The Man, the Myth, the Mess in Argentina

There are those moments, perhaps in an unfamiliar hotel room, when you’re briefly disconcerted, unable before full consciousness burns off sleep’s lingering fog to know where you are and what it’s all about. Such was my lot as the dawn clambered over Buenos Aires’ skyline on Tuesday, when the silence on Avenida Bomplan was near absolute. For three days, ever since Aerolinas Argentinas delivered me and a 12-hour lesson in how not to run an airline, the narrow street below my rented apartment’s balcony had been a racket of buses, trucks, motorbikes and shouting voices, but not that day. Stranger still, there was no sweet scent from the next door bakery of coffee, fresh bread and the custardy postres of which Argentines seem especially fond.

In the elevator, three men in their sixties and all wearing green berets responded to my cheerfully inadvertent ‘Good morning’ with six cold eyes and a stone silence that lasted until we reached Floor 0, where the trio’s shortest said a single word, ‘Inglis?’

No, I replied, ‘Australian’, which must have been misheard, for another of the Beret Boys barked out a guttural ‘Guten Morgen’.

‘Non, no. Australian, not Austrian.’

Suddenly there were smiles and a burst of machine gun Spanish of which only a splatter of syllables was intelligible, Wallabies derrotado — ‘Wallabies defeated’ was the remark, as my smart phone’s translator later established, its googling function providing the information that our First XV had gone down to the Pumas 33-31 last July. Probably just as well my grasp of Spanish doesn’t go much beyond restaurant menus and uno otro cerveza because the unspoken observation that just about anybody, including a women’s team equipped with what now seems the requisite couple of beefy trannies, could beat Australia’s lately hapless green-and-gold ambassadors might not have been appreciated. Argentina has had so few wins of recent years, on and off the field, it wouldn’t have done to diminish a rare triumph.

On the dead-still street itself, my Spanish taxed beyond breaking, I groped for a word that means quiet — taciturno, at a guess; but no, try silencio — and shrugged with raised and open palms a question to my new friends: Where is everybody?

“Malvinas Day,” said the short one, and we went our separate ways, they marching to a memorial service at the national cenotaph in Plaza San Martin, about three kilometres distant, and me to find breakfast, tap into some smart-phone wisdom and learn a little more about what I assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, to be Argentina’s answer to Anzac Day.

APRIL 2, 1982, the day the Argentina junta of newly installed president Lieutenant-General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri set out to reclaim the Falkland Islands from Britain. The justification for the assault was simple: the islands, along with South Georgia, were Spanish possessions when Argentina won its independence in 1816 and, therefore, integral provinces ever after. Need it be said that it didn’t  go well, with El Generalissimo standing down in June, three days after British forces retook Port Stanley, and the junta collapsing. If Argentines see the silver lining in that defeat restoring democracy to the land of the Disappeared and one-way helicopter flights for troublesome sorts far out over the Atlantic, I have yet to hear such a sentiment.

Translated by phone-app, the local news mentioned that new presidente Javier Milei, elected in October and sworn in six weeks later, would be leading the memorial service, which seemed an opportunity to see him in action and too good to pass up. You may have seen footage of the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” on the election trail, brandishing his signature chainsaw and bellowing about the evil of big government — “the enemy”, as he calls it — and announcing his intention to cut, slash and burn laws and regulations inhibiting commerce and growth, along with sacking 70,000 public servants he has described as “bloodsuckers, beyond useless”. They call him El Loca, the Madman, and that is his admirers talking, not critics.

Back in the US, some on the left were calling Milei the ‘Trump of the Pampas’, inevitably noting that weird hair must be a symptom and symbol of populist degeneracy. Well leftoids would say that; such critiques — facile, shallow and misleading — roll easily off the tongue and leave little further thought required, which suits your typical liberal just fine. Yet the differences between the US and Argentine leaders are there and some pronounced. Take tariffs for instance. Trump is forever threatening to impose them — against China, Mexico, Europe, you name it — while Milei’s free-market sympathies have seen him pledge to do away with them. It’s just that, all chainsaw antics aside, he remains a politician when all is said and done, with expediency’s toolbox always at the ready. Take Argentina’s grain exports as an example.

The country is one of the world’s leading producers of corn and soy, both of which are taxed as  they are loaded for export — a 12 per cent slug on corn and a 30 per cent levy on soy. Now you might expect a libertarian would  be keen to scuttle such impositions but that hasn’t been the case, not at all. Instead, the export tax has just been raised to 15 per cent on all grains with the exception of soy, which will remain as is. Argentina is not merely broke (that would be an improvement), it is beyond destitute. Foreign currency reserves are nonexistent, its peso has just been devalued by more than 50 per cent, inflation persists in the triple-digits, as it has for years, and almost half the population of 47 million exists below the official poverty line. An Argentine orphaned by the Falklands War, Enrique, whom I met after the Malvinas Day service, had just enough English to sum up the national situation. “El Loca won because we are f****d,” he said. “What’s to lose?”

NOT THAT the district of Buenos Aires in which I’m staying, Palermo, seems at a glance to be in the least financial distress. Those who have lived for decades with inflation, government as farce and periodic eruptions of unrest learn how to cope and some even to thrive. The local shops and boutiques are stocked with merchandise, the cars are newish, and gay couples can afford the requisite designer doggies, bug-eyed French bulldogs being the popular pick if the canine comings and goings on the street below are any indication. Move away from the city’s central district, however, and there’s no denying Milei has his work cut out if the once prosperous, still proud Argentina is ever to rise again.

Poverty becomes ever more apparent the further you move away from Buenos Aires’ CBD, although the sort of street-sleeping wretchedness you find in Calcutta or, in these days of Joe Biden and US decline, San Francisco and LA, isn’t apparent until you penetrate much further into the city’s seemingly endless sprawl than the Bancalari district to the north, where they’re getting by as best they can on Calle de Lucha, Struggle Street. Juan, the university student I’d engaged as a driver ($40US for the day) expressed his surprise in broken English at Bancalari being the first destination on my must-see list, having confidently anticipated the tour would begin at the tourist magnet of Eva ‘Evita’ Peron’s tomb “where all the touristas go”.That would come later. First, though, to Calle Garibaldi, the mention of which explained everything to Juan.

‘Ah-ha, the casa of Senor Eichmann!’

WE WEREN’T the first to have trouble finding the place. The Israel snatch squad which spirited him to a glass booth in a Tel Aviv courtroom and thence to the gallows also had its problems. German war crime prosecutors were informed by several sources that Eichmann was going by the name ‘Roberto Klement’ and working in Buenos Aires. The tip-off that appears to have done the trick, however, came via half-Jewish German refugee Lothar Hermann, whose teen daughter, Sylvia, had been romantically pursued by one of Eichmann’s sons. The Israelis first staked out an up-market home in a district peppered with Nazi fugitives. Otto Skorzeny, “Hitler’s favourite commando”,  was just down the street and a regular guest at Eichmann’s table. Around the corner lived Juan Peron himself, the man who quite deliberately made his country a sanctuary for war criminals. His defenders, the Peronistas, who represent the parliamentary opposition to Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party, would have you believe such hospitality was a canny move to bolster Argentina’s military skills with German hard-corps expertise. A much better explanation is that Peron didn’t like Jews, greatly admired Hitler, towards whom he had manifested a benign neutrality throughout the war,  and — why not turn an easy peso? — that he profited financially from holding open the door at the end of the trans-Atlantic ‘ratline’ operated by the underground Odessa organisation of ex-SS men and sympathisers.

It was Peron’s ouster late in 1955 that complicated the Mossad’s quest. Quite suddenly, with his host and patron now himself in exile in Madrid, the easy life was over. Not in danger of expulsion but certainly no longer welcome in the flash house on Chacabuco Street in Buenos Aires’ ritziest, top-shelf suburb, he purchased a block of land in what was then the countryside and threw up a very humble home (above) of cheap bricks. Others in Mengele’s circle thought it wise to move much further than that. Skorzeny, who had supervised Peron’s security detail and served as Evita’s personal bodyguard, decamped to Franco’s Spain, while Josef Mengele, another Eichmann intimate in exile, ultimately expired of a heart attack while taking a dip in Brazil, his final refuge.

There was no indoor lavatory in the Eichmanns’ new digs, a mosquito-infested bog for a neighbour and a narrow-guage goods line directly by his front door. The tracks are still there, though seldom used, but the house isn’t, having been knocked down in 2000 and the lot left empty ever since, the symptom of a bitter family feud. Some of Eichmann’s descendants, it has been reported, remained ardent followers of Hitler while others rejected the Ayran cult entirely, with one granddaughter even joining the hare krishnas. If der Opa had still been running the death camp railways she would have found herself in a cattle car double-quick.

Today, Garibaldi Street is just another built-up strip of mean homes jammed cheek-by-jowl across from the goods-line tracks. There are no plaques, no memorials at was once Number 14, since been renumbered as 4261, just weeds and the peeling remnant of what must have been an inside wall (below)

BUT FORGIVE me, please, for I get ahead myself. Several days before seeking out Nazi haunts, there was the Malvinas Day ceremony and the likely chance to observe Javier Miele in the flesh. It, too, like so much else of Buenos Aires, proved less than expected.

First, unlike Anzac Day, attendance was restricted and access denied to the uninvited, which meant watching the televised proceedings over another cup of the excellent local coffee in a nearby cafe. What went to air was a short man in a black suit reading from a prepared speech without ever once lifting his gaze to take in the audience. His style was in keeping with the memorial plaza itself. No soaring monument to sacrifice, it is a series of modest panels with the 600+ names of all who died. Is there an international convention that dictates memorials to those killed in wars that are lost must be at ground level or below? The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington is much the same, black marble slabs of names buried to one side of The Mall, where it can be seen neither from Capitol Hill nor the Lincoln Monument at the other end. Buenos Aires’ tribute to the fallen isn’t quite so circumspect, but not by much.

What was of interest was the body language of Milei’s running-mate and vice-president Victoria Villarruel, who presides over the Senate, Argentina’s upper house. What is going on with this pair? At several moments the camera caught sharp downward glances — even in sensible flats she is several inches taller than her diminutive leader  — as he droned on .. and on … and on. Were they looks of disdain? Quite likely, because the pair have had something of a falling out since the coalition of their parties claimed 55 per cent of the overall vote, losing only four of Argentina’s of 24 provinces, three of those narrowly. The only thumping win for the Peronists came in Buenos Aires, where government has long buttered the bread of the connected.

Milei made global headlines by celebrating the victory with a promise to immediately implement 366 promises as “emergency measures” that aim to see the ranks of public servants thinned by at least 50 per cent, plus death sentences for a slather of government departments ranging from environment to gender equity. This was to be Milei’s chainsaw ripping into dead wood. Instead, in full knowledge that the administration did not have the Senate votes to assure passage, Ms Villarruel brought the measure to the floor in mid-March and unleashed the Peronists to do their worst.

Unlike his Malvinas Day address, there was nothing restrained about Milei’s reaction. On X, until he took it down an hour or so later, he put his name to a tweet that recommended Villarruel be “hung in the plaza”. If that’s a sign of a government getting things done, then the Peronists, the bureaucrats and the recipients of vote-buying largesse probably don’t have too much to worry about.

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A BRIEF NOTE: Readers may wonder why, when I set out for the US to observe this presidential election year, I’m in Argentina. The answer is simple: I didn’t swim across the Rio Grande. Had I done so, Joe Biden would have given me a free phone, free transport to a “sanctuary city” and the right to get a job while Democrat city governments cover the cost of my accommodation. Had I opted for a flight to California I might even have obtained a taxpayer-funded sex change. Yes, really, no kidding.

Yet despite having held a green card for 26 years, fathered one American citizen and now being  grandfather to another, all I could get was a three-month visa. Hence the visit to Buenos Aires, which I’ll depart on Monday with a fresh three months on my passport 

Joe Biden’s America, the world’s biggest goat rodeo.