I’ve already cast my absentee ballot… I am so excited and hopeful and nervous about this. Early polling showed the results would be too close to predict. I actually feel that this is going to all go down for the best. No reason, I’m just feeling optimistic and hopeful. I want to believe that people in Maine are more tolerant than hateful. I read predictions that only 35% of voters would turn out for this mid-term election and I honestly find that really hard to believe, given what a HUGE ISSUE this is. I feel like this will probably be one of the most important things I’ll ever vote on in my life. I think there are a lot of people in Maine who will also feel it and get themselves out to the polls. Fingers crossed. I want this so badly for the people I love, for my state, for the human race.
postscript: ugggghhhh. I am so disappointed in Maine.
I’m sure I don’t need to explain that the vote on gay marriage in Maine did not turn out as I had hoped. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s really disappointing anyway. It was so close. I do not want to give up! I hope that Maine will continue to progress forward on this issue and I hope that I can be involved when I get back to Maine next year!

BUSH OUT! word.

watched the inauguration last week (i think it was last week? i’ve been working too much and losing track of time) and it was truly a great moment. I have been waiting for this day for EIGHT YEARS! as much as I was excited to see Barack Obama inaugurated as president, i have to admit, i was even more excited to see the back side of George W Bush.

WORST. PRESIDENT. EVER. For real.

Goodbye and good riddance and I can only hope that history remembers him as the despicable, idiotic, bumbling, ruinous tyrant that he was.

Ironically, from the expatriate perspective, I think the past eight years of Bush disaster have caused the rest of the world to have more sympathy for American citizens though not the American government. Now that the rest of the world has begun to understand that Americans, too, suffer under the tyranny of an unelected, inept government run wild, I think it’s becoming easier for the rest of the world to sympathize and to understand that any given American citizen does not necessarily stand as a surrogate for American government policy. I can’t count the number of times we’ve been asked by taxi drivers or shop-keepers here: “Where are you from? Ohhh, United States? You like Bush?” and we say “NO!” and they say “Yayyy, me neither! nobody likes him, everybody hates him, yay!” and we can have a joyful bonding moment over our shared opinions, before they may or may not give me the ol’ gringo discount (that is, a $5 surcharge for being a know-nothing foreigner).

Friday night i volunteered with Democrats Abroad Argentina… They hosted a debate-watching party at a bar in my neighborhood, and I got to help out at the voter-registration table. At this point most expats should hopefully have registered already, so we didn’t have a lot of work to do, but we got to answer a few questions and hopefully some of the folks who still hadn’t registered yet will be able to hurry up and squeeze in before the deadline!
The event turned out to be huge, like over 300 people attending! it was definitely the biggest group of *North* Americans I’ve ever seen inside of Argentina. There were two local news teams broadcasting live, lots of cameras snapping everywhere, and i heard there was someone there covering the event for The Huffington Post (here’s the article).
I’m not generally attracted to “expat” gatherings, but I am getting totally excited/anxious about the upcoming elections and after getting myself registered and requesting my own absentee ballot, I still felt like I wanted to do more! and I’m glad I went, it was kinda amazing to be in a bar FULL of people who were all so excited about electing Obama. I’m generally pretty cynical about mainstream party politics and all the political charades in the US… but after the catastrophic 2000 and 2004 elections and the UNSPEAKABLY DREADFUL events resulting from George W. Bush’s election and re-election as president (ie: war, tyranny, empire, failure of domestic infrastructure, economic collapse, the rest of the world really hates us now, etc etc etc), I feel like presidential elections actually can be very very important. And this one is. Living in Argentina makes me realize how meaningful it is just to elect a president that the rest of the world can tolerate, for starters. And it made me feel a little bit better to see that so many other expatriates are feeling the same.

Anyway… on Thursday night Maria had hosted a lovely voter-registration-training for volunteers at her house, and this is what I learned: At this point, any US citizens who haven’t registered yet should go to this site:
http://www.votefromabroad.org/?adid=KDAW9990001071701
and fill out the registration form, print it out, sign it and mail or fax it ASAP! many states require absentee voters to register before OCTOBER 6th! Also, for anyone who is ALREADY REGISTERED to vote in usa, there will be an event at the US embassy in Buenos Aires (4300 Av. Colombia in Palermo) on October 8th, from 9am – 12pm, where they will provide voting assistance, blank federal write-in ballots, and they will accept ballots to deliver to the USA via their special FedEx diplomatic mail delivery. This is handy because the Argentine mail service is notoriously unreliable and it’s sad to think of any hard-won absentee ballot disappearing into the Argentine mail black hole and not getting delivered or counted. Even if you can’t make it to the embassy event on Oct 8th, you can bring your absentee ballot or federal write-in ballot to the embassy and drop it off for diplomatic mail delivery any weekday 8:30 am to 12 noon or 2:30 to 4:30pm, go to window 15 at the embassy.
YAY VOTE!
please save us all from McCain and Palin.

Here’s a video of Democracy Now producer Elizabeth Press and others describing how the police broke into several private homes in the Twin Cities. Police entered with guns drawn and handcuffed the journalists and searched their house and property for no apparent reason (other than intimidation).

and another video of Democracy Now host Amy Goodman being arrested for “interfering with a peace officer” yesterday when she attempted to ask police about the violent arrest of two Democracy Now journalists.

Amy Goodman discusses her arrest on Free Speech TV.

Eileen Clancy of iWitness Video on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show:

twin cities indymedia here

salon.com coverage here and here

coverage of these events is so far mysteriously absent from the New York Times.

Buenos Aires just voted for a new governor and the winner is Mauricio Macri, who is currently president of the city’s famous Boca football club and represents Buenos Aires in the Lower House of the Argentine Congress. Yesterday was a run-off election between Macri (who won with 60%) and Daniel Filmus, who currently serves as Secretary of Education, Science and Technology, and had the backing of President Kirchner. Voting here is mandatory for every citizen. Some have said that because of mandatory voting, lots of people go to the polls without knowing anything of the candidates, and just pick whatever name they’ve heard of, so this system tilts the results towards any celebrity such as Macri. I don’t know a lot of facts about the candidates but I’m slowly gathering facts from reading newspaper articles in spanish, and meanwhile I’ve heard plenty of opinions and hearsay, which I will repeat here in lieu of substantiated facts. Everyone I’ve talked to says that Macri is a bad choice for a number of reasons. He’s the son of a wealthy, powerful businessman, Franco Macri, and most of his business experience comes from working for his rich daddy’s companies. His popularity and name recognition are generally attributed to his association with the popular Boca team, not his position as a public servant or any past interest in public welfare. During his current term of public service, he has allegedly missed 280 out of 320 voting sessions. So, vamos a ver. We will wait and see how this turns out, and meanwhile I will try to learn more facts!

we tried to take a taxi to the Juana Molina show on Friday night and ended up in a crazy huge traffic jam approaching Avenida 9 de Julio. After a half-hour sitting around listening to honking horns, we gave up and walked to the show. When we reached the Obelisco we saw that the cause of the kilombo was like 100 taxis parked in the middle of the intersection, spilling down 9 de Julio and Corrientes!
Protests and strikes are really common here. For instance, there have been two subway strikes recently, when all the subways are shut down and everyone has to take the bus or drive or walk. Other days, when the Subte employees want to send a message to the corporation, but they don’t want to ruin everyone’s day by stopping service, they will just open the turnstiles and everyone rides for free.
This particular strike (en castellano, huelga o paro) was related to a problem with gas supply. Most taxis here run on a type of natural gas (GNC), which is the same stuff used for heating homes. Buenos Aires has been suffering a record-breaking cold spell so GNC supplies are running low and eventually the government told the gas companies to stop selling GNC to gas stations and reserve it for heating homes and businesses. Other cars run on regular gasoline, but taxis use GNC, which is cheaper. One by one, all the GNC gas stations dried up and shut down and so the Taxistas couldn’t work, and expressed their anger by parking all their taxis in the middle of the city’s biggest intersection! I read that other taxis were parked blocking the entrances and exits to the highways as well. It’s interesting to try and imagine this scenario in New York, I’m pretty sure it could never happen. In part, that’s great because it was a huge pain in the ass, but in part it’s sad because I feel that individual people in the USA just don’t have the same sense of solidarity and the same willingness to group together and make visible statements in this way.

Juan Peron was a hugely popular President of Argentina during the forties and fifties. He was deposed and spent 20 years in exile in Spain. During this exile his many supporters organized into opposing “Peronist” factions, left wing and right wing. When Peron returned from exile in 1973, he sided with the right wing faction against the leftists. Juan Peron died during his third presidential term, in 1974, leaving his third wife and vice president Isabel Peron in power. She signed a series of decrees enabling the police and military to “annihilate” left-wing subversives. She was deposed in 1976 by a military coup, and the disappearances increased under the military dictatorship until 1983 when the last military dictator stepped down.

Within a few blocks of our house, in Palermo and Almagro, there have been protests outside the comfortable homes of former officials and professionals who took part in the genocide and have never been tried for any crimes. Some top officials were tried in 1984, but these were followed by pardons and laws of amnesty. In 2005 the Argentinian supreme court overturned the amnesty and trials began in 2006 but have been proceeding slowly and with difficulties. In January of 2007, Isabel Peron was arrested in Spain and is pending extradition to Argentina to testify in court about her role in the disappearances. In the first trial of 2006, against former Police officer Miguel Etchecolatz, one witness was Jorge Julio López, who was one of the desaparecido from the 1970′s. After his 2006 testimony, he disappeared again and is still missing. The general suspicion is that he was abducted by current and former police forces in an effort to intimidate others from testifying in the future.

The memories of the desaparecidos are preserved by the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo, by the living parents, children and friends of those who disappeared, and by some surviving desaparecidos. A few weeks ago a friend of ours told us that both of her parents are surviving desaparecidos. Some children were taken from young mothers or pregnant mothers, and raised by military families, and are now being reunited with their surviving relatives. Here’s a short article from Clarin about an interesting art project using instant messaging on MSN to create a memorial space , and here is a link with more details (in spanish) about yesterday’s events.