after mid-term election, turtle necks, planting leftist pine trees, central american coup,more bus rides

So, unlike the States, people vote on Sundays and it's a legal obligation.  Some people have never changed their residency from when they last moved and don't travel from BA to the interior to vote (although a lot of people do travel election day weekend so as not to break the law, or, I don't know, a sense of obligation to your nation).  Bars cannot be open after 8pm the Saturday before, and I believe that places stop selling liquor at that time or a few hours earlier.  On Friday I talked to a cab driver, as I often do, about his sticker for Pino Solanas (my personal favorite).  He must have been a fiscal (don't know how that would translate in our system), so he had the ballots for Pino in the taxi with him.  Each party has fiscales in different districts who are responsible for distributing the ballots for their party.  The candidates are not all on one list.  You enter the voting place (usually a school, like it is for us) and wait on line.  You are handed an envelop and you go into a room where each party has their own ballot that has their list on candidates.  You choose one paper and put it in the envelop (which has been officially signed, so it can't just be some envelop you snuck in with).  The ballots can be cut in half.  One half of the ballot has the list of candidates to be national representatives for the autonomous city of BA on one side, while the other half has the list for the representatives on the provincial (in this case local BA city) level.  You therefore have the option of choosing one party on the national level and another on the local.  I've heard that this is rare.  If, for example, you want to vote for Pino, you go the table with the ballots for his party (Proyecto Sur).  The ballot has the name of the party and down the middle a dotted line indicated where to cut if you so wish to do so.  You can only cut in half, though, so when you cast a vote on the local or national level, you are voting for a list of people.  Pino debated with three other candidates, each from a different party, and depending on the percentage that a candidate wins, they select a certain number of people from their list to take sits in the legislature with them.  So the ballot has Pino's name in large letters, followed by another known name is slightly smaller font, followed by a longer list in what is probably the equivalent of type 14 Times New Roman.  It is the same on the right side, except with the list of those running on the local level.  Pino's name is the largest of all the names on the entire ballot, although his real first name, Fernando, is in about type 14 also above where it says Pino Solanas.  Nobody knows him as Fernando, and he has been around for years.  He has been making documentaries for a very long time, and no one, as far as I have heard, has referred to him as Fernando.  Pino is the word for pine tree,a nd you would see small Proyecto Sur posters that said:  Pino se planta.  I thought they were so witty.  Plantarse can meen to plant, as in a tree, but it also means to stand firm, as in against larger forces or for a cause.  En serio, Pino se plantó.  Until two weeks ago he had not a chance in hell, on Sunday he came in second.  Everyone knew Gabriela Miccheti would come in first, but she did by far less than expected and Pino's not-too-far-off second place through everyone off.  Gabriela gets five seats in the national legislature, Pino gets four, the Radical candidate Alfonso Prat-Gay three and the Kirchners' candidate, Heller, one.  A student of mine told me it's called the Dont system (that's how he spelled it), which just speaks for itself in more ways than one.  This outcome is remarkable.  Pino is of the left and Capital can tend towards being quite conservative.  What is more interesting is what the election really means overall.  The Kirchners lost...by a lot.  The husband/ex-president came in second in the Province of BA, which is quite the upset.  The interesting aspect to all of this is, although the Kirchners are quite fake leftists, they provoked such strong feelings of disdain that the country has really shifted to the right.  I had gotten all caught up in the frustration with CFK, too, but what has this reactionary approach left Argentina with?  I was happy to see her husband lose because I think Kircherismo needs to die off, but or that to have happened, someone to right of him had to beat him, and that is exactly what came to pass.  Maybe it can also be read as giving a truer left a the voice of real opposition.  If the country is moving to the right, the more conservative politicians can no longer play the victims and Pino, as he is already trying to do, can build a coalition of opposition that brings together a real left that will actually reinforce public hospitals and education.  It's very interesting to watch all of this with quite a militant socialist.  My friend F.  was a fiscal for La Frente Izquierda, which had no chance of really making any impact percentage wise.  The candidate was from the PTS (Partido Trabajadores Socialista), which my friend is a dedicated member of.  He goes to meeting about four times a week.  For him, Pino is from the center, but he was very happy about the outcome, although a bit hesitant to show it.  He pointed out that usually first and second place winners are not so different in their convictions, but the first and second this time have almost nothing in common.  He also pointed out that Argentina went the way of Europe, pointing out how the country has moved to the right significantly, but that mainly people voted against "the couple" and that was how they thought about their vote.  I was thinking about how much CFK and her husband have discredited the left with their words and by using that language.  

Back to the cab driver:  He gave me some ballots because, as he said, there is always fraud, always good to have extra.  It's true.  Often times ballots of one party are stolen.  Each party also has to pay for their own ballots, so a party like the PTS doesn't have nearly as many as any of the main contenders.  As a result, I have four Proyecto Sur ballots.  I got to see a whole pile of F.'s ballots, and from what I can tell, all ballots are printed on what is the equivalent of poor quality paper towels from public bathrooms.  I kept joking that I wanted to use my four votes.  When F. had to return to help supervise the counting of ballots (part of the job of fiscales is to prevent fraud, although it's quite relies a lot on trust), he told me that the person who is supposed to monitor everything as a non-partisan supervisor passed by less than twice every hour.  It would be very easy to commit fraud.  I had explained to the cab driver that I wasn't Argentine, but he told me to take them for my friends who were, in case they showed up to vote or Pino, but there were no ballots for him.  That is how I came into my four authentic mid-term Argentine ballots.  I was so tempted to throw them into F.'s pile, but his sense of humor would not have extended to that theme.  I joked about committing fraud all day and then, as I was reading, I overheard on the news how a group of people up north, indigenous and some barely able to read, had their national ID cards seized.  They were told to go to a certain place to retrieve them and were told to vote for a certain (I believe government, at least Menemista [from the Carlos Menem branch of Peronismo]) candidate upon arriving.  The man who was calling into the news to expose this incident explained that perhaps many of the people involved didn't realize they were being made to vote.   I have used both the words Kirchnerismo and Menemista in this post.  Peronistas, those who follow the the political ideologies of Perón, and a broad group.  So broad, in fact, that when I have asked (as I have done so several times) that a student mark political parties, or just peronismo, on a line that ranges from left wing to right wing, they immediately tell me it is impossible before even trying.  As a result, people claim branches of peronismo and we are talking about a cult of personality that is interpreted in many ways by different people or political moments  The man himself ranged from left to right.  He was a revolutionary for sure, but he is either so demonized or deified that he never seems to be humanly depicted in a conversation.  As one incredible human being told me, who also happens to be a student, he/she is not against peronistas per se, nor necessarily all of what Perón did, but he/she hates what peronismo has done to Argentina.  A fascinating statement, and said inoffensively and directly.  I'm sure some people would be outraged by such a comment, and for that I will not assign this paraphrase to a name. You can be a peronista and you could be from the left, right or center.  In a documentary, not meant to be comedic, about Argentine history, Perón is talked about as being inspired by Trotskyite socialism, Franquismo, Mussolini, the USSR and the Catholic Church.  Enough to make your head spin around ten million times.  

On Sunday there was also a coup in Honduras.  Here, probably for having had to live under a military government (more than once), such an event strikes a chord.  I was reading comments from readers on Huffington Post and was shocked by how people were actually defending the removal of an elected leader by the military.  The most common point made in defense of the military's removal of Zelaya is his relationship, or even similarity to, Hugo Chavez.  I don't have the exact quote, but thank you to the comment that basically said:  I don't care if he was friends with Charles Manson, militaries don't choose governments.  On BBC  many Hondurans talked about supporting the military's actions.  I think it's important to imagine the class of people who have access to BBC online in a poor country.  He was taken out of power after he declared that he would hold a public referendum to allow him to run for re-election.  It is also interesting to know that there are people who have lived under a military dictatorship and yet still support a military that is so powerful that it, within days, deposes and appoints a president.  When I explained this to my Spanish teacher, he said, you just don't understand the Latin American mentality.  Zelaya is not really even that much of a leftist, but when people feel that their interests are at stake, they will accept any action that makes them feel like that immediate threat, perhaps to their pocketbook, is removed.  I respect my teacher immensely.  He is great intellectual, and also the only person I really know who is honest about having voted for the kirchernista Heller in the last election and who openly agrees with CFK, even about how she dealt with the farmers.  I respect that he is honest about liking la presidenta when obviously in one moment many, even a few from Capital, did, but, like with Bush, all of sudden people pretend they had nothing to do with the person who is really screwing up (or at least you know that's how everyone else thinks, so you pretend to be in agreement).  I was so shocked when he told me he was going to vote for Heller and how he felt about "the couple".  He is not in love with them, but he does at least like CFK, which is rare for Buenos Aires and also shows an independence of thought.  Also, like Pino Solanas, and many Las Vegas 70's lounge singers before him, he has a proclivity for the turtle neck.  

One day I will write a book on Buenos Aires buses.  I'm not sure how to organize the chapters. I don't know if I would do it by bus line or hour of the day, maybe even by the music the driver chooses.  Different lines certainly have different characters (both the feeling of the bus and the literal meaning of the word character when used to describe its passengers).  A bus at rush hour can be a dreadful thing.  Last week a woman, well-dressed and with all appearances of decency, shoved me out of the way to get on the 22 ahead of me.  She prevented me from stepping onto the bus so that the could pass me.  

I must be off.  I have to write about plastic bags, must remember that I must share a conversation I had about that with my PTS friend.  

I am not proofreading anything I'm writing.  Sorry, but after Columbia I just don't want to care so much and let it flow.