Beef wars

Almost as soon as I felt better from my back pain I had to move out of my apartment because my crazy landlady just kept walking into my apartment whenever she felt like it. I just packed up my stuff and walked out. She caught me as I was leaving and tried to tell me I owed her thousands of dollars because we had an agreement but I just kept on walking away. I spent a night in a hotel nearby and went to work to find a new apartment. I lucked out and found an even nicer place and rented it right away for $400 a month. Again it was a fully furnished one bedroom up high with a nice view and everything included including local telephone. I moved right in.

I spent the next few days learning more about the city and country. I wandered around the zoo. They had condors at the zoo so I watched them for a couple of hours. They are slowly increasing in numbers and may survive as a species now. I also went to a horse race. My betting skills are normally very good but on this day I lost. I watched a polo game for a while but it did not interest me that much. There was a lot of parks around my area so I tried to check them all out but there were just too many of them.

Right around this time a big fight started to brew in Argentina. A lot of beef is produced and exported from Argentina and the locals eat a ton of beef. The problem was that the beef producers were exporting the best meat because they could get more money for it overseas than they could in their own country. The locals were pissed off that the quality of their cherished beef was going down and they started to complain. There were demonstrations against the growers and lots of newspaper articles and television shows were dedicated to getting better quality meat back on the store shelves in Argentina. The government ended up passing a law that the farmers had to sell a certain amount of quality beef locally at a low fixed price before they could export any to other countries. The farmers did not like that so they started to go on strike and have their own demonstrations on the street. Well the demonstrations turned violent and several people were killed on both sides of the argument. To enforce their law about selling meat locally the government shut down the ports where all the beef is exported and told the farmers that until they sold quality beef locally at the price the government had set there was not going to be any beef leaving the country. The farmers protested and riots ensued with even more people killed. I don't know the total death count but there were quite a few deaths in all. The farmers stopped selling all meat and "forced" the government to reopen the ports which the government did. The farmers felt they had won and loaded up thousands of semi trucks with beef and sent it to the now open port. When there were thousands of tons of beef in the trucks and in the port, the government again closed the port and all the beef rotted. The farmers were livid but realized with out the port they could not export their beef because by road Argentina is just to far away from their markets for beef. The farmers relented and sold quality beef locally at the set price and they were allowed to export again. The whole fight was fascinating to watch. I particularly liked the governments rope a dope stance when they gave in to the farmers just to set them up for the huge loss later. It was a serious war.

Argentinians love to argue about politics or just about anything for that matter. I loved sitting in the cafes and eavesdropping on their animated conversations about just about anything but mostly politics and relationships. I saw several physical fights develop among friends over heated arguments. The people of Argentina consider themselves European. It is a real insult to them if you call them South American. They will always correct you and say, "We are not South Americans, we are Europeans." I heard that many times and I always wanted to laugh at them because despite their attitude, Argentina is in South America not Europe. People can be crazy. Sometimes if I got angry at an Argentinian for some reason I would intentionally tell them they were South American just to tick them off.

One morning I woke up and there was some damage in my neighborhood from what looked like young drunks going on a rampage--garbage cans were tipped over, tree branches were broken, there was some broken glass and debris on the streets, things like that. As I sat at the cafe the people around me were all blaming the damage on drunk American students. There was no evidence of American students but they do have a reputation for doing stupid stuff around the world. My neighbors just assumed it was those terrible American students. They went on and on complaining about the behavior of American students and how senseless this was. I could only think about the riots during the beef wars and how the behavior of the rioters was so senseless and I thought about pots calling kettles black. Enjoy life because we are all crazy aren't we. Just in different ways sometimes.