La Plata, Ciudad de Masones

Generally my timing on this trip hasn´t been great, arriving in Benos Aires at the start of the biggest storm in 10 years, visit the Gauchos town when the gauchos are out of town (out on the plains no doubt) and I arrived in La Plata - a small university city an hour´s drive from BsAs - on a scorching Sunday when all the shops are closed and the inhabitants are off on their summer holiday. Since all the interesting things (such as the self-proclaimed best natural historl museum in South America) were closed I amused myself y exploring the place on foot.

It turns out that this rather nice place has a really quite fascinating story history. La Plata was Argentina¨s first fully planned city and the designs for most of the city¨s important architecture were chose by competition sometime and so there are loads of really delicious flashy european builings about the place. Most interestingly I think is the Masonic sub-plot that underpins the roots of the place (if those mixed metaphors work that is). Now I may have this wrong (googlers and wiki-ists can help me here) but what I gathered from Patchi the hostel owner was that the Masons who founded/funded the place did so at a time when the catholic church were not seeing exactly eye-to-eye due to the the Mason¨s religious inclusivity. In the huge Plaza in front of the huge neo-gothic cathederal (only actually finished and fully neo-gothicised in 1998) besides the many other statues I found an archer hidden amongst the trees who appears to be firing directly at the Cathederal. Curiously, one day his bow disappeared.

Also.... when looking at the plan of the city it features not only the usual grid pattern but also some diagonals, clearly shaping out the Mason¨s symbol in the streets. Conspiracy maybe, but a fun and convincing one.

Politically this place is quite controversial. Essentially La Plata was built as the beaurocratic centre of the Buenos Aires district, and therefore of Argentina. If I unerstand it correctly, a notable numer of the beaurocrats are left over from Menem¨s time in office (the chap responsible for privatising everything to foreign investors and screwing things up nicely in time for a crisis a decade later.... all things that I can speculate but many Argentines would never officially say for fear of, well I don¨t know what) now work here as paper pushers in the dusty corridoors of Government back offices here in La Plata.

Anyway, two years ago a left-ist thinker and activist by the name of Julio Lopez went the same way as the Archer¨s bow and hasn¨t been seen or heard of since. "2 años sin Lopez" and "Sin Lopez no hay nunca mas" and similar slogans cover the streets. Earlier military dictatorships became famous for having people ´disappear´by the mother´s protest in Buenos Aires´ Plaza de Mayo, no surprises that where there is still a concentration of the old boys, that kind of thing is still happening.