Despite the serious economic meltdown in 2001, Buenos Aires remains closer in style and culture to Paris than to any other city in South America, writes John Kavanagh.
Portenos, as citizens of Buenos Aires are known, are sitting amongst the trees of Plaza San Martin opening lunch boxes and sharing gourds of yerba mate. Close by in the fashionable French quarter, restaurants and cafes are packed with business people and tourists. Not far away in Recoleta, the Cementerio de la Recoleta is an astonishing necropolis where in death as in life the elite repose amongst their own in ornate marble mausoleums on narrow streets. A few Irish who succeeded in the new world are also here, as is Evita Peron.
I had spent the morning visiting the old working class barrios of San Telmo and La Boca. Once home to the rich, San Telmo was abandoned after a yellow fever outbreak in 1870 and the mansions of the rich became the tenements of the poor. Slowly recovering its former glory, antique shops and traditional bars cooled by rotating fans hanging from high ceilings are a feature of the area.
La Boca, originally settled by poor Italian immigrants in the late 19th century, retains the corrugated houses painted in psychedelic colours. A nondescript statue, in memory of Admiral William Brown of Foxford, looks out on a harbour badly in need of a clean up.
North of La Boca, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, wearing symbolic white headscarves, continue to protest over the disappearance of their children during the state terrorism of 1976-1983. On April 30th, 1977, a handful of mothers met in Plaza de Mayo for their first demonstration and as the disappearances continued the numbers of protesting mothers grew. Despite intimidation by the authorities and neglect from the state church, the weekly protests have continued for the past 30 years.
The mothers of Plaza de Mayo had also lost grandchildren kidnapped with their mothers, others had been born in concentration camps, and their mothers "disappeared". Investigations by the organisation, Hijos, discovered that children of the "disappeared" had been adopted by families connected to the military. They then attempted, with the help of geneticists, to find and identify the missing children with the goal of restoring their personal and familial identities and offering them the choice of returning to their surviving relatives.
Of the estimated 200 missing children, 56 have been found and identified. The majority returned to their biological families, while a few divided their loyalty between both families. At all stages psychological and ethical guidelines, protecting the interests of the children, were followed. I was on the periphery of one of these investigations in 1998 and it was not a pleasant experience.
I boarded a bus for Misiones, disappointed I had missed out on an opportunity of sharing a beer with an old friend, Jorge Fondebrider. Jorge, a gregarious Jew, had often surprised me with his knowledge of Irish poetry. In 1999, he published a 500-page book on the works of Irish poets translated into Spanish. For most of the 16-hour bus ride to Posadas, capital of Misiones, we passed through rich fertile land as vast and as flat as the arid wastes of Patagonia. Cattle ranches with no apparent boundaries dominate the landscape and only isolated pine plantations gave any height to the horizon. As we approached Posadas, yerba mate, grown to produce the stimulating tea ritually drunk by the majority of Argentines, replaced the cattle ranches.
In 1947, the eccentric aristocrat, Ernesto Guervara Lynch, father of the revolutionary Che, caught the "green gold" fever and moved with his family to Misiones. His hope that the plantation would solve his financial problems was not realised and the family returned to Buenos Aires before moving in with Guervara's mother, Ana Isabel Lynch. Her father, Patrick Lynch, had emigrated from Galway to Argentina in 1847. It was during those years of living with Ana that the asthmatic and rugby playing Che forged a strong emotional bond with his Irish grandmother.
Crossing the bridge over the mighty Parana River to the town of Ciudad de Este in Paraguay our bus struggled through an army of people returning to Brazil and Argentina carrying sacks of duty-free merchandise. Grim-faced custom officers struggled unsuccessfully to cope with the sheer numbers.
Paraguay is part of the South American trade group, Mercosur, although much of their trade is based on contraband. Long the delinquent of South America, this land-locked country is struggling towards democracy. In a continent noted for military coups I have only witnessed one. I happened to be in Asuncion on February 3rd, 1989, when the 35-year dictatorship of Gen Alfredo Stroessner came to a sudden end as I was photographing the Juan O'Leary nameplate on a street close to the Palace. In May 1961 Stroessner had the body of Eliza Lynch exhumed from the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris and brought back to Paraguay as a national heroine. Eliza, daughter of John Lynch, a west Cork doctor, fled with the family to Paris in 1847 to escape the potato famine. There, as a Parisian courtesan, she met Francisco Solano Lopez, the future President of Paraguay.
In 1855, as his mistress, she accompanied him to Paraguay where he assumed power on the death of his father. Because of a previous failed marriage, Eliza was left outside the loop of family and local society. Nevertheless, she became effectively first lady and for the next 15 years was the most powerful woman in South America. Historians have condemned her for her part in the War of the Triple Alliance, a war that decimated the male population and lost chunks of the country to her opponents. Despised and reviled, she was expelled from the country in 1870 when Lopez was killed and she returned to Paris. She lived there in relative obscurity until her death in July 1886.
I continued on a difficult journey to my next destination, the largely indigenous area of Humahuaca in north-west Argentina. Here one is as likely to hear the indigenous Quechua language as the language of the Conquistadors. Humahuaca was once on the colonial route that brought silver from Potosi in Bolivia to the ships waiting in Buenos Aires.
Bolivia, despite its appalling poverty, has always attracted me but news of terrible rains in the Beni region deterred me from going north. Memories of a previous journey through Bolivia in early 2001 made with my daughter Orla were too recent and too painful. On that occasion constant rains had extended projected 18-hour bus journeys to a tortuous 30 hours and a decision was taken to cross the Andes to the dry Atacama Desert in Northern Chile. With exquisite timing, and apologies to Orla, we arrived in Calama as torrential rain turned the streets into brown rivers.
Now with knowledge of a wine festival in Mendoza, the wine capital of Argentina, I boarded a bus to go south. Armed with a bottle of the finest wine in Argentina, from Finca Las Nuebles in Cafayate, I would celebrate yet another birthday on a long bus journey in Latin America.