are threadbare and the fashions they wear are three years out-of-date. There are very few new cars on the road and heads turn to watch when one goes by. People are thin.

The shopping streets have a bright and shiny store in every space. The latest fashions from all over the world are on display. There are no vacancies, no empty storefronts, on the streets famous for their wares. Every corner has a shoe store and every block an internet shop. Moving off of the main drags and onto the cross streets there are some vacancies, but not so many as I anticipated, not nearly the rows of empty shops I remember from my own town in the early nineties.

Who buys all this? I walked into a crowded electronics shop to buy an alarm clock. There were five employees and they never stopped moving, never stopped selling. I had to take a number in order to be served. The main business was cell phones - which everyone has, as they do nearly everywhere in the world now - and watches. I found the same exact alarm clock I left at home for the same exact price. Later, I browsed in a shoe store and was the only customer. Bookstores are open until midnight and are always packed with people standing and reading. Do they buy the books or only browse?

People eat late in Buenos Aires and they eat out. We would eat at 8:30 and be the only people in the restaurant, but by 10 every place we went was packed. Every night. Food is cheap, even by local standards, but it was surprising to see every table filled and a line out the door.

There are very few beggars. I saw one in a week of walking around the city center. That doesn't mean there are not desperately poor people sitting on the sidewalks, but they do not ask for money outright. Instead they offer to sell you things (homemade jewelry on one corner, glowsticks on the next) or services (e.g. watching or washing your car) or they perform (juggling in the crosswalks during red lights is quite popular).

Then there are the cartoneros - the trashpickers. They are everywhere, with their dollies and their bicycles (the vast majority of bicycles I saw were in the business), their plastic sorting bins and their pocket rolls of bundling twine. Every garbage can in the city, every garbage bag laid on the curb at the end of the day has been, or soon will be, picked over for recyclables. People can earn a pittance for collecting cardboard, plastic, glass and bringing it to a central processing area. But a pittance is apparently enough to keep body and soul together in Buenos Aires these days, and I am told that the recycling in the city is among the most efficient in the whole world. There is one additional piece to the story: some brilliant entrepreneur has established a train, just a length of empty cars, that daily hauls the recyclers and their goods to the processing plant.

I am nearly overwhelmed with awe by the apparently spontaneous development of this new professional niche (make no mistake, the recyclers are highly professional and organized). At the same time, it nearly overwhelms me with sadness that this niche should be necessary. For some people, there are no other options.

The Teatro Colon, the city's major opera house, offers some tickets for the equivalent of fifty cents - but we couldn't get a ticket for any price. They were sold out. There are theaters all over the city, musicians and dancers booked for months, whole seasons of art planned. The movie theaters, as I've mentioned, have long lines waiting to enter. That last, at least, reminds me of stories from the US in the thirties.

I've been poor places, places where one meal a day was good living, where ten square feet of corrugated steel makes a good roof, where the choice is between deadly thirst and water bourne sickness. Buenos Aires is not poor in these ways (though parts of Boca may be trending in that terrible direction). Indeed, many people around the world would be delighted to be "poor" in the way Argentineans are poor. That is not to say the situation is good, but it is not yet desperate, nor is it likely to be.

There are two great strengths in Argentina. First is an incredible energy to work coupled with a strong pride in doing a good job. Argentineans work hard despite a situation which would seem to suggest that working hard is no guarantee of success. There is no complacency or falling back on destiny or despair. Second, the Argentinean system has not fallen apart. There are laws and rules, traditions and shared ethics which bind the people one to another and provide a framework for working out their problems. This is not a nation starting from scratch.

. . .

¹ "Depression" may not be the right word (the authors of the linked article above believe it is the right word), however it is one people in Buenos Aires used. "Devaluation" isn't emotional enough to capture the local imagination. It was explained to me many times in Buenos Aires and in many contexts that living is something that you have to do with your heart and not just with your head.

Posted by Martial