A "Virtual Kidnapping"

Right before I took off to Brazil, my spanish teacher Pato told me about a "virtual kidnapping" her family experienced the night before. It's a weird story, worth telling.

Kidnapping is definitely an issue in Latin America. Colombia is famous for it, and Mexico has had more of it in recent years. And since the Crisis -- the economic collapse of 2001/2 -- there has been a bit of it here in Argentina as well. Just today the TV news was reporting on a kidnapping of a daughter of a business owner. I'm not sure but it seems that although the victim is still held hostage, they have identified the kidnapper, a 24-year old male. Or maybe they somehow just figured out that he was 24 years old?

Anyway, about two weeks ago, Pato's father received a telephone call from someone claiming to have Pato's sister held hostage. The person wanted 30,000 pesos, I think (about $10,000 US dollars) -- something like that. Pato's father handled the situation relatively poorly. He said he did not have the money, so somehow the person on the phone got the father to give out the phone number and address of Pato, the sister of the person supposedly held hostage. The perpetrator then called Pato's number, and Pato's boyfriend Mark, a brit with so-so spanish, picked up the phone. He naturally could hardly understand the person, so not much progress was made, and I didn't really get the story of how that call ended. Pato was at school, and when she came home the police were there talking to Mark and I guess waiting for her.

As it turned out, the other sister was also safely in a class somewhere, and so no kidnapping had actually taken place. It was a fraud kidnapping, "un secuestro virtual" as Pato put it. But still, now the person has Pato's address and phone number. Not that that's much of a threat, it's easy to get someone's address and phone number. But still, it would certainly make me uneasy to be a target of this sort of thing.

It seems to be generally agreed that the two big concerns among people here in Buenos Aires and probably in Argentina as a whole are inflation and security. Prices are going up up up, and so making ends meet is harder and harder. But the rise of crime, especially violent crime, really seems to be the big problem to me, the problem that will have greater repercussions if it doesn't stop. People will become more and more wary, more and more distrustful. I think people are already more wary than they were two or three years ago. And then also if crime really spirals out of control, there will be support for rougher and rougher policing tactics, more authoritarian behavior on the part of the authorities. And, god forbid, the military might come to be seen as the best hope for maintaining "order".

This is the sad history of much of Latin America -- fluctuations between more representative governments and nasty military dictatorships. Let's hope the cycle doesn't repeat itself here.

Buenos Aires -- Ciudad Internacional

I have some much more serious stuff to write about tonight, but before I get to that, I thought I'd mention a great situation tonight at the gym. I was in spinning class with about 16 or 17 people in it. And it couldn't have been a more international crowd if it was in London or New York or Hong Kong. There were two people from the US, a Norwegian, two people from Venezuela, one from Mexico City, one from Switzerland, and a Guatemalan.

The teacher made a point of asking everyone where they were from, and it became more and more amusing as each person mentioned another country. Most of the latecomers were Argentines, too, so for a while the class was 2/3 foreign. It was funny and sweet, but it was also great -- a real sign that Buenos Aires is a world city, not just an Argentine city. Like New York, London, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and a handful of others. Good company.

MY problem with cars here in Buenos Aires

As I've mentioned in other posts, the drivers here suck. They have a terrible, terrible macho road culture that puts everyone at unreasonable risk for no good reason. They talk about it every day on the TV news, they call it a crisis even. La inseguridad vial, road insecurity, they call it. Every day on the news they show all the accidents, they show the blood on the road, the bloody car interiors, the bodies on the ground covered by blankets. And still they drive like, oh, not madmen -- like assholes. No consideration for anyone else, pretty much my definition of an asshole. But culture changes slowly, very slowly, so I suspect the road carnage will continue for quite some time.

I don't like dwelling on the negative, but, hey, a few days ago I came as close as I've ever come to getting hit by a car. And it was absolutely 100% the car's fault. And this was the second time this happened, in almost the same way.

I went for a ride out to the suburbs on Monday, which was a national holiday. (For some reason commemorating or recognizing the military coup in the 70's, '76 I think.) I left around 2, and the roads were very quiet. I took Juan B. Justo, a great big road with not so many lights that leads out of town, and it was no problem -- nice and empty, like most sundays. Coming back, though, the road was quite crowded, and cars were driving aggressively as usual. It think people were coming back from vacation, because it had been a 5-day weekend.

Near-accident was simple -- I'm riding along at a good clip on my tank of a mountain bike, 13-14 mph, and a car turns in front of me to make a right. Going fast, clearly trying to "beat" me through the intersection. But, swear to god, there was about a meter, meter and a half maybe, between my front tire and the corner of the car that cut me off. Which, at 14mph, is not very much at all. I am a very aware, kind of paranoid, rider, and so I managed to break really hard, and I just barely missed the back side of the car -- less than a foot.

I was actually shaken up by this, and got off the big street and took the less direct (and frequently cobblestoned) side streets home.

All I could do was shake my fist at the car as it sped away. I could see that it was an older woman driving, with what looked like a family in the car. So macho driving is not limited to the males of the species here.

My earlier near-accident was indeed an example of macho driving, the worst kind of macho driving. In that case, I was at the interesection of Libertador, a giant through avenue, and the General Paz, the ring freeway which forms the boundary of the Capital Federal. Most of the cars were turning onto the freeway, so the only way I could get through the intersection was to jump the light and gun through the intersection before the cars took off. Standard urban biking, not dangerous, not particularly aggressive -- just getting the hell out of the way, essentially.

But, you know, get a young argentine male (futbol fan, no doubt) behind the wheel, and he doesn't like a guy on a bike (a dork wearing a helmet, no less) getting out in front of him. So even though i got a good head start through this big intersection, this guy accelerated hard and pulled past me and cut right in front of me. Again, I had to break really hard to avoid slamming into the passenger door. And I am a seriously, seriously skilled urban cyclist. I can't imagine how amateurs deal with driver behavior like this. (Although amateurs probably wouldn't jump the light and gun it across the intersection.)

Both of these drivers put my safety (and life) at an unreasonable risk. Especially the later guy, he couldn't possibly have saved even a full second by "beating" me through the intersection. The woman, maybe she had some other crazy driver on her tail. But she could still have braked a little and let me through the intersection.

So what's to take away from all this, besides "fuck you people!"? As I said before, it's a kind of culture, the road culture here, and it changes slowly. I guess sixty, eighty, a hundred years ago US road culture was full of carnage, and probably devoid of consideration for other drivers and pedestrians and cyclists. So our road culture evolved. And here in Argentina, oh, I guess this particular aspect of culture hasn't evolved so much. So if I'm going to keep cycling here, I just have to accept it and be careful.

As a nice quantitative example of the "inseguridad vial" here, check out this nice graph showing traffic fatalities per million cars on the road:

problems with cars

One of the reasons I keep coming back to Buenos Aires is that it's a city where you can easily live without a car. Much like New York, much like many of the great cities worldwide that developed before the auto became so common. Seoul, no; Barcelona, si.

The posh districts of the Capital Federal, where foreigners such as myself are likely to live, are relatively close together and are generally close to the subway system. But it turns out that the subway system is quite limited. So most of the public transport is via these crazy buses that run in very perplexing routes and get very full. And these buses really barrel around -- just two days ago, there were two bus-on-bus collisions in the morning rush hour, one of them very serious -- sixty injured, two or four killed.

And so Buenos Aires is more of a car town than I thought. I'm in a pretty central area, and of the four apartments in this building occupied by locals, three of them have a car. Traffic here is just terrible -- maybe not quite as crowded as New York, but the drivers here have much worse habits. (I was going to say "skills", but that would be too generous.) There is a kind of aggressiveness on the roads, a devil-may-care attitude about safety, that just drives me insane. I can't tell if it's a symptom of latin machismo, or italian carefree-ness, or some combination, but whatever it is, it's my least favorite thing about this town.

This week there has been a great deal of attention on the news to the road conditions, because of the aforementioned bus accidents, but more importantly because of another accident where an 80-year-old driver barreled into a crowded sidewalk on Avenida Rivadavia, one of the biggest streets here, killing one and seriously injuring four or five others. Worse, the dude kind of kept going -- he crashed into the sidewalk, then veered back onto the street and kept driving, dragging someone under his car. Nice, huh? And of course the local news had no qualms about showing the trail of blood on the street. Maybe that's macho as well, I don't know.

So there's been lots of discussion about whether eighty year olds should be driving, and how to make sure that those who shouldn't be driving aren't. Which leads me to the subject line of this post.

Here's one of the worst problem with cars, or rather with a society physically organized around car-based transportation -- Driving a one- or two-ton vehicle around at high speed is not something that should be done by anyone at any time, but because it's such an integral part of functioning in our societies, not being able to drive is a serious handicap. If you can't drive, because you're old, or you're sick, or you're intoxicated, you're a second-class citizen. And people don't want to be second-class citizens, and so they drive even though they shouldn't be. So you get eighty-year-olds and drunks killing people on the roads.

It's easy to blame the drunks, but it's harder to blame the eighty-year-old. No one wants to admit to diminished capacities. And ninety-nine percent of the time, driving is easy, very manageable. It's just that one percent or that one-tenth of one percent of the time when you need good reflexes, peripheral vision, and depth perception.

On a personal note, my father is now 75, and he lives in rural Washington state. He's in excellent shape physically, but he's 75 and he just doesn't drive as well as he once did. Not at all. My older sister and I joke morbidly that the only way he's going to die before 90 is behind the wheel. But driving has been such a part of his life, and it's so essential where he lives, he'd have to really, really deteriorate before he could submit to be chauffeured around by his wife.

This is a long-term problem, not a short-term one. Sure, you can test people more, you can have roadblocks for drunks. But still, people are going to want to drive. And also, just on a fairness measure, you don't want to create second-class citizens out of those who can't drive. There just needs to be other ways of getting around. And more importantly, things need to be organized differently, more densely, to enable effective public transportation. Like I said, long-term problem -- none of us are going to live long enough to see it resolved.