The Third Person

REYKJAVIK, Iceland – A few days after the U.S. Congress approved an $85-billion energy bill late last month that critics decried as loaded with giveaways to the fossil-fuel industry and stingy on renewable resource funding and energy conservation, the largest field test of hydrogen-powered municipal buses was wrapping up across Europe.

The energy bill, the outlines of which were years in the making, contained $125 million for a five-year, fuel-cell bus demonstration program and about $3.5 billion for R&D on fuel-cell technology and hydrogen as a clean fuel source.

Although the U.S. Fuel Cell Council, an industry advocacy group, praised the funding, others believe that by designating such relatively small funding to this technology, Congress has ensured that the United States will lag in the development and application of what some regard as the energy technology and fuel of the future.

Early this month, nations involved in the Clean Urban Transport for Europe project concluded a two-year test of Mercedes Benz fuel-cell buses – 30 total – in 10 European cities.

In Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital city, three buses enjoyed a highly successful run, according to Tim Sasseen, a senior field service engineer with Vancouver, Canada-based Ballard Power Systems. Ballard, which is a world leader in the development of fuel cells, partnered on the buses with DaimlerChrysler, Shell Hydrogen and Icelandic New Energy.

“And drivers in Stockholm said they were not as tired at the end of the day due to vibration,” he added.

For the field test, the CUTE project involved installing fuel cells on modified Citaro buses, which is the standard Mercedes Benz municipal bus platform. Project cities were in Sweden, Portugal, Germany, Luxembourg, Holland and Spain, as well as in London and Reykjavik. The project was also run in Perth, Australia.

Electrolysis-produced hydrogen generates energy to power the buses. Water vapor, the sole emission, escapes through the tailpipe.

Besides being a clean fuel source, fuel cells are two to three times more energy efficient than gasoline, Bragi Arnason, a University of Iceland professor and the nation’s hydrogen guru, noted in the July 8 Grapevine, an English-language newspaper.

So far, DaimlerChrysler is the world’s leader in fuel-cell adaptation to municipal transit. Toyota has eight hybrid/fuel cell buses in Tokyo, according to Sasseen, and a bus project is set to begin this autumn in Beijing.

Last September, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a demonstration program involving Ford Motor Corp. vehicles equipped with Ballard fuel cells.

Besides mass transit and eventual automobile usage, fuel-cell technology is envisioned for a host of energy applications, including home heating and home electricity and even cellular phone power.

Optimistic estimates are that it will be another five years before fuel-cell buses begin to be cost compatible with diesel buses. It is expected to be several more decades before fuel-cell automobiles are in widespread use.

In April 2004, California Gov. Arnold Swarzenegger signed an executive order creating a public/private partnership to build a network of 150-200 hydrogen fueling stations or a “hydrogen highway” by 2010.

Hydrogen for fuel cells can be harvested from various sources, including natural gas, biomass, coal, oil or water. Producing it from those sources typically results in the generation of carbon dioxide at the beginning of the process, which is counterproductive to the clean-energy concept.

However, the hydrogen produced for the Reykjavik buses comes from water – from Iceland’s hydro-electric grid, which is virtually pollution free.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Pounding on drums under a sizzling afternoon sun, several dozen union members marched through a downtown plaza here recently, chanting slogans and setting off firecrackers. Their leader paused at a camera to answer questions for a television reporter. Then he strode over to several police officers and briskly shook their hands, thanking them for not halting the protest.

A few blocks away, neatly coifed matrons strolled through a fashionable district of Cartier, Hermes and Burberry shops where uniformed doormen tended marble- and polished-brass entryways to elegant apartment buildings.

Welcome to Buenos Aires.

Much has changed from two years ago when a default on the nation’s crushing foreign debt triggered the deepest economic crisis South America has known.

The crisis sparked severe government belt tightening. Joblessness soared, general strikes erupted and workers poured into the streets facing police resistance.

The repercussions of that crisis still rumble through this nation of 38 million, despite the presidential election last April that buoyed hopes that incoming President Nestor Kirchner could do something his predecessor could not, and despite an improved economy that is now adding jobs rather than shedding them.

Indeed, Argentine businesses invested $2.78 billion in the first 10 months of this year, or about twice what they invested in 2002, and they accounted for 35.1 percent of all investments in the national economy in the first 10 months, up from 23 percent last year. In addition, a recent report by the Di Tella University’s Center for Financial Studies showed consumer confidence up 15.8 percent over November 2002.

Still, in a recent speech to the Argentine Chamber of Commerce, Kirchner noted that Argentina is still straddled with a debt that is 150 percent of the size of its national economy, even though the country benefited from a monthly 1 percent gain in real wages over the last half year. The government forecasts that gross domestic product will grow 7 percent this year, the fastest in six years.

By electing Kirchner as president, voters made Argentina the last South American nation, with the exception of Columbia, to have a left-of-center president.

To placate rising expectations by workers and stimulate the consumer economy, Kirchner pledged to employ a few economic incentives that international lending groups, such as the International Monetary Fund, discourage.

The government plans to raise the minimum wage in January to 350 pesos a month from 300 pesos, about $100. So far this year, it ordered three rounds of targeted wage increases to restore some salaries to their pre-peso-devaluation level.

“According to Kritz’s estimates, 75 percent of the workers that benefit from the wage increases belong to the half of the population that is not below the poverty line,” according to the Dec. 12 Buenos Aires Herald. “Among workers below the poverty line, only 12 percent are formally employed. By ordering wage increases in this manner, the government may be counteracting its own goal of achieving a fairer distribution of income, Kritz concludes. In other words, while the rich [relatively speaking] are getting richer, the poor are as poor as ever.”

With an official jobless rate at about 15 percent, pensions lowered and the farming industry suffering under a World Trade Organization agreement that the minister of economics said creates unfair advantage for subsidized United States and European agricultural exports, working people remain discontent and union picketers continue to march here and in the provinces.

Still, earlier this year Argentines marked 20 years of a democratic turnaround from the reign of the generals and the 1976-83 so-called Dirty War, a dark period when an estimated 30,000 workers, students, journalists, intellectuals and others “disappeared” for speaking their mind. Clutching flower-ringed photographs and banners, mothers of many of the disappeared continue to hold memorials for their loved ones every Thursday here at the Plaza de Mayo.

The Dirty War still echoes here, and early in December it was reported that a team of investigators found no evidence that the German carmaker Mercedes-Benz conspired with the government during the military dictatorship to disappear 10 workers from one of its factories outside town.

One of Kirchner’s pledges was to clean up corruption and incompetence. In November he ordered a “complete cleansing” of the 47,000-member Buenos Aires province police force. He has sought to remove Supreme Court justices, accusing them of malfeasance, and his administration suspects that police brass looked the other way as rogue cops carried out kidnappings of members of prominent business families and celebrities for ransom.

Most recently, his administration convinced Uruguay to reverse a decision to appoint a naval attaché to Argentina who is accused of being “a savage torturer.”

Argentina is a member of Mercosur, a trading block that also includes Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil. Twenty-five percent of Mercosur’s trade is with the European Union, which absorbs about half of Mercosur’s agricultural exports.

Argentina’s relations with one EU nation, England, grew frosty early in December over ramifications from the 1982 war in the British-governed Falkland Islands, over which Argentina has always claimed sovereignty. A leaked document revealed that British warships carried nuclear depth charges during the war in the Falkland Islands, which Argentina calls the Malvinas Islands.

Although Argentina lost the 73-day war, it sunk six British warships. London denied that any of the sunken ships carried nuclear weapons. But Kirchner demanded an explanation and apology, which the Blair administration ignored.

Meanwhile, on Monday Jaime Jelincinc, the mayor of Magallanes and the Chilean Antarctic Province, pointed out that “Chile supports Argentina’s claim to Malvinas,” according to the Mercopress News Agency.

He also called for direct air flights to the islands from Argentine soil on an Argentine carrier. Currently, only a Chilean carrier flies to the islands once a week from Chilean cities and once a month from Rio Gallegos, a city in the Patagonia region of southern Argentina.

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay – If seductive Samba rhythms are what you seek for a carnival getaway the week before Lent, then Rio or Salvador in nearby Brazil are the places to be. But here in this port city of 1.3 million it is candombe, the Afro-Uruguayan drum-dance tradition that provides the explosive cultural backdrop to carnival.

Although blacks comprise a small percentage of the Uruguayan population – fewer than 5 percent – their musical tradition of candombe, nurtured from slave days, has seen a resurgence in recent years, corresponding to the growing interest elsewhere in various types of world music.

Candombe is front and center on New Year’s Day, as well as during the Jan. 6 observance of Epiphany and on celebrations of other holidays. Members of dance clubs parade through the streets in flashy costumes and makeup, using a stick and the palm of an open hand to beat on potbellied drums hung around their necks.

Some well-known candombe clubs have named themselves after African countries or African ethnic groups.

The resurgence of candombe has encouraged some Uruguayans of European descent to reexamine a segment of the nation’s history that is not always appreciated.

The Museo del Gaucho, near this city’s old town section, portrays some of the contributions of blacks to the gaucho or cowboy culture of the Uruguayan countryside. In addition, Pedro Figari, a famed Uruguayan impressionist, portrayed black culture in his early 20th-century paintings.

Nonetheless, Alejandro Frigerio, an Argentine sociologist who is familiar with issues facing blacks in Argentina and Uruguay, noted that candombe has become a musical lingua franca, providing a framework for unity between blacks and their supporters in both countries.

Frigerio points to candombe differences between Uruguay and Argentina. And he notes that the musical form has been popularized to the point of being taught and practiced by white musicians in Argentina, which has an even smaller black population than Uruguay.

But just as white suburban teens in the United States have become major purchasers of urban-born rap music, some black Uruguayans worry if their musical form, which thrives in Barrio Sur, home to many blacks, will eventually be co-opted by the larger society.

Ruben Rada, one of Uruguay’s best-known black drummers and band leaders noted in the Aug. 15, 2000, Christian Science Monitor that “Whenever artists were sent abroad to represent Uruguay, they never sent black people. Not many people in the world, including Latin America, know Uruguay has black people.”

That perception is being fought by Mundo Afro, a black cultural and civil rights group formed here in 1988. It runs a cultural center that keeps black dance and theater alive, and it has collaborated with black organizations in other Latin American nations.

In March 2000, it hosted a conference of representatives of various black communities in Latin America that examined such topics as the challenges facing black women, black culture, racial discrimination, the struggle for land and the black role in the foundation of the Americas. Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle addressed the event.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – This Southern Cone nation of 38 million is best known for tango, grilled steaks, red wine, knockout landscapes and its gaucho culture. Its capital city is regarded as the “Paris of South America” because of its numerous plazas, statues, fountains, outdoor cafes, museums, French colonial architecture and bohemian zest.

Although indigenous people and blacks are few in number, according to some estimates, blacks constituted 30 percent of the population in the early 1800s. But later in that century a yellow fever epidemic and a war with Paraguay killed off many black Argentines.

Alejandro Frigerio, an Argentine sociologist familiar with issues facing blacks, considers that to be an overestimate. He said it is difficult to be precise about the number of blacks living in Argentina. He believes that descendants of Argentine slaves are outnumbered by blacks from the Cape Verde Islands, most of them born here, in addition to blacks from Brazil, Uruguay and elsewhere in Latin America who’ve settled here.

The following are excerpts from my interview with Frigerio:

Question: Have there been any recent issues involving black Argentines? What are the most critical challenges facing black Argentines? Education? Employment? Is there housing discrimination?

Answer: The most pressing urges for Afro-Argentines are, as one of them recently said in a public meeting at the university, to fight invisibilization and discrimination.

Also, as Africa Vive leaders say, most of them are poor, and have the same problems that millions of Argentines now face after a decade of harsh neo-liberal economic policies: unemployment and reduced social and welfare services. The new Kirchner government is trying to improve things, but it will take time.

We lack good research on the needs of Afro-Argentines. They have only recently been “re-discovered” as a topic of research. Also, when I started research in the 1990s, several of them did not want to talk about their condition as “blacks.” Now a group of activists are trying to change things – although they also encounter the resistance of some of their peers who do not want to be reminded of their blackness.

Q: I see that Montevideo has a black city councilor. Are there any black elected officials in Argentina?

A: No.

Q: Who are some of the best known black Argentines?

A: Because of the invisibilization of Afro-Argentines, and the way racial categorization works here (I have a paper on this but it is in Spanish), most living notable blacks are not considered so because they are light mulattos. The greatest living tango musician (pianist Horacio Salgan) has a black mother. Since he is light-colored, he is not considered black.

The most famous jazz musician (Oscar Aleman, who died I think 20 years ago) is also black, but this is not mentioned so frequently nowadays. Probably the most famous black figure is Gabino Ezeiza, the most noted payador, who died a century ago.

Q: Are there antidiscrimination laws in Argentina? Are those laws strong enough?

A: The only good thing the [former President Carlos] Menem government did was to create a National Institute Against Discrimination (INADI – Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminacion). This has created a forum where people can denounce discrimination of all sorts.

There have been a couple of laws against discrimination. In this sense, people have legal advantages they did not have years ago. The institute and the laws were probably thought more in terms of Jews and other ethnic groups but now many minority groups can take advantage of them.

This collection of articles I wrote over the years on assignment on foreign shores. Enjoy!