A Bit of Argie Bargie in BA

Manana, manana ... 

Argentinians like to protest.   I´ve been curious about this country since the early eighties, when I remember watching, on the news, the swelling crowds in Buenos Aires demanding the return of Las Malvinas.  A year or two later, in flickering black and white, during a performance of Evita, I was strangely stirred by 1940s cinefootage of Eva Peron rousing the crowds from the balcony of the Casa Rosada.

So I should not have been particularly surprised at what I saw developing before me in the Arrivals Hall of Terminal B at Ezeiza International Airport last week.  The queue for passport control was a 35 minute eyebrow-raiser, but the subsequent line to take your collected bags through customs was simply absurd.   Round the newspaper stands it swept, on past the after-shave counter of the duty free, back past Carousels 4, 5 and 6 on on towards the bored looking men by the three luggage scanners that weren´t broken.   I stood in line glumly.  So did everyone else.  And then, it began.  A slow hand-clap, which became louder, and louder, until a good thirty or forty Argentinians (all women, I think) had joined in the jamboree, with one slightly self-conscious chico inglese lending a helping hand.

It made no difference, of course.  Just as the weekly protest by groups of elderly mothers, Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, appears to have had no impact whatsoever.  They´ve gathered in Buenos Aires´answer to Trafalgar Square each Thursday afternoon at 3.30pm for more than thirty years now, demanding to know what became of their sons and daughters who disappeared during the Military Dictatorships of the late seventies.  Something worth protesting about, I thought, that makes my small hand-clap seem very quiet indeed.

John