Go ahead and cry for Argentina

Over lunch the other Sunday, my sister commented that my columns have been so negative on the economy, it’s getting people depressed. She related that just the night before, some broadcast journalists were having dinner in her restaurant (Café Mischka on Tomas Morato) and she overheard them discussing my pessimistic prognosis on the economy.

I guess she is worried that if I keep on writing this way, her kid brother is going to get a reputation as Bad News Boo. But based on what’s happening in Argentina and America itself, what choice do I really have?

I explained to her that it is difficult to be upbeat these days. We have the worst Senate we have ever had and the bigger economies have been bearish and uncertain. Anyone who reads web editions of The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Financial Times on a daily basis can’t help feeling a little nervous about the future.

In a sense, most Pinoys living in this country are blessed, in the sense that ignorance is bliss. The local mass media has reported very little of the dangerous twists and turns of the world financial markets. There is very little explanation of how events in Wall Street impact on us. And forget the broadcast media. Somehow, the depraved bedroom antics of a drug crazed has been actor merits more airtime in the newscast than the biggest single day fall of the Dow Jones in years.

Actually, if it is melodrama that we crave for, it is all there in the real life soap operas that unfold daily in the streets of Buenos Aires since their economy turned belly up. Last Monday, the Washington Post reported that when a truck carrying about 20 live Angus cows overturned, hungry Argentinians attacked the cows and slaughtered them in the street, each one getting a piece of beef to feed their hungry families.

Here is how the Post article reported it.

A mob moved out from Las Flores, a shantytown of trash heaps and metal shacks boiling over with refugees from the financial collapse of what was once Latin America’s wealthiest nation. Within minutes, 600 hungry residents arrived on the scene, wielding machetes and carving knives. Suddenly, according to accounts from some of those present on that March day, a cry went up. "Kill the cows!" someone yelled. "Take what you can!"

Cattle company workers attempting a salvage operation backed off. And the slaughter began. The scent of blood, death and fresh meat filled the highway. Cows bellowed as they were sloppily diced by groups of men, women and children. Fights broke out for pieces of flesh in bloody tugs of war.

"I looked around at people dragging off cow legs, heads and organs, and I couldn’t believe my eyes," said Alberto Banrel, 43, who worked on construction jobs until last January, when the bottom fell out of the economy after Argentina suffered the world’s largest debt default ever and a massive currency devaluation.

"And yet there I was, with my own bloody knife and piece of meat," Banrel said. "I felt like we had become a pack of wild animals . . . like piranhas on the Discovery Channel. Our situation has turned us into this."

The desolation of that day, neighbor vs. neighbor over hunks of meat, suggested how profoundly the collapse has altered Argentina. Traditionally proud, Argentines have begun to despair. Talk today is of vanished dignity, of a nation diminished in ways not previously imaginable.

There it is. What started out late last year as boring economic statistics have become telenovela material. Perverse as it may sound, I felt some relief that we aren’t that desperate yet. Then, again, things are reaching that point in many areas of our country. What is happening in Argentina could and may happen here, if it isn’t already.

Then, it is not just Argentina. Brazil is next. In fact, Latin America is in real trouble, which explains why America’s Treasury Secretary is now visiting a number of countries in that region. The last time Latin America got into serious economic trouble, so did we. We are after all, the only Latin American country in Asia.

The other night I was watching the Bloomberg Channel on SkyCable just before I went to bed. A bigger mistake I couldn’t have made. All the anchors could talk about was "capitulation". They were wondering if the American consumers have finally "capitulated". Will they now drastically reduce spending out of fear of the future? Consumer spending is the last thin line that is holding the American economy up.

Talks about "double dip" recession and "capitulation" aren’t exactly the stuff that make for sweet dreams. It must have been about two in the morning before I finally got to sleep. Those anchors and the analysts they interviewed were visibly scared. The latest economic indicators have turned into incantations of witches and goblins that go bump the economy into another recession. Now they tell us the last recession was worse than previously thought and the prospects for the future aren’t as rosy as they predicted.

Then I think of our stupid Senate whose members wasted all of two months in a bitter power struggle. It is as if it really matters if it was Drilon, Angara or Pimentel who was Senate President. I wonder if we can hire one of those Palestinian suicide bombers to do to our Senate what they do to those buses in Israel that kill our OFWs. Our OFWs after all, are without doubt, immensely more useful to our economy than the senators.

I hope this explains to my sister why I write the way I do. Maybe I should just stick to the movie channels or the Cartoon Network before I go to bed. But morning comes and I can’t help worrying about this country’s future after reading something like this passage in the same Washington Post article. This could very well describe our country if we don’t wake up and start working together to get things right.

Argentines have watched, horrified, as the meltdown dissolved more than their pocketbooks. Even the rich have been affected in their own way. The tragedy has struck hardest, however, among the middle-class, the urban poor and the dirt farmers. Their parts of this once-proud society appear to have collapsed – a cave-in so complete as to leave Argentines inhabiting a barely recognizable landscape...Buenos Aires, a city once compared to Paris, has become the dominion of scavengers and thieves at night. Newly impoverished homeless people emerge from abandoned buildings and rail cars, rummaging through trash in declining middle- and upper-class neighborhoods.. .

"There is not enough trash to go around for everyone," said Banrel, one of the participants in the cattle massacre. Rail-thin, he normally passes his days combing the garbage-strewn roads around the Las Flores slums in Rosario, a city of 1.3 million residents 200 miles northwest of Buenos Aires and long known as "the Chicago of Argentina." With more people in the slums, there are fewer plastic bottles to go around. Banrel said he was getting desperate that day when he joined the mob on the highway.

Go ahead cry for Argentina. But save some tears for Payatas and for the over 50 percent of our people who would find Argentina’s miseries no different from Manila’s. Yesterday it was Argentina. Tomorrow it is Brazil, possibly Uruguay too. We’re doing better, in comparison. But for how long?

One last thing... I just had lunch with my astrologer friend. She sees something definitely bad towards the end of the third quarter. She sees massive loss of lives, possibly a war. The only catastrophic thing I see is the possibility of the tail wagging the dog, you know, like a war to save the Republicans from defeat in the November election. George Bush seems determined to remove Saddam Hussein from the face of the earth, and what better time to do it than before the November polls. Maybe that’s what my astrologer friend is seeing.

Lack of experience

Now, here’s Dr. Ernie E.

"What’s the difference between a screw and a bolt?" the shop teacher asked Judi, the only girl in the shop class during the first day of school.

Judi pondered the question for a moment, then replied, "Well, I can’t rightly say I know, ‘cause I have never been ‘bolted’."

(Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected])