Across Av Caseros from the old prison is a very nice park, Parque Ameghino. I’m very fond of the parks and plazas scattered through Buenos Aires, so I thought I would check this one out.

Just after entering the park I saw a small sign with a brief history of the park. The park was originally the Cemeterio del Sur, which dates back to 1867. The next year 1,400 victims of the cholera epidemic were buried there. Just a few years later during the 1871 Yellow Fever epidemic more than 14,000 people who died from the disease were buried in the cemetery.

A monument to the victims of Yellow Fever is at the center of the park. The monument has a nicely detailed scene.

On his excellent blog dedicated to Parque Patricios Gabriel has much more information (in Spanish) about Parque Ameghino, the monument, and the history of the cemetery.

When I was at the park I kept wondering what happened to those that were buried there. Gabriel provides one clue and photo at the end of his posting that indicates the location of a small rise in the land in the park, which according to a local historian, is the spot of a common grave.

At some point I’m wanting to do more research into the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1871. A few years ago I read a fascinating book Yellow Fever and the South. That’s the American South not South America. But I think an interesting book to research and write someday is an examination and comparison of 19th century Yellow Fever epidemics in both North and South America. There are surely some fascinating stories to uncover. Well, guess I just add that to my long list of things to do!

Not everyone reads the paper or watches the news on TV. But everyone sees the posters on the street.

On Friday posters were pasted to the city’s walls proclaiming Justice against one of the most notorious torturers from the last dictatorship. The poster, sponsored by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Center for Legal and Social Studies, focuses on Julio Simón, known to his victims as Julián the Turk.

Simón was finally sentenced to 25 years in prison for his involvement in the kidnapping, torture, and forced disapperance in November 1978 of José Poblete, Gertrudis Hlaczik and their 8 month old daughter.

The long delay was caused by the Full Stop and Due Obedience Laws that provided impunity to those who participated in the military government that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Efforts to repeal the laws were finally successful in 2005.

Simón is the first person to be sentenced now that Full Stop and Due Obedience are no longer in effect.

“Legacies of Torture”

I first learned about the horrendous person that is Julio Simón, Julian the Turk, a few years ago when reading A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture by Marguerite Feitlowitz. It’s an excellent book on the dark history of the last dictatorship and, along with Nunca Mas, should be required reading for anyone trying to understand contemporary Argentina.

Described as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Julián the Turk is said to love opera. One of his victims tells that Julián would bring tapes of classical music to the detention center and they would listen to it together. The same victim recounts horrors committed by Julián the Turk and the large swastika that hung on the end of a watch chain worn by Julián the Turk.

After the dictatorship ended some victims encountered Julián the Turk walking on the streets and were warmly greeted by their former torturer. Reading some accounts of the Dirty War and its aftermath can leave you with a bizarre feeling in which you wonder whether the old man sitting next to you on the bus is so kind.

On May 1, 1995 a taped interview with Julián the Turk was shown on the Buenos Aires news program Telenoche on Canal 13. One of his victims also was presented on the same program and said the following about Julián the Turk. Warning: graphic description of torture:

There was Julián standing over a prisoner they had naked, laid out on his belly, with his legs hanging down over the end of the table. Julián was torturing this man with an electric cable which he had shorn of its insulation and changed to 220 volts. It seems this wasn’t enough for Julián for he then inserted a stick into the man’s anus and then tortured him some more with the cable. As the man’s body writhed and jolted, the stick tore apart his intestines, and he died.

There’s also an odd story about competing news stations. Perhaps someone who was living here at the time might know more about it. Julián the Turk had pre-recorded his interview with Canal 13 but was irritated that he wasn’t going to be paid for his appearance. The station advertised heavily in the newspaper to promote the exclusive interview.

So, he went to the state-run TV station then called ATC (now Canal 7), which reportedly paid him for the interview and ATC aired the interview prior to his appearance on Canal 13.

On Canal 13 Julián the Turk appeared in a dirty turtleneck sweater and with a beard. On the ATC interview he was clean shaven with hair slick by gel and combed back. On ATC he told the interviewer, “What I did I did for my Fatherland, my faith, and my religion. Of course I would do it again.” (Feitlowitz 212).

The things nations do to fight terrorism

Marguerite Feitlowitz, who was conducting research for A Lexicon of Terror, met with Julián the Turk two months after the TV interviews at a café near where he was living in the Constitución section of Buenos Aires.

Julián the Turk immediately told her, “I am not repentant….This was a war to save the Nation from the terrorist hordes. Look, torture is eternal. It has always existed and always will. It is an essential part of the human being.” (Feitlowitz 212)

Feitlowitz writes:

Julián says the program on Channel 13 was “distorted. Not one innocent person passed through my hands.” He holds out his hands, which are large and muscular, with trunk-like fingers, and not entirely clean. What about the man with the stick in his bowels? He waves this away. The pregnant blind woman tortured and raped at his command? For some reason this gets to him, he denies ever having tortured “cripples.”

Justice – nothing more, nothing less

I know for a fact that there are a few educated porteños who believe that the actions of the government at that time were justified. Their arguments have the hauntingly, familiar tone that it was all about protecting the nation from terrorists. They say, “It was a war.”

It’s important to fight terrorism but it’s equally important for the state, for all countries, not to overstep human rights in that struggle. The path to justice and peace always seems decades away.

It’s the weekend so it’s time for the tourists to descend upon San Telmo for the antique fair. San Telmo is actually much nicer during the week when it is not so crowded. I’m reminded of something that Borges had said about San Telmo and the southern barrios of Buenos Aires.

This is from the lecture titled Blindness; unfortunately, I only have the English translation of this particular lecture:

For everyone in Buenos Aires, the Southside is, in a mysterious way, the secret center of the city. Not the other, somewhat ostentatious center we show to tourists — in those days there was not that bit of public relations called the Barrio de San Telmo. But the Southside has come to be the modest secret center of Buenos Aires.

When I think of Buenos Aires, I think of the Buenos Aires I knew as a child: the low houses, the patios, the porches, the cisterns with turtles in them, the grated windows. That Buenos Aires was all of Buenos Aires. Now only the southern section has been preserved. I felt that I had returned to the neighborhood of my elders.

I know that some of these words are not quite how it is expressed in Spanish but it will have to do, for now. For instance, “Southside” is likely “el Sur” in the way that Borges wrote when he referred to this area.

Almost thirty years after Borges gave that lecture, people still don’t make it to many of the southern barrios other than San Telmo and the ultimate tourist trap that is Caminito in La Boca. Of course, nothing is like it was a hundred years ago. It’s debatable even if it was in 1977 when Borges gave this lecture. Of course, by that time he had been blind for twenty years and, perhaps, was fortunate not to see, literally, the changes. Yet, the southern barrios do have a certain feeling not found in Barrio Norte or Palermo.

It’s a sad day in my barrio. Four blocks from my apartment is, or was, one of my favorite, old spots in the city, Bar Británico. Located in San Telmo at the corner of Defensa and Brasil, Bar Británico was one of the classic cafes of Buenos Aires.

I just returned from walking by the now closed Británico . Police are standing in front of the doors and all the furniture has been removed. It’s now just an empty shell. I didn’t even want to take a photo, preferring to remember it as it was before. On flickr you can see these photos that others have taken of this wonderful place. And be sure to look at this great photo.

Británico has been fighting to stay open for months over a dispute with the new landlord. We signed a petition earlier in the year, along with 20,000 other people, and the case has been in the courts. The city also has tried to mediate a solution between the property owner and the tenant. The end came finally this month when a judge ordered the bar to be closed. This morning the police arrived to enforce the court order. The Clarín has an article about the closing, as does La Nación. [both in Spanish]. Several news crews were around so there should be coverage on the Buenos Aires TV stations tonight.

The bar has been run for almost fifty years by three guys from Galicia. They are José Trillo, Manolo Pose and Pepe Miñones. At almost any given time you could go into the Británico and see one of them, now old men, serving the beer and food to customers. José Trillo says that now that the bar is closed that he will return to Spain.

The problems started when the former landlord died and the property was inherited by his son. The son Juan Pablo Benvenuto, seeing a prime real estate opportunity, didn’t want to renew the lease and rented the corner property to another person.

True, Bar Británico didn’t have the splendor of the Tortoni and hadn’t renovated itself like 36 Billares but the Británico had an antiquated character that kept it a popular place. While its competition across the street El Hipopótamo is a nicer cafe, we preferred to take our foreign visitors to the Británico.

The new tenant plans to open a cybercafe on the corner, as if the neighborhood really needs another one? How boring, you would think that with all this trouble that they could come up with something more creative.

Update: The rumored cyber never opened, yeah. Bar Britanico re-opened some time ago and I’ve returned as a regular patron. It’s not quite the same as the old Britanico but it’s close enough.

Today is Independence Day in Argentina. La Patria was very important to Borges, though he usually wasn’t in agreement with the popular governments. More on that in another posting.

Borges wrote a poem, “Página para recordar al coronel Suárez, vencedor en Junín”, in memory of one of his ancestors who led one of the last battles for independence against Spain on August 6, 1824.

Borges writes in the poem that the battle was only with swords and lances, “not a single shot fired”. I don’t know if that’s historically accurate but it would be interesting, in terms of military history, for a battle at that time not to have gunfire.

Composed in the early 1960s, here is the last stanza of that poem:

His great-grandson is writing these lines
and a silent voice comes to him out of the past,
out of the blood:
“What does my battle at Junín matter if it is only
a glorious memory, or a date learned by rote
for an examination, or a place in the atlas?
The battle is everlasting and can do without
the pomp of actual armies and of trumpets.
Junín is two civilians cursing a tyrant
on a street corner,
or an unknown man somewhere, dying in prison.

Su bisnieto escribe estos versos y una tácita voz
desde lo antiguo de la sangre le llega:
– Qué importa mi batalla de Junín si es una gloriosa memoria,
una fecha que se aprende para un examen o un lugar en el atlas,
La batalla es eterna y puede prescindir de la pompa
de visibles ejércitos con clarines:
Junín son dos civiles que en una esquina maldicen a un tirano,
o un hombre oscuro que se muere en la carcel.

A book recently translated into English should be on interest to those who admire Buenos Aires: The Tango Singer is the latest novel by Tomás Eloy Martínez.

It’s a translation of El Cantor de Tango, which came out in Spanish in 2004. The English translation appears already to be available in the UK but is just being released in the U.S. next week.

Tomás Eloy Martínez is most known for his two novels about Perón: Santa Evita and The Peron Novel.

The Tango Singer is about an American graduate student who travels to Buenos Aires to research Borges’ writings on tango. The student learns about a mysterious, hemophiliac tango singer who is supposedly better than Gardel but who has never recorded and only does spontaneous performances at various spots around Buenos Aires. This sets the student off on a search through the city to locate the tango singer.

Tomás Eloy Martínez uses the plot to talk about the history of Buenos Aires and to pay homage to Borges. The student comes to believe that he is staying in a boarding house that is the centerpiece of one of the most important stories by Borges, El Aleph.

In many ways, the book is more about the myths and stories of Buenos Aires than anything else. The plot providing a nice frame for talking about Buenos Aires. But, that should make for a good book to read on those long plane trips down to Buenos Aires.

A detailed review of The Tango Singer is available at The Complete Review, which also links to a number of newspaper reviews available online. A review of the book in Spanish is in Página/12.

The line between fiction and non-fiction is usually very thin in the novels by Tomás Eloy Martínez, whose background is as a journalist. In fact, I believe that the book might originally have been intended as a non-fiction work.

A couple of years ago I closely monitored the Bloomsbury Press web site, which had announced that Tomás Eloy Martínez was writing a book about Buenos Aires for Bloomsbury’s Writer and the City series, in which famous writers talk about their favorite cities. Other books in the series include Edmund White The Flaneur about Paris and John Banville’s Prague Pictures : A Portrait of the City (Writer and the City.). But Tomás Eloy Martínez non-fiction account of Buenos Aires never came out. Instead, Bloomsbury published this novel.

I have to make a disclaimer that I’ve not read The Tango Singer yet. Since I’m completing my own novel set in Buenos Aires, I didn’t want to be subconsciously influenced. But, as soon as I’m done writing, I’ll be reading The Tango Singer.

In a recent post about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, I mentioned the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo who are focused on identifying the children who are born in captivity or kidnapped with their parents during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. Recently, the Grandmothers announced that they had identified another missing child, which now brings the total to 82 children that they have recovered in their 27 years of searching.

An article in Clarín, in Spanish, says that the identified child is now a man of 28 who goes by the name of Sebastián. His parents, Gaspar Casado and Adriana Tasca, disappeared in 1977 and he was born in captivity the following year. His parents are still missing.

After his birth, the boy was given by an Army officer to another family. The family registered the boy as their own with the aid of doctor associated with the Buenos Aires police.

As he grew older the boy had doubts about his identity and last year contacted the Grandmothers association by email. They established his identity and introduced him to his maternal grandmother. He recently received results of DNA analysis that proves the relationship.

As I’ve also mentioned several times on this blog, an excellent book about this subject is Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza De Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina

The New York Public Library Digital Gallery has a small collection of 28 digitized images of posters advertising Yiddish theater performances in Buenos Aires during the 1930s and ’40s. NYPL places the items in a comparative perspective with a larger set of posters advertising Yiddish theater in New York during the early 20th century. The NYPL online guide says,

In Buenos Aires, by contrast, the story was quite the reverse. Yiddish theaters had existed there since the beginning of the 20th century, but, controlled by mobsters and patronized by the city’s rollicking Jewish underworld, they had taken on something of the character of the burlesque house and, accordingly, were given a wide berth by members of the official, respectable, larger Jewish community. It was not until the end of the 1920s that the genteel element, with its aspirations toward community and cultural advancement, prevailed. With encouragement from such figures on the New York scene as Thomashefsky, who would visit for the winter while their own companies were closed for the summer, a modest golden age ensued, through the 1930s and into the 1940s, that made Buenos Aires the second city of the world history of Yiddish theater.

The mobsters and “rollicking Jewish underworld” must be a reference to the Zwi Migdal, a bizarre and notorious Jewish criminal organization. I’ll be writing about the strangely fascinating history of Zwi Migdal in a future post.

After 25 years and 1,500 Thursdays, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo made a historic last march in Plaza de Mayo. The Pirámide, around which the Madres march every week, was covered with photos of the disappeared.

In the year that is the 30th anniversary of the last military coup in Argentina, the final march by the Madres received surprisingly little news attention. While there were a good number of photographers in attendance, there were not the horde of videographers and photographers that seem to accompany every piquetero demonstration even though an announcement about the march had been on the Madres web site for at least two weeks.

There was an almost circus-like atmosphere to this Thursday’s event that, I thought, detracted from the solemnity of the regular weekly marches. Two stages of live music, food stalls, and a number of piquetero groups staked out spots on the Plaza. Yet, appropriately for this last march, the presence of the piqueteros ensured that this time there were more Argentines than foreign tourists in the Plaza with the Madres.

According to Clarín, however, there will still be Madres marching in the Plaza de Mayo on Thursdays. Foreigners often don’t learn that there are several groups of mothers associated with the Plaza de Mayo and the disappeared. The largest and most well-known is the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, headed by the outspoken, and sometimes controversial, Hebe de Bonafini. It was this group that ended its weekly marches. A splinter group is the Madres de Plaza de Mayo – Linea Fundadora, which separated from the original group in 1986; this group marches at the same time as the original group but does so separately and under its own banner.

Bonafini gave some odd statements explaining the end of the marches was because they do not have an enemy in the Casa Rosada and that “El presidente es amigo de Madres”. Technically, the Madres have called these marches “la Marcha de la Resistencia” and it is the march of the resistance by the Madres that is ending. Clarín reports that the Linea Fundadora will continue with its “Marcha de la Resistencia” on Thursdays. Also, it seems that the Madres led by Bonafini will continue marching on Thursday about the disappeared.

Then there also are the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, though they don’t march in the Plaza. The grandmothers focus on the children who were born in captivity when their pregnant mothers were kidnapped by the dictatorship as well as children that were kidnapped with their parents. A fascinating book on the work of the grandmothers in investigating the identity of these children who were placed with adopted families, sometimes with military men responsible for the disappearances, is Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza De Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina

The book is based on many interviews with the Madres and Abuelas. One account by a woman whose daughter, 8 months pregnant, and son were both disappeared highlights the suffering and courage of the mothers:

At first when my children disappeared I just laid down in bed, looking at the ceiling, blank. That was all I could do. My weight went down to forty kilos….I met a woman who said to me: “Why don’t you come on Thursday to the Plaza de Mayo? Take a little nail, that is how they will recognize you.” So I went, and I sat on a bench and my husband sat a little away from me. I had this little nail in my hand, and I saw that the others also had a little nail, and that is how I knew it was them….In the Plaza we secretly passed notes about where our meetings would be….We were simply housewives. Most of us had never done anything outside the home.

I first saw the Madres in Plaza de Mayo in early March of 2003 on my first visit to Buenos Aires. After they finished their half-hour demonstration in the Plaza, we followed the Madres as they made their way to a statue in front of the Casa Rosada. The Madres walked up onto the base of the statue to give a speech.

Standing near me was an American tourist, in his fifties, surrounded by his two college age children. He motioned to them and said, “You will remember this for the rest of your lives.”

Later I learned that the speech was a regular part of the Madres’ Thursday ritual. Normally, the speech is given by Hebe de Bonafini but she wasn’t there that day. Instead, it was given by one of the other prominent Madres. This was only a couple of weeks before the U.S. invaded Iraq but it was clear that war was coming. The Madres spoke out passionately against war, stressing that it is the mothers and the children who suffer the most during war.

In reading books about the last military government in Argentina, it’s chilling to come across statements in which the government labeled the disappeared as terrorists and justified its oppressive actions as means of combating terrorism. Groups like the Madres are needed to serve as a reminder, not only to Argentina but also to the world, of the atrocities that can be committed by governments in the name of patriotism.

Leaving the Plaza that day in March 2003, walking down Avenida de Mayo, I looked back and took a photograph that always will be my most emblematic memory of Buenos Aires. The Plaza’s centerpiece, the Pirámide de Mayo, is often covered with graffiti and contiually repainted white by the government. On that particular day it was adorned with the simple words, “Gracias Madres”.

I stumbled across this excellent essay by David Rock titled Racking Argentina that provides a solid background for understanding today’s current economic conditions in Argentina.

David Rock is the leading English-language historian of Argentina and his work always has an economic slant to it. While written in 2002 before the election of Kirchner, the article is still timely as David Rock puts the situation into a global context, explaining how economic conditions in various parts of the world impacted the Argentine economy. He also points out critical mistakes by the government: “During the Menem years, investment potential remained largely in the imagination of the president’s advertising team.”