Introducing Our New Ant Overlords. Argentine Ants (Linepithema humile) have spread to every continent aside from Antarctica, forming Supercolonies such as stretching 3,700 miles (6,000km) of the Mediterranean. Once thought to be independent of one another, scientists now have cause to believe that the disparate Supercolonies in fact make up one global Mega-Colony. They are highly invasive, attack native animals, thrive in fast-growing, high-density colonies, and have an increased capability for cooperation. "The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society," the researchers claim...
posted by Navelgazer on Jul 6, 2009 - 40 comments

Another day in a regular city in Argentina, another thief looking to score a car in a city well fed-up with a high crime rate. Or it would have been, except for the enterprising chicken-suit wearing guy that was promoting a nearby shop, who gave pursuit and captured the would-be car thief. [more inside]
posted by Iosephus on Jun 9, 2009 - 22 comments

Disability and Employment in Argentina: The Right to Be Exploited?
posted by aniola on Apr 11, 2009 - 7 comments

A native of Barcelona, Spain, Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu moved to New York in 2002 to pursue a career in photography. Adriana has been capturing the lives of young Puerto Rican women and their families in Spanish Harlem, NYC. There is a hardness that characterizes Life on the Block. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Apr 11, 2009 - 6 comments

Agustina Vivero, known also as Cumbio, a name derived from Cumbia Villera, a favorite music of hers. She is openly lesbian, 17, has a book, and is becoming quite famous, all from her photos.
posted by jester69 on Mar 17, 2009 - 20 comments

At 18 lanes and 110 metres wide, Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is not only a beautiful example of urban design but is also apparently the widest major road on the planet. [more inside]
posted by Cobalt on Jan 2, 2009 - 60 comments

People with a keen strategic sense maintain a well-diversified hoard of coins and painstakingly build alliances with local shopkeepers or bank tellers, conspicuously proffering coins for one purchase or deposit in the hopes of being indulged when they're short of change at some point in the future. Argentina's coinage problem. [more inside]
posted by cortex on Dec 3, 2008 - 19 comments

Notes from an economic collapse. With the shaky state of the economy, some are modifying their retirement plans. Fortunately, we have helpful tips from survivors of other collapsed economies to help us weather the (possible) approaching storm. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 on Oct 2, 2008 - 30 comments

Candelaria and Herman Zapp drove from Argentina to Alaska in a 1928 Graham-Paige. They wrote and self-published a book about their trip and are now planning a similar trip across Asia. [more inside]
posted by maurice on Sep 21, 2008 - 12 comments

Von Wernich signed the baptism certificate of a girl born in a clandestine prison, whose mother was murdered at his orders. He encouraged torture victims to "testify, for the sake of god and country," perverting the confession into an interrogation tactic. Under a Nazi flag, he witnessed the torture of Jewish journalist Jacobo Timerman [...] Von Wernich was convicted on nearly all counts "under the mark of genocide." The crowds inside and outside the courthouse broke into celebration, singing, lighting firecrackers, some burning effigies of the priest. After thirty years, the saga to bring Von Wernich to justice was over.

The Unending War — Argentina's quest for justice by Sam Ferguson is about how Argentine society is dealing with the legacy of the junta's Dirty War of 1976-83. [more inside]
posted by Kattullus on Jul 30, 2008 - 7 comments

Dancing tango to Eminem [more inside]
posted by ruelle on Jun 29, 2008 - 47 comments

Guitarist and singer José González's myspace page mentions [lots of youtube ahead] Low and Elliot Smith. And no review of the Swede whose parents left Argentina in the 1970s is complete without a reference to Nick Drake. But what about the influence of styles from the hemisphere his parents left behind? [more inside]
posted by umbú on Mar 22, 2008 - 25 comments

Creepy, side-stepping gnome caught on video. [more inside]
posted by essexjan on Mar 15, 2008 - 98 comments

The biggest tourist attraction in Buenos Aires is a cemetery. El Cementerio de la Recoleta is the final resting place for some of Argentina's most illustrious and wealthy residents. (Yes, Evita is among them.) AfterLife explores the architecture, motifs, and history of this cemetery, as well as the stories of its residents. [more inside]
posted by veggieboy on Jan 28, 2008 - 16 comments

The quicker you succeed the better. Declassified documents show Secretary of State Kissenger gave a green light to the Argentine Junta, whilest Rev. Christián González aka Christián von Wernich, also leant a hand, showing that The Catholic Church's involvement with fascism and the Dirty War was far from dead. The Vatican was instrumental in witholding detail. The Desaparecidos probably exceeded 12,000.
posted by adamvasco on Oct 10, 2007 - 8 comments

Alessandra Sanguinetti The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams (flash, a bit NSFW) All at once.
posted by parmanparman on Oct 4, 2007 - 3 comments

The maiden, the boy, the girl of lightning: they were three Inca children, entombed on a bleak and frigid mountaintop 500 years ago as a religious sacrifice.
posted by timory on Sep 11, 2007 - 30 comments

Carlos Gardel was a singer who became a national icon of Argentina. He sang the tango among other styles, but would now be most famous for this, which was originally this. (Lyrics here.) For those of you who think this is all too romantic, listen to another side of tango...(Translation here.)
posted by StrikeTheViol on Aug 1, 2007 - 10 comments

It's genital evolution day! Penis evolution. For my money, evolution reached it's zenith with the Argentine Lake Duck. Plenty more MeFi penis related shenanigans here , including the penis museum.
posted by lalochezia on Jan 23, 2007 - 31 comments

Latin America Turning Left? From the top: Lula da Silva*, Lopez Obrador, Nestor Kirchner, Hugo Chavez*, Alvaro Uribe, Michelle Bachelet*, Ollanta Humala, Alfredo Palacio, Oscar Berger, Leonel Fernandez, Oscar Arias, Tony Saca, Tabare Vazquez, Martín Torrijos, Evo Morales* Manuel Zelaya, Nicanor Duarte, Daniel Ortega, Rene Preval*.
posted by airguitar on Apr 13, 2006 - 30 comments

Argentina On Two Steaks A Day The classic beginner's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon.
posted by rxrfrx on Apr 12, 2006 - 78 comments

Camouflage Comics [requires Flash] - an exploration of the issues of censorship, dictatorship, human rights and the legacy of the Argentinian "Dirty War", the 1976-1983 military junta's repression and extermination of dissidents (when 10,000 to 30,000 Argentinians were tortured and "disappeared"). Produced at the Jan van Eyck Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht, the project presents striking comics and illustrations made between 2002 and 2005 by contemporary Argentinian artists, as well as text essays on the production of comics and cartoons during the dictatorship era.
posted by funambulist on Sep 26, 2005 - 2 comments

The patients are running the microphone. "Health is not the absence of infirmity...Health is the dignity of being human." A live radio show produced by residents of a mental institution in Buenos Aires. (Link in Spanish; English creator bio, news stories: BBC, VOA; documentary info (French); some MP3 episodes; related audio: otras colifatas, Radioteatro de Ever.)
posted by Mo Nickels on Feb 6, 2005 - 8 comments

Argentina Didn't Fall on Its Own. (Single-page, printer-friendly version here.) I don't normally read long articles on economic subjects, but this one is riveting, because it links Argentina's collapse to larger issues of how the world of money works today.

"The time has come to do our mea culpa," Hans-Joerg Rudloff, chairman of the executive committee at Barclays Capital, said at a conference of bank and brokerage executives in London a few months ago. "Argentina obviously stands as much as Enron" in showing that "things have been done and said by our industry which were realized at the time to be wrong, to be self-serving."

...It is like "a bizarre AA program in which you remove booze from the homes of people who are reducing the amount they drink and put it into the homes of people who are drinking more every day," Pettis said. "This is probably not the best way to reduce drunkenness."

posted by languagehat on Aug 3, 2003 - 7 comments

Good Memory. From Argentina, a 1967 school photograph with a story. From the introduction :- 'decided to hold a 25th reunion of my classmates from the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires so that we could see each other again. I invited those I was able to find to my house, and proposed doing a portrait of each of them ... Later, a ceremony was organized, in memory of the students of the school who had disappeared or were murdered by state terrorism in the black years of the dictatorship. After twenty years, the school authorities accepted, for the flrst time, that the missing be officially recognized in the school's main hall. It was a historic occasion ... '
posted by plep on Jan 17, 2003 - 8 comments

A married couple are walking from South Africa to the tip of Argentina, with a quick boat ride over the Bering Strait. Their 65Mm (that's megametre) route follows that which early man used to spread across the world's continents.
posted by Pretty_Generic on Nov 21, 2002 - 23 comments

The US defeated in basketball World Championships by a dominant Argentina team. This breaks the record 58 non-stop winning series since the US allowed NBA players in 1992. I love this, just as I loved all the upsets at the FIFA world cup.
posted by ugly_n_sticky on Sep 5, 2002 - 16 comments

What a real depression looks like. Total collapse of the middle class, malnutrition, starving bands of marauders eating road-kill, it's every survivalists dream come true. Until last year, Argentines were part of the richest, best-educated and most cultured nation in Latin America. Not anymore.
posted by stbalbach on Aug 6, 2002 - 47 comments

Argentina are out of the World Cup in round one for the first time in forty years. England and Sweden go through to round the second. w00t!
posted by stuporJIX on Jun 12, 2002 - 45 comments

ANDDOVUS Nations Authorize ÒRegime ChangeÓ for USA
BUENOS AIRES -- The Association of Nations Destroyed, Destabilized or Otherwise Violated by Uncle Sam, or ANDDOVUS, has authorized the ouster of the current U.S. administration by no later than March 2003. Foreign ministers of the 123 nations that make up ANDDOVUS met earlier this week in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they agreed to appropriate $42.8 billion for what they termed Òregime change in the United States.Ó
posted by mapalm on May 8, 2002 - 11 comments

The Falkland Islands are ours and we'll get them back, says Argentina. Argentina celebrates the twenty-year anniversary of their invasion of the Falkland Islands. Britain won the Falkland War in 1982, but Argentina now boasts that they'll definitely conquer the islands in the future. Since the majority of islanders are of British descent, does Argentina stand a chance? And shouldn't Argentina be focusing on rebuilding its own economy instead of whining about some insignificant islands in the Atlantic ocean?
posted by wackybrit on Apr 2, 2002 - 38 comments

Attempted hijack of United Airlines flight to Argentina...
A passenger was seized by cabin crew today as he attempted to enter the cockpit on an American Airlines flight from the US to Argentina today...
I don't think this is anything al-Quaida related, but I thought it was worth the post.
posted by tomcosgrave on Feb 7, 2002 - 12 comments

Two in a week! That must be a record or something. Nobody knows where is Argentina going, and the rioters keep making damages in the capital. Nice way to spend the New Year's eve.
posted by Flor on Dec 31, 2001 - 10 comments

The most popular board game in Argentina now is called "Deuda Eterna", Eternal Debt. It's been flying off the shelves. It has the players trying to operate South American countries which are rich in natural resources while trying to outfox the IMF. (The name is a play on "Deuda Externa", Foreign Debt, on which Argentina just stopped paying interest.)
posted by Steven Den Beste on Dec 24, 2001 - 12 comments

Argentina Declares State of Siege. After a prolonged national strike (the 8th in two years), protests due to social tensions, violence, and looting have broken out, and in response a state of siege allows for "authorities the right to suspend constitutional guarantees such as the right to assemble and travel freely, while giving police greater powers to make arrests." What effect will this have on South American stability? On worldwide financial markets?
posted by mathowie on Dec 20, 2001 - 23 comments

The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
posted by signal on Oct 14, 2001 - 12 comments

De La Guarda (Flash-only, navigate through to 'Shows' section) This Argentinian collective mixes dance, music, climbing and circus skills in their show 'Villa Villa', which has played in London, Las Vegas and (currently) in New York. They've managed to sum up the whole tribal, visceral experience (think rave rather than Cirque de Soleil) via this site's interactive elements.
posted by skylar on Sep 30, 2001 - 7 comments

Cafe Con Pelvis Wow. Coffee hookers hostesses give you that ‘extra’ attention.
posted by kd on Sep 21, 2001 - 13 comments

Argentine Peso Crashing, Provinces Pay in 'Patacon'
The new scrip will be accepted, officials hope, until the recent US bailout makes it possible to print pesos. The IMF posted 8B dollars last week, at which time 'patacon' was being used in ATMs (Surprise!) I like the above articles noting that it "fits into a wallet like money" --- was there ever a case of design problems in emergency paper currency?
posted by rschram on Aug 27, 2001 - 6 comments

VBS Worm Generator Software. I read in a foreign techi. publication about this Argentin kid who supposedly offers this virus generating software on his homepage. Being a layperson I don't know what to make of it. Is this possible?
posted by semmi on Mar 21, 2001 - 5 comments