Argentina is one of those countries with enormous difficulty in coming to terms with its past and therefore has the same problem in getting rid of its ghosts, looking forward and growing. I approached Buenos Aires, bearing in mind the names of the streets and the images evoked by the pages of literature and news stories I had read over the years. Among the many suggestions, perhaps the most present were the wandering around the city of Horacio Oliveira, the protagonist of Julio Cortazar‘s“Rayuela,” and the somber but hopeful atmospheres reported by Enrico Calamai, heroic Italian consul in the Argentine capital and Chile, who in“No Political Asylum” and“We Will Make America” testifies to his efforts in rescuing political refugees during the years of dictatorship.
The reportage I made in August 2010, when the terrible Santa Rosa blizzard raged, testifies with absolute topicality to the melancholy and wounds of a country that continues to relive its past and its mistakes.
We were, then as now, amid an economic and financial crisis that held a large part of the Argentine population in check, a population still struggling with the ghosts of the great tragedies of the 1970s and 1980s: the dictatorship, the Desaparecidos, the Malvinas-Falklands war, and political and financial instability.
Tragedies and hardships were tirelessly witnessed in Plaza de Mayo by the mothers, grandmothers and fathers of the Desaparecidos, by the veterans of the Malvinas war, and in Plaza Lavalle by the protesting pensioners.
