Crumbling away behind a facade of optimism

摘要

The jacaranda trees are blooming on the streets of Buenos Aires but in some ways the Argentine summer is almost over. Amid the street demonstrations by piquetero [unemployed groups], an authoritarian, self-deluding government is using a recovery bounce to avoid confronting the deep-seated problems that will come back to haunt it in 2005. Argentina is going down the drain. Even worse, for people like 57-year old Miguel Santangelo - a minicab driver who takes home half of what he did before the 2001 crisis, when the convertibility regime of one peso to one dollar collapsed - the summer never began.