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argentina: another crazy week

Argentina, Buenos Aires, Casa Rosada, valla

The first week of March has come to an end which means two things: autumn is coming & the school year has begun. Naturally, the education system is not immune to current political & economic problems in Argentina. Faced with less funding for schools & salary cuts, threats of striking teachers in half the provinces of Argentina had many people wondering if classes would be in session or not. Buenos Aires had no problems on the first day of class, but the strike was adhered to in seven other provinces. The following day, news media reported that most teachers in the country reported for work, & the story quickly disappeared from headlines. President Duhalde went to Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego to inaugurate the school year. Fortunately there were students and teachers present to listen to his public address!

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argentina: free market peso, day 2

Buenos Aires, microcentro, San Nicolás, corralito, banco

My first experience exchanging dollars to pesos in Argentina went surprisingly well. After over a decade of pegging the peso to the dollar (known as convertibilidad), most exchange places outside of downtown Buenos Aires had gone out of business. Also ATMs previously offered either pesos or dollars, but that’s not an option now. Everyone heads to the microcentro to exchange cash, so off we went too.

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argentina: recent history

Amazing to think that when I wrote the following nine posts, Wikipedia had just come online with minimal content. Who knew how much it would grow?! All the info below can be found easily on the internet today, but in 2002-03 few English-language summaries of Argentine history & current events existed.

Beginning in the 1970s, each section brings you progressively closer to my first blog post about Argentina in Feb 2002. Monthly summaries give an almost day-by-day snippet of major headlines to show how quickly changes occurred both before & after devaluation in December 2001.

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