At the corner of calles Mitre and Ecuador in Buenos Aires, 194 lives were lost amid the fumes and smoke that engulfed club Cromagnon on the night of December 30, 2004.

They had come on a warm night of the austral summer to hear Callejeros, one of the more popular bands on Argentina’s rock scene. When starting that evening never did they imagine that their lives would end here.

As so often with the tragic death of the young a makeshift memorial emerged. Six months later, this one remains, filled with expressions of sorrow by those who lived and those who were left behind. Gently placed on the ground or hung from a wire stretched across the now closed street are dozens of rosaries along with the remnants of everyday items once touched by those who died. What seems ordinary in life becomes cherished in death: a girl’s white tube top with the name of a favorite band delicately written on the ink in pink and black.

I first heard about this tragedy while sitting in a remote cabin high up in the northern Patagonian Andes. We had planned for several weeks without TV over the holidays. But on the drive from Neuquén we had heard about the tsunami on the radio while stopped at a gas station. As news junkies we were dismayed that we had spent several days traveling without hearing about the tsunami. After arriving at the cabin, we glad to see that it had DirecTV. As we watched the endless coverage of the tsunami, news of the nightclub fire in Buenos Aires crawled along the bottom of the screen. I called Ceci into the room from the kitchen and we turned to CNN Español, hoping for a live report from Buenos Aires.

Walking upon the club Cromagnon today, one is met with a sense of surprise and a heavy feeling as one realizes what happened here. This area of town, around Estación Once, is not so far from the well-heeled barrios where the tourists flock. But a tourist will never find his way here. Outside the train station on calle Mitre, a dozen city buses continuously drop off and pick-up passengers. Bordering calles Mitre and Ecuador is the formerly grand Plaza Miserere. At the center of the plaza is a large mausoleum containing the remains of Bernardino Rivadavia, Argentina’s first president. Standing guard around the tomb, and seemingly the only ones to care anymore about its existence, are dozens of feral cats. From their perch on the tomb the cats must have watched the horror that unfolded across the street on the night that the Cromagnon burned.

Stretched between poles and street signs outside the club are graffiti covered bedsheets, hanging like prayer flags outside a temple. The writings on these banners, that sway in the breeze, speak of a family’s sudden loss: “Voices. Voices. I hear voices in my head. Where is my daughter? Where is my sister?” [translated from the Spanish].

Above the street, shoes dangle by their laces over the electrical wire. Empty shoes, never to be worn again, have become one of the symbols of the tragedy. One of the most moving parts of the memorial is a pile of dozens of shoes that belonged to the kids who were trapped in the burning club, the emergency exits locked shut.

Stretched in front of the memorial next to the club are four rows of seats, arranged as if a meeting is about to take place. Then you realize that the seats are for families to come, sit, rest, and remember. It’s like a waiting room on the street. The rows of chairs look like they came from an actual waiting room, perhaps from the train station down the street. Some of the chairs are covered by an awning. The same awning stretches over the items left at the memorial. Between the rows of chairs has been placed a locked wooden collection box that is obviously for donations.

Scattered among the items in the memorial are a few toys, such as a stuffed “Barney”. One of the more shocking aspects of the tragedy is that among the dead included a number of very young children who had accompanied their parents to the club.

The walls outside the club are covered with haunting murals. Camping tents have been thrown up outside the doors of the club. The men staying there keep watch over the memorial. The emotional toil on the families and friends of the victims, as well as the survivors, must be tremendous. This is the kind of trauma that one never really gets over. Eventually, with time, one just learns to cope and to live with it – every day.

Here’s a wonderful photographic essay, Buenos Aires: the Ghost Train of the Cartoneros.

Cartoneros are a visible part of daily life in Buenos Aires. Photographer Andrea Di Martino provides an insightful view into their lives.

Last weekend an article appeared in Staunton News Leader about a family from Buenos Aires that had emigrated to Virginia in the U.S.; Staunton is a small town in the pretty Shenandoah Valley about 3 hours southwest of Washington, DC.

It’s a rather odd article as it paints a very dark, ominous picture of Buenos Aires that, frankly, I find doesn’t exist. The article is titled “Family Finds Safe Harbor in the Valley.”

The wife of the family talks about how much safer it is to go to a shopping mall in the US than in in Buenos Aires : “I don’t have to worry when I take them to the mall here. I don’t have to grab their hands and pray for their lives.” What?! That seems just hysterical. I’ve been to shopping malls here a lot and never seen anyone who looked like they’re in fear for their lives.

Admittedly, there are a few cases of kidnappings among wealthy families, but that doesn’t seem to be too common. Staunton’s reporters wrote another article titled Crime rate in Argentina makes daily life unsafe. The article perpetuates the image that all of Latin America is some desperate Third World “wild west” where armed desperados roam the streets:

Silvana and Natalio Scotto Lavina also faced each day in Argentina with trepidation. Were their children going to be kidnaped, was their home robbed?

“There are so many people without money there,” Silvana Scotto Lavina said. Although the threat was constant, her immediate family did not have problems ”“ but close relatives did.

What type of problems? True, the very wealthy here are likely to encounter more potential criminals than the average person since their wealth makes them an easy target. But, that’s true in every country of the world even in the U.S.

Perhaps the most ridiculous part of the story was the caption that ran under the photograph on the story about crime. The caption states that a “man digs through the garbage”. Now if you look closely at that photograph, the man is clearly walking the dog that is standing to his left; the dog obviously is on a leash. It’s likely that the man is simply dropping a bag of doggy poop into the trash. And the two girls in the background of that photo look very stylish and happy, certainly not fearful.

I will confirm, however, that there are a lot of people who go through the trash every night in Buenos Aires. They’re called cartoneros. (I’ll soon be posting an excellent link that tells the story of the cartoneros. Indeed, one of the saddest sights I remember seeing is a small child, almost still a baby actually, sitting on top of a trash bag while his father retrieved any usable, recyclable material from one of the many other trash bags on the curb. Every night in my neighborhood, on the street in front of our apartment building, one can see the cartoneros. However, I have never felt fearful at the presence of any of these people.

Just hope that the good people up in Staunton, Virginia, USA don’t get the wrong impression of Buenos Aires from those articles. I’m a former resident of Virginia also and it’s a great place but so is Buenos Aires.

The minimum wage in Argentina is going up to $630 pesos/month (about US$217). The increase will impact almost a million workers.

Watching the local news tonight, I saw a segment about a new television network launched by Hugo Chavez out of Cuba called teleSUR. It has been called the anti-CNN, apparently in reference to US imperialism as seen embodied in the Atlanta-based news network.

Workers.org writes that teleSUR will describe the “reality and the struggles taking place in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

AlterNet, a site about alternative news media, says “Move over Al Jezeera, Telesur is here”.

It’s all not just Venezuela, though. Argentina is funding 20% of the network.

I saw some commercials from teleSUR’s new PR campaign where people say, “Yo Soy teleSUR.” Mentally, I just have the image of Chavez and Castro staring into the camera saying that line….hmmm, I wonder if teleSUR will be carried on the Miami cable companies?…Ted Turner is probably getting a good laugh out of the anti-CNN comparison. The better comparison would be anti-Fox News.

I’m actually looking forward to seeing what teleSUR has to offer. For, indeed, any news about social issues in Latin America has to be worthwhile even if there is a leftist-slant to the journalism.

I have some photos of last week’s protest marches over on my Flickr account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffbarry/. Take a look at social activism in Buenos Aires!

Technical comment on Flickr: I’ve been playing around with the Flickr service today for the first time today. I probably will eventually just put most of my photos on my own hosting space here at elsur.org but I wanted to examine Flickr’s functionality. I do like their slideshow tool but Flickr has at least one major problem. It doesn’t seem possible to place photos in a specific order. Flickr has an organizer tool that looks like it should allow you to order the photos as you like. However, everytime I tried it, the photos just went back to the original order. Apparently, the photos are in random order, not even by the order in which they were uploaded or by filename. Now, come on Flickr guys, this isn’t that difficult to program….maybe I missed something, but it should have worked easily. Also, as a librarian, I wonder how the tag structure is going to hold up over time over whether it will collapse under its own weight. But, there seem to be a lot of momentum behind unstructured tagging these days, e.g., technorati. Yet, that’s a topic for my Endless Hybrids blog. I’m not writing much there these days….

Tonight´s 10,000 person march by university faculty and students came to a somber stop just three blocks from the Plaza de Mayo. I was walking next to the front line of the marchers when I the procession came to a halt. Half-a-dozen people quickly surrounded a figure lying on the pavement.

Apparently, an elderly man attempting to cross the street – just in front of the marchers – collapsed from a heart attack or some other problem. When I got to the group, someone was administering CPR. Others were calling for a medic. Since I couldn´t be of any help, I stepped away, not wanting to see what might have been the last moments of someone´s life.

Earlier in the night I had noticed a significant number of police on motorcycles ensuring that traffic was cleared from the route that the marchers were taking. Looking down Av de Mayo, I saw several police offers about a block and a half away. I had assumed that they would come down to handle the situation and call for rescue, but they never did. After a few minutes, I saw one of the marchers run towards the officers; I assumed he was wanting them to summons an ambulance.

I felt for sure that the old man was going to die there on Av de Mayo. It gave an eerie tone to the whole evening. While the front of the line knew what was happening, the thousands of people in the back had no idea what why the march had come to a stop. The marchers in the back were getting louder and louder as time went along.

About five, maybe ten, minutes after the man had collapsed I checked my watch since I was curious why an ambulance had not yet arrived, particularly since the police were so close and you see ambulances cruising around all over the city.

It took at least 25 minutes for an ambulance to finally arrive.

Also, rather than driving around the marchers and coming up the part of Av de Mayo that had been cleared from traffic in the opposite direction, the ambulance drove up from the back of the procession. The time that it took to go through thousands of pedestrians could have been fatal for elderly man.

I do not know, and may never know, the ultimate condition of that old man. Just before the ambulance arrived, I walked closer to the circle of people around him, which had thinned out. I feared that he would be lying there dead but he was conscious and I saw him move his head and hands. I wished I could have done something to help him but I have no medical or healthcare training. The ambulance took him away and sped off.

Incidentally, during this entire time, not one police officer ever came over to see what was happening – not even after the ambulance was there.

Two blocks from our apartment is Plaza de Houssay, which is situated between the medical school and business school of the University of Buenos Aires. Tonight over 10,000 students and faculty from all over the country marched from Plaza de Houssay through the streets of downtown Buenos Aires and arrived at Plaza de Mayo about 9pm tonight.

I stayed with the group the entire way and got some good photos and videos that I will post later.

These were mostly college and university students, though the high school students who have mobilized to protest the poor conditions of school buildings in Buenos Aires also joined the march.

Faculty at public universities have been on strike since Wednesday.

The demands were a basic salary of 800 pesos for university professors. That equates to about $275 US. Read that again: a basic salary of $275 US a month for college level teaching.

The marchers also demanded that university budgets be tripled, as part of increasing the educational funding to 6% of the GNP.

(Note: see my other posting for a near tragic event that happened during this march).

I got up early today, 11am, because I knew that the teachers union – CTERA – was planning a large march to the Congreso at midday. Across Argentina, 95% of the teachers went on strike today.

This was the first strike by the teachers in the two years of Kirchner´s presidency of Argentina. Union organizers estimated over 10,000 people participated in the march. Not all were teachers, as I noticed some piquetero groups at the end of the march. But that´s okay, there´s solidarity in the social movements here.

The teachers are demanding that the government financing for education be increased to 3% of the Gross National Product. Currently, educational funding is at 3%.

Following the student protests about the building conditions at the Escuela Normal Sarmiento, a city judge tonight ordered the school to be closed. The judge inspected the building and found that there were dangers of electrocution and fire. So, the students were right afterall. This news just hit the wires around 11pm tonight, so it will be interesting to see the reaction on Friday.