A second highlight for her was going to the Plaza de Mayo to see the Thursday march of "the Madres". This ritualistic march started out as a quiet, peaceful demonstration by the mothers whose children disappeared during the military dictatorship in place between 1976 and 1983. They wear white head scarves to symbolize the blankets of their children...These scarves are painted on the ground in their honor around the plaza where they march...
Katherine saw this group who appeared to symbolize the original marchers...
However, as we have learned while here, the "madres" has turned into a political machine, supporting specific political candidates and receiving contributions from various politically-motivated sources. They now view their organization as a bigger-picture human rights organization, and have a lot of political clout. Katherine's guess was that this group represents this new direction...
It is also known as a peaceful demonstration, but this week, the media was out in force...
Our guess was that this was related to the breaking news this week that one of the administrators of the organization has allegedly been pilfering funds for "his" own use.
Politics seems very interesting in Argentina, and there was lots of activity while we were here, as there is a presidential election this year. Lots of candidates. And much speculation about whether or not the current president will run again, or if her husband, who was the president before her, will run.
So enough about that...may be hard to follow in the US, as it has become evident while here that the US doesn't seem to cover what's going on down here very well.
For our last night in Buenos Aires (or Katherine's last night anyway :-), we opted to go to one of the tango shows. They have gotten mixed reviews from folks as being too tacky, too commercialized, not very good food, etc. But we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We went to the Piazola (sp?) show (he is a famous tango composer whom Katherine knew about). First there was a tango lesson included. It was not quite the same as our private lesson with Cherie and Ruben, but we got to try out our moves that we had learned, so it was fun (Cherie, I still can't get the hang of moving my feet so far backwards!). Then dinner, then the show. They have singers in between the dancing, and Katherine and I would agree with the critics that we could have done without that. They also did a couple of folk dance numbers which we thoroughly enjoyed. Then they invited audience members to come on stage and dance with the dancers, which we of course did, which was a fun cap-off to our tango evening!
Location:Ayacucho,Buenos Aires,Argentina
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