Don't cry for me Argentina....

I was reading Maritas blog, and the post "Hidden Tracks" was quite good, and it made me think about an episode that I had in La Mantanza where Ingvill and Marte worked. Mette, Julia (one of Mica's good friends) and I had visit the school where the two girls worked (and where we met Herman), we were going to take the bus back home to rich, clean and "wonderful" Palorma. On the way home in the bus, three guys saw another guy passing by outside the bus. They told the busdriver to stop the boss, ran out and took some stones and start throwing them after the guy who was walking by the bus. He responded in a way that I only see in movies. This poor boy, lift up his white dirty t-shirt, under where he is hiding an old rusty six-shooter. He points it at the three guys, who then runs into the bus again, it drives for 1 min. before the three boys jumps out again and starts running after the boy (who is now running faster than what I have ever seen a person does.)

Argentina has an extremely interesting story. I have just read two great books written about the Argentinean history, the first one "A History of ARGENTINA in the Twentieth Century" by Luis Alberto Romero and "The Myths of Argentine History" by Felipe Pigna (Yes, I wrote the titles and authors so you could go and order them on amazon!). Both of them describes a society "where people are forced to speak the language of their conquers." This is a country which has tried many success, and many more downfalls. Tupac Amaru. Manuel Belgrano and Mariano Moreno tried, and somehow succeed, but also died in the fight for independence.
Argentina was one of the richest country in the 1930s, but as seen many more times before, only a little majority enjoyed this. Then Peron (with success in the beginning, mostly because of his wife Eva), and later General Jorge Videla screwed up the country. For ten years there was a so-called "Dirty War" where more than 9000 people disappeared, and many mothers are still walking on the famous square in BsAs today, because they have never been told what happened with their son and daughters.
In the late 1990's the economic crisis started, and in 2002 they had two weeks with five different presidents. Furthermore, more than 50% was unemployed at the time.
Today the country’s economy is going a bit better, mostly because of the growing tourism, however, I still saw a lot of people sleeping on the streets, and many people are starving (even though Argentina is the 8th largest food producer in the world, and could feed 10 times its own population). If you walk around BsAs you will find a lot of the so-called "Cartoneros", people collecting paper for recycling so they can earn a bit of money.
The minimum wage is 630 pesos a month; a three-room flat costs around 300-1300 pesos a month. Every third Argentine is today considered poor....just no one of the tourists and backpackers I met knew all this. I am sorry that I wrote all these facts down; I just wanted to share a little bit of important information. Good Luck to Argentina in the up-coming World Cup. And thanks to Ingvill and Marte for the work they did.