Argentina’s Most Watched YouTube Video
Almost six million people have watched this video.
Why? I’m not sure. It’s not that interesting. But it’s interesting enough. It’s a tale that’s been told a million times, over and over again, in all countries and in all languages.
Part of what’s interesting about this video, perhaps, for Argentina observers, is that it dispels a couple of myths about the country.
One of those myths is that the cops are all bad, all untrustworthy, corrupt scalawags. That may be the case some of the time, but it’s certainly not the case all of the time, and the attitude of the cop in this video seems to underscore that notion.
He couldn’t be more polite. It’s as if he were cast especially for this role just to show how decent cops behave. Just listen to the way he tells the drunkard to refrain from using vulgarities in the presence of a lady.
Another myth, one that’s often propagated by Argentines themselves, is that everything that’s what’s wrong with the country is the fault of Argentines, themselves. Some problems – alcoholism and drug abuse among them – derive more from human nature and biochemistry than from nationality.
At one point in the video the woman (let’s call her the Good Samaritan) becomes so frustrated by the lack of help from others that she says, “Thanks for nothing, we’re Argentines.” What she’s doing, of course, is denigrating all Argentines because of the actions of a few select people.
By doing so, she’s exaggerating the nature of the problem she’s confronting and illogically extrapolating from it to conclude that the entire nation of Argentina is responsible for the trouble she’s experiencing.
In reality, the events shown in this video could just as easily have taken place in my hometown in Colorado, or in your hometown, or on the streets of New York, or Beijing or Cairo.
Alcoholism, drug abuse, stupidity and violence are universal demons (I’m using the word figuratively) whose causes and consequences are endemic not to one people, or one city or country, but to the entire human race.
Perhaps it’s because of this that so many people, in so many countries, have deemed it worthwhile to watch this video.
Taos, you are spot on. She misses the fact that there is a cop doing his job and doing it well right in front of her. If anything this should give people some reassurance that there are decent cops and good Samaritans (like the guys helping the cop).
I don’t know about you, but I got a good feeling out of this one.
I don’t know about the 6 million …but for the Argentines among them, the fascination is probably about how different things are today as opposed to something less than 10 years ago. For the others, it might be that Buenos Aires has been sold to them as a “safe paradise”, a reputation that it has had among Latin Americans for about a century.
We foreigners might tend to think of Argentina as being historically unstable but that’s really not the case in social and cultural terms. The country that produced a bigger middle class than all of Latin America combined and a capital that ranks about the 10th largest city in the world probably still enjoys more calm and civility than one should have a right to expect.
After the collapse, circa 2001, that character started to change. Being from Chicago, I couldn’t notice it like a porteño. Other big-city migrants started to discover Buenos Aires about the same time and probably never gave a passing glance to a drunk/druggy staggering off the curb to stop traffic, either. In fact, the lack of such incidents probably impressed us, at least subliminally.
But to long-time residents of Capital, scenes like this were a sea change. They had never really seen things like this as something that you could witness anywhere, anytime.
I remember a Buenos Aires, pre-”crisis”, that insisted upon its order and decorum. When the cartoneros first appeared, for example, I feared for the worst. I thought that the city would never tolerate them and I was afraid of a crack-down.
It turned out that the crisis made both rich and poor feel a certain “we’re all in the same boat” sensation. No crack-downs ensued …to the surprise of everyone, I think.
Now, 10 years later, I think we’re all still close to the memory when scenes like this were not routine …yet we see them enough today that we’ve begun to accept them. That having one leg in the past and the other in that video is really disconcerting to long-time porteños.
Maybe that explains some of the hits from here.
I wonder why the TV crew didn’t stop what they were doing to get him out of the extremely risky situation he was in, with cars zooming by so closely. Never mind, I think I know the answer…and it is not an Argentinean exclusive, unfortunately. They could have taken him out of risk first and interview him later, for example. But they would rather have a selling product and couldn’t give less about the poor guy. I think they would have regretted it if the guy was hit right in front of their camera, or perhaps they would have been happy to get it on film, who knows…And maybe that same yellow journalism is partly responsible for most passerbys not getting involved; their scare fed partially by the constant bombardment of yellow press in the media, showing robberies, kidnappings, and human tragedy as if it was the only thing happening in the city. The “good Samaritan” however, went out of her way to help this person, she even mentioned driving him to where he was going! I see a reminiscence of the old Buenos Aires in her, back when portenos were more trusting between each other.
Cris
Cris, Frank and Mike,
Thanks very much for your very interesting comments!
Taos
This video hurt me bad. May be it was the distance, may be teh remember of something that no longer exists… Anyways… thanks for the video.
It’s very sad to watch this. Unfortunately it happens everyone.
Not that long ago in US, do not recall which state, on a busy street a person was hit crossing the street, and all that was taped. Cars did not even stop, no one called 911 for I believe over half an hour and the person was just lying on the street while cars zoomed by and people walked on sidewalks, stared and then passed by . Imagine, NOT even the phone call to 911. And how about another victim in Emergency waiting room IN THE HOSPITAL, who was in seizure and security personnel passed him/her by many, many times and did not do nothing (another case in US, taped with security camera). It is all about the people around the world, and, as it was mentioned, it has nothing to do with nationality, more with humanity. At least here there was this kind lady trying to help out this man, in the two cases I mentioned, no one helped for some time which were vital to the victims.
Being from Los Angeles i notice that the cops here in Argentina
don’t have any deadly weapons on them or seem to use them.
There isn’t a heavy flashlight or stick, and the cop doesn’t
do any body searches for the drunk perp here. Also he
doesn’t call for back up.
Really, this guy would be in the
hospital clinging to life if he pulled this in my home city.
This “Leaving Buenos Aires” video shows us how one is one’s worst enemy, on the strength of wants, and vanished past: attempting to escape it in any way possible. All the while, life a step away from ending, still trying to find itself among us right now.
Thanks for posting this. I hadn’t seen it before. Just a comment. What do you think of the cop’s response to Ramon’s aggression? It seems that he loses it, he’s not just defending himself, he’s putting the guy at risk again. You said that the cop couldn’t be more polite, but I think that his response to aggression was quite unprofessional (I mean it’s the response someone without training and temperamental would have had).
Hi Dani,
I can certainly appreciate your point. That said, the cop’s response to being punched in the struck me as reasonable. No matter how much training one has, the immediate instinct after being hit like that is to fight back. Despite this, the cop seemed to be aiming to deter the drunkard from further aggression, not to inflict pain on the poor man or beat him to a pulp. As Annie noted, he didn’t seek retribution, which is important. Once he had the poor guy down on the street, he could have hit him again, but he didn’t. He simply moved to restrain him, and I think that speaks well of the officer.
Saludos,
Taos
Dani, I wonder if you can imagine, as Bill from LA does, what would have happened to someone in LA who attacked a cop? It seems to me that this police officer, as you point out, is likely lacking in the area of training for hand to hand combat, but I can say that I was impressed he immediately stopped all response once the guy was handcuffed. No retribution. I think people ask a lot of cops, to be out there, in the street, protecting us, often from ourselves, and to be expected not to feel anger or to respond with self-protection in mind, when attacked by the people they are trying to help. He seems like a good guy to me, let’s not try to make it look like something else…
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Thanks for your responses. It’s probably hard to determine an answer for this, it’s subjective. I’m not trying to “make it look like something else,” Annie. It simply looks to me like something else. The lady had a similar feeling than me, obviously, because the first thing she says is “pará que tenés un arma, pará, pará.” I think she thought that the cop lost his temper and anything could happen. I agree that nothing happened after he was handcuffed. So my only objection was the lack of training or professionalism for a defensive fight against someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing.
I ask a lot from cops. They carry guns and can legally inflict harm on people (under certain constrains) so I believe that they have to be held to higher standards than the rest of us. I don’t ask people who don’t specialize in what I do to have the same standard as me on that activity. Cops deal with violence and I expect them to know what they are doing all the time. Am I asking too much? Aren’t we all asked to have a standard different from non-specialized people in whatever we do in our professional lives? On a more speculative note, we cannot forget two things: 1) that there is a camera and the cop is aware of that. 2) that we don’t know (or do we?) what happened next, when the drunk guy is finally in the police station, with no other protection or witnesses than cops. Of course, I cannot imply what we don’t see, only point that we are seeing a part of it, hopefully not different from what is not on camera.
It is very sad that the policeman behaves in such an unproffesional way, unprepared to handle a situation with a completely intoxicated , uncordinated person. I am not saying good or bad cop, but by looking at the “street fight”…, can’t belive it!
And who knows for how long the intoxicated person was interfering with traffic, in a densely populated, well known, part of the city, during the day.
I can’t tell what would happen later. But I think that there is total lack of resources: no training for the policeman, no patrolling, a sense that anything can happen and there’s no law enforcement, or anybody to protect the citizens. Isn’t that what is going on in Buenos Aires now?
Sad.