Feria de San Telmo

Sundays here are full of artisans fairs, street performances, and hanging out and sharing yerba mate in the sun. There's the fair at Mataderos, on the fringe of the city, mostly attended by locals, where they have traditional music and dancing from the north of Argentina, and all sorts of specialty food products. A friend of mine sells cheese there from the province of Tucuman, in the mountains.

Another great fair is the antique fair in Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo, an old working class barrio just south of the center with cobblestone streets and a rough edge. It's where tango was born (although residents of the barrio further south, La Boca, would beg to differ), originally danced by men and prostitutes, and often just men while they were waiting turns for prostitutes. Tango shows are an integral part of the Sunday fair here, and the antique displays are impressive and rather photogenic. So here's a bit of a photo gallery:

Desaparecidos

Today marks one month since the disappearance of Jorge Julio Lopez, the main witness in a trial of a former military general from the dictatorship of the seventies who was recently convicted for crimes of genocide, including the kidnapping, torture, and murder of teenagers.

Disappearances aren't supposed to happen here these days. It's an age of democracy, and people are trying to move on from the days when 30,000 people were disappeared. But apparently there are still people who don't want certain secrets to get out, and are willing to continue such tactics. Julio Lopez is a 77-year-old carpenter and ex-desaparcido who had been held and tortured for 80 days...now he has either been killed for his willingness to speak up, or he is currently reliving his nightmare as we speak.

There have been marches on the plaza demanding the appearance with life of Lopez, and there will be another one today, with hundreds of thousands of people. I've received phone calls on my land-line and cell-phone from the government searching for any information on his whereabouts, as part of a program to keep up the image that anything and everything is being done to locate him. But there is corruption in the government, everybody knows it, and there's little surprise that information has not yet surfaced.