Economist.com Cities Guide: Buenos Aires Briefing - December 2005

News this month

Grounded

A nine-day strike by employees of Aerolineas Argentinas, Argentina’s main airline, caused trouble throughout the country in late November. Buenos Aires, at the hub of the air network, was particularly affected. With hotels already near capacity, passengers stranded in the capital had a hard time finding a place to stay. On top of this, strikers cut the highway to Ezeiza, the main international airport, forcing hundreds of passengers to walk over a kilometre to the terminal.

Aerolineas, which is Spanish-owned, reckoned that the strike, over demands for increased pay, affected 83,000 passengers and cost the company $10m. Travel-industry lobby groups, meanwhile, estimated the damage to the tourist industry at $1 billion. The strike was part of a wave of industrial action that has hit local travellers recently. Just three days after the Aerolineas strike ended, workers on the “subte”, the capital's underground network, went on strike for most of a day. And with the Aerolineas dispute merely on hold for 90 days, travellers should expect more trouble.

Feeling the heat

Things don't look good for Aníbal Ibarra, the mayor of Buenos Aires. In November, the Buenos Aires city legislature suspended him so that he can face an impeachment trial over his role in the deaths of 194 people in a nightclub fire last December. And now it seems he will be judged by a commission made up of his opponents. A new city legislature takes office in December, and a new group of deputies has been appointed to the commission, to replace those who have finished their term of office. Though this has tipped the scales in favour of the mayor's critics, it is still not certain that they will achieve the two-thirds majority needed to remove him.

Meanwhile the search continues for the concert-goer who fired a flare that ignited the club's ceiling. While one survivor claimed to have identified the culprit among photos of the victims, her friends contradicted her. The father of the boy who was fingered is one of Mr Ibarra's leading critics, and he accused the mayor of inventing the accusations to smear him. Mr Ibarra has denied the charge.

Blacklisted

Several of the congressmen elected in October to represent Buenos Aires and the surrounding province ran into problems when trying to take office in December. In a highly charged inauguration ceremony, members of Congress voted 212-8 to bar Luis Patti, a former police chief, from taking office, because he stands accused of human-rights abuses during the years of the military dictatorship (1976-83). Mr Patti claimed that he is not facing charges, but his opponents pointed out that he is under investigation for covering up abuses by two military officers. Mr Patti has been charged on repeated occasions and was even jailed in 1990, but he was later released under statute-of-limitations legislation.

Congress did not prevent two other controversial deputies from taking office. One was Eduardo Lorenzo Borocotó, who was elected for an opposition party and then switched sides to join the government before he had even been sworn in; the other was Rafael Bielsa, a former foreign minister who had resigned from Congress after being offered the post of ambassador to France, but then changed his mind.

Abuses of police power

Buenos Aires provincial police, the notorious Bonaerense, are once again under scrutiny, for their treatment of Gabriel Roser, a political activist. Critics claim that Mr Roser was singled out for mistreatment by the police because of his politics. Even though he had no criminal record, he featured in a book of police mugshots, from which he was identified by prosecution witnesses in an armed robbery case.

In early December he was released from prison, where he had spent almost 20 months despite bearing little resemblance to the initial description of the criminal and numerous inconsistencies in the witnesses' testimony. The case against him ultimately fell apart, and the prosecutors withdrew their case before the trial had ended.

Working capital

The impoverished rustbelt surrounding Buenos Aires has the highest rate of unemployment of any part of Argentina. According to government figures, 13.6% of the economically active population around the capital is unemployed, with another 16.2% under-employed (working partially, but not enough to cover their needs).

The lack of work has created a new urban underclass on the city periphery. This impoverished army is led by piqueteros—unemployed protestors who stage roadblocks to demand assistance—and cartoneros—scavengers who make a living sifting through the city's rubbish. But things are improving, albeit gradually. In the last three months, both unemployment and under-employment rates in the poor suburbs have dropped by around two percentage points. Meanwhile, unemployment in the capital itself dropped from 9.6% to 7.7%—the lowest figure in the country.

Catch if you can

December 2005

Jazz photos from the collection of Hermenegildo Sabat

Until December 30th 2006

Hermenegildo Sabat is familiar to millions of Argentines for his mordant political illustrations in Clarín, a leading local newspaper. But he is also a journalist, photographer and enthusiastic amateur clarinettist. For all these reasons, the General San Martín Cultural Centre has employed him as curator of an entertaining collection of jazz photography, as part of its 35th birthday celebrations. Some of the photos, such as one of Billie Holliday recording “Strange Fruit” in 1939, were taken by celebrated jazz photographers like Charles Peterson; others, including Louis Armstrong visiting Buenos Aires in 1957, were taken by Mr Sabat himself.

Centro Cultural General San Martín, Sarmiento 1551, Tribunales. Tel: +54 0 (11) 4374-1251/59. Open: daily, 10am-10pm. See the centre's website.

More from the Buenos Aires cultural calendar