Over the past three days, a long weekend that included a Monday holiday called “Dia de la Bandera,” the flags came out, although probably not in the time or manner some people might have hoped. Despite a stadium in Buenos Aires full of fans clad in sky blue and white, there was no cause for celebration on Sunday when the national team barely eked out a 1-1 tie in a World Cup qualifying game against lowly Ecuador. But the flags did fly tonight when, at precisely 8pm, a cacerolazo started in city centers across Argentina. A form of protest typified by the banging of pots – in Spanish cacerola, hence the name – this cacerolazo, organized at least in part by text message, showed that even on the 97th day of the conflict between the government of Cristina Kirchner and the group of agribusinessmen known here as el campo, this disagreement that began with a hike of export taxes on soy and corn looks very far from a resolution.
We heard the car horns first. Our apartment is in a section of the city called Nueva Cordoba, which is packed with new high-rise apartment buildings, many of which are owned by members of the campo. As our nighttime doorman Marco said with a grand gesture, “All of this is made of soy.” From our balcony we could see people standing on terraces banging pots and pans, clicking away with cameras, holding up cell phones, and yes, waving flags. After half an hour of noise, Rebekah and I headed to the shopping mall in the center of Cordoba which fronts onto a plaza and a prominent six-way intersection. I’d seen fans of the River Plate football team celebrating their national championship there two weeks earlier.
We found what might have been five or seven thousand people thronging the streets, armed with drums, empty plastic coke bottles, whistles, party noisemakers, and pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils so battered and dented that they must have been set aside for this very purpose. Parents carried children on their shoulders; cars roving the side streets were filled with entire families, and they honked their horns, flashed their lights, and trailed waving flags from their windows. As we got closer to the mass of people, which had halted the progress of, and then surrounded, a line of cars, trucks, and even an empty bus, everyone became very quiet. I noticed an eerie plume of smoke rising from the middle of the throng, the place where moments ago, the flags were being waved most wildly. A number of people had both of their hands raised, reinforcing a silence and stillness that was unsettling. Suddenly, waves of a song, the national anthem perhaps, swept through the crowd, which began to bounce, clap, and make noise even more energetically than before.
Two-and-a-half hours later the television was still broadcasting live images of city squares around the country filled with people. Here on the corner of San Lorenzo and Chacabuco, though, only the occasional car horn could be heard passing by.
