More Boca, No More Ford Falcons

On to Caminito, one of the major tourist fly traps of the city, where the houses are brightly painted and over the last twenty years the quality of the street art has gotten much worse, and the subject matter of the work has narrowed to two words -- tango crap. You can pose with tango dancers or stick your head through one of the tango or beer belly cardboard cutouts. But there are still deserted tables under Quilmes umbrellas where eventually a mozo shows up and you order a beer and an empanada and watch the young couple in the cement playground across the way dancing tango (it´s not of course the dance that merits the "crap" epithet, it´s the crass industry around it) to recorded music, under the wall photo of this year´s Boca squad, and look forward and back. Here in Boca, in San Telmo, and in Palermo around the corner from our rental, there were four far more eloquent reminders of the military reign of state terrorism than spray painted slogans or even, by this time, grandmothers´ head scarves. Simple plaques in the sidewalk or -- in San Telmo´s case -- Dorrego Plaza reading, "Aqui vivio (name), victima del terrorismo del estado, desaparecido el (date the person was taken away)" At another site in Boca there is a list of union members who disappeared, in one case on the same day, a 39 year old mother and her 17 year old son. There was simply no excuse on earth for it. Argentina now, for all its faults, no longer carries the threat of the cruising Ford Falcons late at night. I walked around the handicraft fair in the Palermo Viejo plaza, seeing some very alternative people and thought that thirty years ago some of them would not have been let alive to sell their trade. Tom Paine -- profiled in a New Yorker review of books about him -- would have had some thoughts about all that. There weren´t -isms in Tom´s days, but it´s a fair bet he would have thought as little of them as he did of religion. To an old woman who came "from Almighty God to tell you that if you do not repent of your sins...you will be damned," Paine replied, "God would not send such a foolish ugly woman as you."