Burning Fields

The smoke has cleared, for the time being, although one night about three weeks ago the entire slumbering population of Buenos Aires collectively awoke, put on its slippers, and ran to the kitchen in search of the fire. Finding nothing, those who could went back to sleep. The rest of us made coffee and waited for the sun to come up.

For the lucky few with river views, it might've been worth the wait, rising as it did a stout blood-orange over Uruguay and the Rio de la Plata. For everyone else, daylight was just backlight diffused through the thick, acrid smoke that during the night had crossed the General Paz and advanced (block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood) until it was everywhere. Windows were sealed as best they could be. There was a run on surgical masks. Anyone with access to a house sufficiently south went there. Then, with just enough wind to carry it but not enough to carry it away, the smoke reached there as well. And there it stayed for a few days, irritating eyes and throats and lungs, causing a number of catastrophic pile-ups (after which several major highways were closed), and sending everyone - or their domestic employees - scurrying out to gather the laundry.

As it turns out, the fire was (and still is) about 100 kilometers to the north, up in the province of Entre Rios (or, "between rivers"), where 60,000 hectares of grassland have been burning out of control in the Paraná Delta. Apparently it had been burning for quite a while. Some of the locals had been complaining about it to any government official who would listen. Few did, until the wind shifted, sending the smoke down here to the capital, where it promptly hit the fan: that is, the federal government's ongoing, very nasty, ideologically-charged, potentially explosive confrontation with "El Campo" (that is, the entire agricultural sector, along with the various regional economies that depend upon it).