If you or someone you know needs help getting a DNI, a drivers license or getting their residency papers in order, help is on it’s way.

The “Immigrant Mutual Aid Society” has arrived and it’s entire purpose is to help you get legally settled into this wonderful country.

The Society is a kind of “open source” group aimed at linking people together so they can help each other with common challenges.

According to the group’s website:

“Our model is the old 19th century immigrant mutual aid societies that helped members of their respective ethnic groups with learning and assistance with Spanish, finding their way around, finding housing, finding employment, navigating bureaucracy, social services, medical services, legal services, residency and citizenship, friendship and camaraderie, and generally saving time and effort that can be better spent enjoying life.”

The Society will hold its first seminar on “How to Obtain Legal Residency” next Tuesday. Details follow:

Where: areatres – Malabia 1720 (right behind the Starbucks, in Palermo Soho)
When: Tuesday, September 22, 2009 – 7:00pm
Contact info: info@immigrantmutualaid.com.ar

*Kudos to Yanqui Mike for the heads up on this.

Editor’s Notice: I’ve gotten a number of emails about this, so for those of you who are interested you can follow me on Twitter here. I’ll post Twitter links to other contributors as they offer to share them.

Have you ever been scared or angered while driving down the streets of Buenos Aires?

If so, you’re not alone.

That’s because Porteños are exceptionally aggressive drivers, according to a new survey from the Road Safety and Experimentation Center (CESVI).

A whopping 78% of Porteños drive aggressively at some point while on the road, according to the survey.

Around 38% of people polled said they “usually” drive aggressively while 40% say they are sometimes aggressive.

Some 12% of people surveyed said they “only insult people while driving if they themselves are insulted first.”

Just 10% of those polled said they are drive like the Buddha – peacefully.

It’s common to hear horns honking and insults on the city’s streets. In some ways it’s part of the city’s mystique.

But the aggressive behavior and the constant insults and single-fingered gestures obviously have a downside.

“This behavior reflects the constant state of intolerance and aggression with which we live in our country,” said the study.

Around 75% of aggressive drivers are men, according to the study.

Link: 15 Rules For Stress-Free Driving In Argentina
Link: Argentine Post Video: Traffic in Argentina

By Joel Richards

When the Argentine Football Association was hunting for a new national team coach ten months ago, Diego Maradona’s name was nowhere to be seen.

The albiceleste were on the back of a poor run of form with just one win from six World Cup qualifiers, and the team needed new ideas to put them back on track.

The old-school style of the gruff Alfio Basile, now the Boca Juniors coach, clashed with the young generation of millionaire superstars that returned from Europe to represent the country.

The names suggested as possible candidates to replace Basile varied in profile and status. Maradona didn’t fit into any of the categories – with virtually no experience in coaching, a controversial past and a rocky relationship with AFA president Julio Grondona, El Diez was never in contention. That is, until he himself threw his hat into the arena.

In a matter of days, the situation turned on its head and Maradona was presented as the new Argentina coach. It was an enormous risk for AFA to take, for several reasons, not least of which was the possibility that Maradona’s legend could be tarnished. (more…)

Crime seems to have worsened last month, according to a new study.

But as overall crime rose, the percentage of violent criminal acts appears to have declined.

Still, Torcuarto Di Tella University’s latest crime “victimization rate” survey indicates that both overall criminal activity and violent crime continue to be a cause for concern.

Di Tella’s study, which surveys households in 40 urban centers around the country, shows that 31.6% of these homes said at least one household member was a victim of a crime within the past 12 months. That figure is up just a hair on the year, but it’s up almost 11% from the previous month.

Crime was worst last month in Greater Buenos Aires, where just over a third of households reported having at least one crime victim. It was lowest in the cities of Cordoba, Mendoza, Rosario and Tucuman, where 28.4% of households reported having a victim.

In the City of Buenos Aires, 31.4% of households said at least one resident had been a victim of crime.

In another poll carried out in May, 71% of those surveyed said they had changed their habits – stopped going to certain places or avoided going out alone – because of concern about crime.

Link: Di Tella Victimization Survey

The number of homes sold in the City of Buenos Aires in July plummeted 38.73% from the same month a year ago, the public notaries association, or “Colegio de Escribanos,” said Monday.

Sales fell just 1.9% from the previous month (June).

Exactly 4,199 homes were (formally) sold in July, compared with 6,853 a year ago. The total value of of the homes sold was almost 1.2 billion pesos (US $311 million), down from 1.5 billion pesos a year ago.

That puts the value of the average home sold in July at 285,409 pesos (US $74,132). That’s pretty close to the average price of US $72,402 in 2000, when the peso was pegged 1-to-1 to the U.S. dollar.

In other words, average property values have changed little in dollar terms over the past decade. But in peso terms, they’ve shot up 294%.

In order for residents of the city to have been able to keep up with the dramatic peso-based rise in prices, their salaries would had to have risen at a higher rate than inflation every year since 2002, when Argentina devalued its currency and let the peso “float” against the dollar.

But that hasn’t happened. Salaries have risen by a much smaller percentage, meaning that when it comes to buying property, most Porteños are notably worse off now than they were a decade ago.

By Fiorella Donayre

The ninth annual “Vinos y Bodegas” wine exposition opens at La Rural Tuesday, bringing together big name local wine producers and boutique vineyards for three nights under one roof to showcase the 2009 harvest.

Among activities, there will be cooking demonstrations and live music shows. The supermarket Jumbo will also be selling 100 different labels at a 35% discount.

The trade promotion group ExportAr will also hold a roundtable to put Argentine producers in touch with foreign importers (Click here for more info about this.)

This year’s grape harvest dropped 24 percent from last year, as cold weather in the Argentine Fall of 2008 damaged plants. The slide may lead Argentina to import cheap wine from Chile to meet large domestic demand for everyday table wines that cost around five pesos per bottle, according to this article in the Argentine business newspaper El Cronista.

Argentina last imported Chilean wine in 1993 after hail and cold weather during the previous year damaged vines.

While weather hurt this year’s grape production, exports of bottled wines to the U.S., Argentina’s top market, jumped 39 percent to 25 million liters during the first half of this year, according to the USDA.

Event Details:

When: 6pm to 11pm daily.
Where: Pedestrian entrance:  Av. Santa Fe 4201.
Parking entrance: Av. Sarmiento 2704 and Cervino 4476
Cost:  60 Pesos

For more information: www.expovinosybodegas.com.ar

*Fiorella Donayre is a Peruvian lawyer who moved to Buenos Aires in 2004. She completed the professional chef’s program at Mausi Sebess in 2006 and has worked as a pasante at the Caesar Park Hotel’s Agraz restaurante in Recoleta and at El Señorio de Sulco in Lima. She can be reached at: fiorella (AT) argentinepost.com

Like the mythical Phoenix that dies in flames and is reborn from its own ashes, former president Néstor Kirchner this week reemerged from the quietude of his self-imposed isolation following a stunning setback in June’s midterm congressional election.

The former president’s return was just as fiery as the run-up to his defeat in the election, when Congressman and wealthy businessman Francisco de Narváez outpolled Kirchner by a small margin in the all-important province of Buenos Aires.

Given Argentina’s proportional voting system, both candidates won seats in Congress.

But De Narváez’s victory was a shocking symbolic defeat for Kirchner and his wife and successor, President Cristina Fernández.

The defeat stunned the former president, who offered a bumbling press conference immediately after the election and then fell into a period of unusual silence. (more…)

The Banff Mountain Film Festival, a traveling festival dedicated to screening adventure and sometimes death-defying extreme sports movies, is about to arrive in Buenos Aires.

The festival will show 13 films from Canada, Germany, Norway,  the US and the UK, as well as Argentina. Before the films, there will be free conferences with people who participated in the movies in one way or another. Details follow:

In Buenos Aires:

Where: Cine Hoyts. Dot Baires Shopping Center. Vedia 3632.
When: September 21-23 8pm (pre-film conferences start at 6pm)
Contact: 4704-5222 banff@aver-sa.com
Cost: 25 pesos or 65 for all three nights

If you like art and photography, mark your calendars now.

The globally renown World Press Photo is coming to Buenos Aires.

WPP organizes “the world’s largest and most prestigious annual press photography contest. Prize-winning photographs are assembled into a traveling exhibition that is visited by over two million people in some 45 countries worldwide. A yearbook presenting all prize-winning entries is published annually in six languages.”

Last year’s winner of the WPP’s 52nd annual Photo of the Year prize was a black-and-white photo by American photographer Anthony Suau.

International jury chair Mary Anne Golon said this about the image:

“The strength of the picture is in its opposites. It’s a double entendre. It looks like a classic conflict photograph, but it is simply the eviction of people from a house following foreclosure. Now war in its classic sense is coming into people’s houses because they can’t pay their mortgages.”

Where: Centro Cultural Borges (corner of Viamonte & San Martin, en el microcentro)
When: Sept 11 thru Oct 4
Monday - Saturday: 10.00 – 21.00
Sunday: 12.00 – 21.00
Phone: 5555-5453

Link: World Press Photo

As reported by The New York Times recently, Nazi concentration camp doctor Aribert Ferdinand Heim seems to have escaped Europe after WWII and moved to Egypt, not Argentina, as had been previously thought by some Nazi hunters.

It is now believed that Heim, who reportedly converted to Islam and changed his name to Tarek Hussein Farid, is thought to have conducted hideous medical experiments on Jews during WWII. Evidence now indicates that he died in 1992 in Cairo.

But as recently as two years ago, Nazi hunters were trying to track down Heim here in Argentina (see the video above).

It wasn’t completely out of the question that Heim may have come to Argentina. After all, even more famous Nazis did, including Adolf Eichmann, Joseph Mengele and Erich Priebke.

In 1962 Israeli agents captured Eichmann,who had adopted the name Ricardo Klement, and eventually brought him to Israel for trial. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity, among other things, and hanged.

According to the 2005 book Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, the Nazi’s last words included a special reference to Argentina:

“Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family, and my friends. I am ready. We’ll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.”

In the 2002 book The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Peron’s Argentina, Uki Goñi offers in-depth evidence that Argentina’s government actively collaborated with local Catholic Church officials, the Vatican, and Swiss officials to provide a safe haven to Nazi leaders in Argentina.

Critics say the Argentine government has yet to completely open its archives and clarify its role in providing a cushy, post-war life for the Nazis.