It's World Cup season, so no list of Argentine maladies would be complete without futbol fever. I could go on and on about how soccer is the worst sport ever, but that yarn has been spun many times. I will thus try to be brief. Soccer is an effete sport full of fruity men in short-shorts hungering after balls. It rewards style over substance and encourages its players to fake injuries and over-dramatize everything in hopes of drawing a foul. It often is low-scoring, with ties being common. So, not only is it a stupid sport, but half the time NO ONE EVEN WINS. What a mess.
As far as Argentina is concerned, well, where to begin? Their vaunted history in the sport is due to them cheating in order to win. The fans are obnoxious. I hate how the entire country shuts down during soccer matches, and the loud auto parades that subsequently follow. We Americans really like sports, too, but I'm pretty sure that even during the most alluring football or baseball game, if my house burned down, the fire department would still show up. That's not a guarantee in Argentina.
The national obsession with the sport is perhaps the most maddening. I don't begrudge anyone enjoying some good athletic competition...that's all in good fun! When practically the entire nation worships at the altar of futbol, neglects their lives, families, and jobs (even more so than normally) in order to salivate over it, something is quite wrong. As I told one Argentine friend, Americans just don't care about soccer. We have two wars, and oil spill, and a global economic crisis to deal with. On top of that, we already have plenty of sports that appeal to us much more than soccer.
Wisely, this friend replied that, "Futbol is just a distraction for all of us...yet another thing to make everyone forget the chaos our country has."
No visitor to this grand republic can go more than a few moments without experiencing the glory that is Argentine motoring. For many, the encounter comes right at the airport, where you will cram yourself into a tiny two-door taxicab. In order to truly take in the full splendor of the nation’s cars, one must bravely risk being run down by one and head into the barrios where the true prides of Argentina are garaged. The average car is a corroded old rattletrap that, even when it was brand new in 1974, was still a horrible example of an automotive abortion. But it’s not their aesthetically displeasing aspect that really grinds my gears. Rather, it is the sound of grinding gears. In America we have a wonderful little device called a “muffler,” the purpose of which is to make your vehicle sound less like a Sherman tank and more like a smooth, purring piece of personal transportation. Sadly, this invention has not yet made its way south.
As I lay awake in bed one fine morning, I suddenly became aware that I was experiencing something unprecedented: silence from the street below. I heard nary a chugging Citroen, rumbling Renault, or puttering Peugeot. In my amazement, I forgot to count how long this beautiful moment lasted, but it couldn’t have been more than ten seconds. What a beautiful ten they were, almost certainly unprecedented since the automobile was first introduced here.
It’s one thing to live the awful experience of having to be on the outside looking in to the Argentine automotive world. It’s quite another to take your life into your own hands—or, rather, the shaking hands of a blind, deaf, hopped-up-on-nicotine-and-mate Argie driver*—and actually get into a car. The Argentine driver very much deserves their own entry on the list, but his chariot itself is almost as awful.
A typical car ride allows one to experience the glory of French and Italian engineering. I once thought that GM, Ford, and Chrysler had a monopoly on shitty design, crappy plastic parts, and general mechanical failure. Not so. I will put any dinky Eurocar on the street here up for a battle royal for Worst Car Ever against the worst the U.S. has to offer. The exterior of the car typically has significant rust and structural damage, the result of its owner’s considerable skill behind the wheel. I suspect it is a mark of pride among Argie drivers if their car’s bumper is still attached. However, this seems to be fairly rare, and most are secured with tape or some combination of string, cords, or woven corn husks.
Inside, the seatbelts are either disabled or have been hacked out with a knife. Argies take pride in having one of the highest automotive fatality rates in the world, and they sure as hell aren’t going to let a safety belt ruin that record. The first time I got in an Argiecar, I naturally reached for my seatbelt as a reflex. This got a lot of laughter from the Argie passengers, as apparently only stupid yanquis care about not dying in a fiery, twisted metal accident. Surviving even a short ride with an Argie behind the wheel is always uncertain. The missing windows, random blunt objects protruding from the dashboard, and toxic diesel fumes allow for so many deadly possibilities in the inevitable fatal accident that is just a short ride away.
A fun game to play when riding in an Argentine auto is to imagine just how you would meet your end given that particular death-trap’s features. There are millions of potential combinations of death that are likely to happen to you. In the barely-functioning Renault I last rode in, I calculated that the most likely cause of death was being thrown forward onto the dash as a result of having no seatbelt. I would be impaled on the jagged pieces of metal and plastic on the dashboard, where the car stereo had been pried out. Bloodied and dazed, with already fatal puncture wounds, I would writhe around and get my head trapped in the plastic bag taped over the broken window, and suffocate to death. When riding in a vehicle that has been home-modified to run on natural gas, the exposed tanks precariously exposed in the pickup bed or trunk, I usually like to work some kind of epic explosion into the metric. The possibilities are endless, and each car on the road provides a unique chance of taking a horrible last breath on the side of some dusty ruta nacional.
I must conclude with a quick note about “nice” cars are just as shitty as the aged clunkers. Many a propertied Argentine youth likes to strut his stuff in his Fiat Uno, cruising the local strip with the windows down while the breeze flutters in his mullet. This ultramicrosubcompact style of car is particularly popular here, and that probably has a lot to do with the high traffic fatality rate.Even with a two-cylinder engine, it is quite possible to kill yourself when your car weighs a mere 500 pounds, is made of some kind of plastic composite, and the doors are only half an inch thick. My little cousin’s Power Wheels truck is more sturdy and well-built than these tinny little disgraces. (I’m pretty sure it has more horsepower, too.) Even luxury autos like BMW or Mercedes-Benz are mini-sized and sorry-looking compared to their mighty, full-sized cousins sold on the American market. At least the old Argentine jalopies are big, steel barges that would perhaps provide some protection in an accident. Of course, the driver wouldn’t be wearing his seatbelt anyway, so…moot point.
