BUENOS Aires must be one of the most elegant capitals in the world with its abundance of tree lined streets and neighbourhoods reminiscent of exclusive Paris arondissements, but over the past ten years there’s been a curious evacuation.
Drive an hour north towards Pilar and high walls hedged with barbed wire line the highway. They could be prisons, but they are not. They are the ‘Country Clubs’ or ‘countries’ as they are known locally. Huge gated communities with 24 hour surveillance and housing quoted in dollars. For the professional classes have runaway, taking their families into protected hibernation from the horror of urban life.
The children being raised inside these upmarket camps are isolated from the real world. Their parents might accelerate into the capital city in their four wheel drives to work each day as lawyers, doctors and accountants but the kids left behind never leave the campus apart to be driven to equally secure schools and returned home later. There is no escape.
It seems idyllic, they have the freedom to roam safely within their walled cities with golf courses and pools and tennis: friends of the same social class on tap, able to ride their bikes or skateboard safely. At weekends their parents simply want to invite the neighbours around for an “asado” or relax by the pools. Holidays will be spent in the integrated resorts, shopping done in drive in malls a generation raised who have never crossed a road with traffic lights or walked on a pavement.
Outside the gates shanty towns are gradually emerging to service the needs of the domestic staff that live within and who cannot afford the exorbitant prices of the few supermarkets inside. Outside one of the largest barrios with 1800 luxury homes a whole village is growing like a medieval community beneath castle walls.
It’s not cheap to live in these places, the most exclusive carry monthly maintenance costs of 1000 dollars for membership of the gym and spa and polo lawn and houses up to a million dollars. Potential buyers are queuing up on waiting lists to provide references or in many cases a sponsor. Visitors must produce a special pass.
A teacher from one local private college tells me they used to take their sixth formers to Europe now she arranges special orientation trips to their own capital city just 50 kms away to teach them how to use a Metro or go into a shop before they are confident enough to go to University. It is, she says, like some curious controlled sociological experiment: Shangri-las for the most privileged.
But who can blame these parents, who are going to such extremes to give their children the happiest and remove them from the real world? For in one street in Buenos Aires the message cannot be forgotten: each day, every day mothers draw pavement portraits of their lost sons, their only way to remember the thousands of children who simply disappeared.
