He died in 1992, but his music lives on in a new album by Gerard Edery.

It is a tribute album in which Edery performs some of his favorite tunes written by the late Argentine musician.

Edery himself is a well-known classical guitar player, as well as a folk singer and master of Jewish Sephardic music.

The tribute album is titled “Edery Sings Yupanqui.”

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The Argentine government insists the number is much lower, under 10 percent. And it’s enlisted the world’s most famous hamburger to help make its case, in a mysterious way.

Step in line at any McDonalds. And you’ll find there’s no Big Mac on the menu.

“It’s really hard to find the Big Mac on the board here. Like, there’s no picture,” said economist Miguel Angel Boggiano, who authors the blog, Carta Financiera.

But if you want to order one? No problem.

And compared to what is on the menu, a quarter pounder or chicken McNuggets, the Big Mac is cheap. With fries and drink, it’s just 22 pesos, or about $5.50. The other meals start at 33 pesos.

So why are the Golden Arches hiding those two all-beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onion on a sesame seed bun?

And selling them at 30 percent off?

Boggiano’s not surprised at all. In fact, he called it, “an obvious thing”.

Boggiano said Argentina’s current government, especially its commerce secretary Guillermo Moreno, is notorious for telling companies to fix certain prices to keep the official inflation rate down.

“I’m 100 percent sure they told the guys at McDonalds, listen, you won’t sell this meal over than this level. So they actually fix it about 30 percent below the other ones,” Boggiano said.

The Economist magazine publishes one of several inflation indicators. Its famous Big Mac index uses the prices of Big Macs worldwide to measure inflation rates. The magazine called out Argentina last year for manipulating the price.

There’s broad consensus among private economists here that inflation is more than double the government’s official rate. Last year, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s administration sued 12 economists for publishing their own figures, including those of former undersecretary of finance Miguel Kiguel.

Kiguel said the government’s sticking to the lower rate, under 10 percent instead of 25 percent, hoping to curb expectations.

“If they can convince people that the inflation is 10 percent, all of a sudden, wage increases would be 10 percent, and people would demand only 10 percent wage increases,” he said.

But that’s not happening. Right now unions are insisting on 25 percent wage increases, and in the past, they’ve gotten them.

Kiguel’s firm, Econviews, consults with foreign companies. He said investors otherwise bullish on Argentina may get spooked by the government’s increasing hand in the domestic economy.

“Lots of controls on imports, controls on exports, also controls on sending dividends abroad,” he said. “But, you know, firms that operate in a country like this, pay attention to this.”

President Fernandez has actively defended the government intervention, saying it’s the only way for her small country to develop mature industries that can compete with the United States and western Europe.

Fernandez de Kirchner is popular with Argentines, having won a landslide election last October. But that doesn’t mean they buy her government’s inflation figures.

Sabrina Perez and Giselle Rodriguez, systems analysts for a local firm, both said inflation is much too high, and salaries aren’t keeping up with prices, like they used to.

“In relation to what you make, if you want to buy yourself something special, you have to work too hard to do it,” Rodriguez said.

Victor Miguel Greco, a security guard at a downtown mall, agreed. But in a country where inflation was as high as 200 percent a couple decades ago, he said Argentines are more used to prices creeping up than, say, Greeks or other Europeans dealing with their current crisis.

“It doesn’t hurt us as much. It’s not good, but you can live with it,” Greco said.

The Argentine government has stayed mum on the Big Mac controversy. When local media asked McDonalds why its most famous product was removed from displays, the company said it’s just marketing new products, like a “Triple Mac”.

But if it’s a fast food deal you’re looking for, the Big Mac may be Argentina’s worst kept secret.

In Argentina, the Senate has just voted to put it under the control of the government.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez believes until now, the fact that opposition newspapers had majority ownership of the company that manufactures newsprint gave an unfair advantage to her political opposition.

But critics say putting the government in control of the supply of newsprint is a challenge to free expression.

Lisa Mullins speaks to an reporter Daniel Schweimler in Buenos Aires.

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Lisa Mullins: Newspapers are losing readers in this country and elsewhere. But in Argentina, they’re still going strong. Which is why a law just passed by the Argentine Senate is controversial. It allows the Government to control the supply of newsprint – that’s the paper that newspapers are printed on. Reporter Daniel Schweimler in Buenos Aires says it’s part on an ongoing conflict over free speech.

Daniel Schweimler: Well, this is in many ways the latest stage in a long-running battle between the Government of President Cristina Kirchner, which started with her predecessor as president, her late husband Nestor Kirchner, who basically fell out with the main media group here in Argentina – the Clarin Group. Which is the owner of the main cable television station, the Clarin newspaper – which is the biggest circulation newspaper in Argentina, very influential – as well as several radio stations and new magazines, and until a couple of years ago the main transmitter of live soccer to the Argentine people. So a very important company in that sense. The Government fell out with them three or four years ago, and one of the areas they have been attacking is the control of newsprint, the paper on which newspapers are printed.

Mullins: So it’s kind of the equivalent for us of say the New York Times and you know, ABC, NBC, CNN, whatever, and ESPN, as if they are all part of the same conglomerate. And what the Government in Argentina is saying is: “Look, this can’t happen. And because you own a leading share of the company that makes the newspaper, the actual paper itself, we’re going to take control of that.” So it’s kind of a free speech issue.

Schweimler: Exactly that. And those have been the first accusations immediately after the law has passed from the two main newspapers – La Nacion and Clarin. Front page editorials, front page stories, saying exactly that. That this is an attack on the freedom of expression. The front of the Clarin newspaper said this is an attack on the very constitution, democracy in Argentina. They’re certainly seeing it in those terms. And the Government here accuses Clarin especially, and La Nacion to a certain extent, of having risen to their positions of prominence during the military rule in Argentina in the late seventies, early nineteen eighties. It’s a very sensitive issue here still, many years after the end of that dictatorship. And the newspapers, to many degrees, have responded in kind with almost daily attacks on the Government, on different ministers in the Government, which the Government here sees as blatantly unfair and undemocratic.

Mullins: Can’t that conglomerate get the paper someplace else?

Schweimler: They’re going to have to certainly look at getting the newspaper someplace else. I mean, increasingly in the modern world, people are reading their newspapers more and more online. So I wonder whether the issue of paper is as dominant, is as important now as it perhaps might have been five or six years ago. But most Argentines still read their newspapers as tangible pieces of paper rather than online. So it’s still an issue. And what the Government has said is that it will now control the production, the price of the paper, the newsprint. If they don’t like what the company is doing, it will now have the power to intervene. Newspapers fear that they will only intervene if they don’t like, if the Government doesn’t like whats being printed in the newspapers. The Government said its really an issue of control. Its an anti-monopoly measure, more than anything else. They don’t see it as a freedom of speech, a freedom of expression issue. So again, it depends very much on which side of the fence you’re on.

Mullins: Alright. David Schweimler, based in Buenos Aires. Thank you very much.

Schweimler: Okay. Thank you very much.

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Argentina Open Polo Championship (Photo: Campeonato Argentino Abierto de Polo/Facebook)

The venue is one of the barrios or neighborhoods of Buenos Aires.

This posh neighborhood we want you to name borders on the Rio de la Plata, the river that divides Argentina from Uruguay

Iconic revolutionary Che Guevara once lived in the neighborhood.

But for the next two weeks all attention is on what the locals call the “Cathedral of Polo.”

So which barrio of Buenos Aires is this ‘cathedral’ to be found?

The answer is Palermo. Anchor Lisa Mullins gets details from Pascal Renauldon who’s covering the competition for Equestrio magazine.

It’s a percussion explosion – 18 musicians dressed in bright red overalls playing djembes, bass drums, claves and congas.

David Sommerstein went to one of their show’s recently and brings us this report.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: Other Latin American nations are reaching further back into their past to deal with issues of impunity and human rights abuses. Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil all endured military dictatorships in the 1970s and ’80s. Last week, all three countries took concrete steps to review the abuses committed during that period. Peter Kornbluh is a senior analyst at the George Washington University’s National Security Archive and he has been following all these developments. Start with Brazil, Peter Kornbluh, if you will; the decision to create a truth and reconciliation commission – it was unanimously approved by its congress. How dramatic a move is this?

Peter Kornbluh: It’s an amazing move for Brazil because Brazil, in great contrast to the other countries of Latin America, has refused to look into the dark past of its dictatorship which lasted from 1964 to 1985. Brazil has not had a truth commission. It has not prosecuted a single military officer for atrocities of the past. And the military, even today, has been so recalcitrant in even opening its own archives for evidence into these cases so that the Truth Commission Law has been really a political compromise of sorts. The Truth Commission Law actually says that it does not challenge the amnesty that the military holds.

Mullins: So what good is it then?

Kornbluh: Well…

Mullins: I mean, no one is going to be prosecuted in the current military?

Kornbluh: The process of truth can be very powerful even if it explicitly is not linked to justice. Once Brazil, if it can uncover the information, the evidence of a series of atrocities that took place during the military regime, then there will be a new discussion in Brazil over what to do about holding those accountable.

Mullins: What about in Chile? This is a country that you know very well from all of your works. The process also started with a very weak truth commission there, but two decades later Chileans now have made an enormous amount of progress on prosecuting members of the military. How did they overcome the kind of resistance that you just talked about in Brazil?

Kornbluh: Chile had a truth commission right after General Augusto Pinochet was forced to step down. It explicitly did not name names because Pinochet was still head of the military at that point and said that he would not let a hair on the head of any of his soldiers be touched. But the Truth Commission report itself gathered evidence, was there, galvanized the debate that continued until Augusto Pinochet himself was arrested in London in 1998. That arrest and the dynamic of attempting to prosecuting him in Spain and the effort to prosecute him when he went back to Chile, I think has had a major effect on all of Latin America and particularly the southern cone. What we are seeing today in countries like Chile and Uruguay and Argentina and Peru and even a country like Guatemala where over 300,000 people were killed is this slow march of justice. It’s clear that justice delayed is not necessarily justice denied.

Mullins: Moving on to Uruguay, this is just south of Brazil. Congress there last week revoked a military amnesty. It’s now going to categorize kidnappings, torture and killings that happened under the dictatorships as crimes against humanity. What’s the significance of that?

Kornbluh: Uruguay has been struggling to revoke an amnesty that protected the military from any type of prosecution. They already, a couple of years ago, took the dramatic step of convicting their former President, Alfredo Bordaberry, of human rights crimes, but they were framed outside of the actual amnesty law. What Uruguay has ingeniously done now is basically declare that these human rights crimes were crimes against humanity and therefore were outside the language of the amnesty law.

Mullins: Many of these Latin American military dictatorships of the ’70s and ’80s were supported by Washington. They received strong support from the United States. Why and what is Washington doing right now to help this process of justice?

Kornbluh: There is a bit of poetic irony here, which is that the more the United States was involved in the repressive apparatuses of a country like Chile or Brazil or Argentina, the more intelligence reporting there was on what those repressive apparatuses were doing. And therefore, in the coffers and the vaults – the secret vaults of the CIA and the FBI and National Security Council and the State Department – are these documents that are rich in detail about repression in these countries. In a country like Brazil, for example, where the militaries themselves have refused to really release their archives, have stood as guardians of the gates on these secrets to protect themselves from being prosecuted, the United States can step in by doing something that I call “archival diplomacy” – opening up our own archives, providing documents to bring these cases forward.

Mullins: Okay. Peter Kornbluh directs the Chile documentation project at the National Security Archive. Nice to have you in the studio, thank you.

Kornbluh: Thank you so much.

Mullins: We’ll have more of our conversation with Peter Kornbluh online including his view on why there is such momentum now in Latin America to prosecute past abusers. That’s at theworld.org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

The arena dates back to 1932 when it began as an open air stadium for boxing matches and also served as a venue for carnivals and concerts. It was there in 1944 that Juan Peron met Evita, an actress at the time. He was on the fast track to become the president of Argentina.

The place where they met holds a special place in the nation’s heart and still hosts boxing matches, concerts and tango. In fact, it held the finals of the World Tango Championships this week.

The answer is Luna Park Stadium.

Earlier this week dancers from around the world flocked to Buenos Aires to compete in the World Tango Championships.

Declared by UNESCO as part of the world’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity,” Tango seems to be catching on across the globe.

More than 400,000 people participated in this year’s festival and international dancers shocked the public, beating the Argentinians at their own game.

For the first time in history, the top five ranking couples in Salon Tango were foreigners: This year’s champions were from Colombia with runners up from Venezuela, Italy, Japan and the Unites States.

By Melaina Spitzer

Earlier this week dancers from around the world flocked to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to compete in the World Tango Championships. Declared by UNESCO as part of the world’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity,” tango seems to be catching on across the globe.

At this year’s championships, international dancers shocked the audience in Buenos Aires with an impressive accomplishment. For the first time in history, the top five ranking couples in the “salon tango” category were foreign.

That includes an American pair of dancers: Brian Nguyen and Yuliana Basmajyan, from San Francisco. They never thought they could make it to the World Tango Championships. In fact, they never even planned on becoming tango dancers.

Brian said he started out doing breakdance and salsa. “I ran into tango by accident,” he recalled, “and from then on, I converted… because it really was the dance for me.”

Basmajyan told a similar story. And it wasn’t easy for either of them, because of their family backgrounds.

“I’m originally Armenian,” said Basmajyan. “I came over to the States at the end of 1998. And I’m coming from a very traditional family and culture. So this is against what our culture would normally do.”

Basmajyan said her family wasn’t happy when she decided to become a tango dancer. “I’ve gone through a lot of struggles, [but] now they feel more comfortable about the idea that I’m pursuing tango and hopefully it will get better with time. This is my passion and I want to follow my heart,” she said.

Nguyen can relate. His parents came to the US from Vietnam after the Vietnam War. And he said being Vietnamese-American comes with certain expectations.

“I’m expected to be an engineer or a doctor. But I didn’t decide to be any of those,” Nguyen said. “So of course my parents were mad at me for a really long time.”

Brian said his family is coming around now, encouraging him. But he can still feel their disappointment.

“My parents are always thinking, man, he should have been a doctor,” But, oh well. I push on because it’s my passion. “

And in Buenos Aires, Nguyen and Basmajyan’s passion was put to the test.

At the salon tango finals, the dancers were rushed to the stage to begin the competition. Salon tango is traditionally danced at milongas, or social tango gatherings. And unlike the highly choreographed “stage tango,” this competition was all about improvisation.

Ten couples took to the stage at once, gracefully circulating counter-clockwise before a panel of judges. Basmajyan stood out in her bright red velvet dress. And Brian’s slicked back hair was reminiscent of tango’s golden age, in the 1940’s.

After four rounds of competition, the scores were announced. A Japanese pair came in fifth. The Italians were fourth. And Basmajyan and Nguyen placed third.

Taking the equivalent of the bronze medal in salon tango was a big deal for the American pair, especially because they were only a hundredth of a point away from a three-way tie for the top spot.

The Colombian and Venezuelan pairs went on to compete in a dance-off for first place. And it was the Colombians who emerged as world champions.

Backstage after the competition, Nguyen said the win changes everything. “Now it feels really good!” he exclaimed. “I think everybody can relate to this. I mean, you go through life looking for a way to prove to yourself that you’re worth something. And I found that in tango.”

As to what they’ll do next, Basmajyan said it’s time to get down to work. “Get ready for next year, to compete again and dance more and travel more,” she said.

But first, Nguyen wanted to celebrate by pouring some wine into their third place cup.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: This next story is of interest to anyone who has ever sipped a lager beer.  A lager is a clear, cold-fermented kind of beer.  You have to use a specific kind of yeast to make the stuff.  Lagers were first brewed in Bavaria in southern Germany back in the 15th century.  Scientists have long known that the yeast involved was a hybrid, half European and half well, that was a mystery until now. Turns out the mystery yeast originated in Patagonia on the tip of South America.  Chris Todd Hittinger is a genetic scientist and co-author of a study on lager yeast.  It was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. Hittinger says he and his team made the discovery while investigating different species of yeast, or Saccharomyces, around the globe.

Chris Todd Hittinger: Saccaromyces is the Latin name for the close grouping of yeasts that include the ones that make ale, and bread and wine; and those are all made by cerevisiae, Saccaromyces cerevisiae.  And Saccaromyces are often found in association with oak trees and also with fruits.  And it turns out that all southern beech trees, they form galls in response to infection by another fungus.

Werman: And these galls they kind of look like goiters on a tree.

Hittinger: That’s right and we have them in the northern hemisphere also in a mute response.

Werman: So the lager yeast was in these galls.  How did it get to the caves of Bavaria?

Hittinger: Well, so the lager yeast itself is not in the galls, but the missing species is in these galls.  This is where the genetic research can’t be particularly informative, but we can speculate a little bit.  We know that yeast are found in the digestive tract of fruit flies and other insects, and so they are prime carriers.  With transatlantic trade going back and forth there would’ve been fruit, and juices and fermented beverages going back and forth, and fruit flies tagging along on the ships too. And either indirectly on the fruit or on the fruit flies, or even on the wood itself, seems like probably carriers from the forests of Patagonia eventually into port cities in Europe, and eventually on to Bavaria to form a hybrid that would have had a colder temperature preference than the traditional ale strains.  And they would’ve outcompeted the ale strains.  They may also have part of interesting flavors that brewers would have selected for over the centuries.

Werman: Of all the bars in the world why did a genetics professor like yourself snoop around beer yeast?

Hittinger: Well, we’re mostly interested in yeast diversity for biomedical and bio-energy applications.  And in particular, most of the genome technologies have actually been worked out in half a dozen fairly simple organisms, and Saccaromyces is really one of these champion research organisms.  And so a lot of the technologies that people are using in doctors’ offices and will soon be using in doctors’ offices are currently being used and tested out in yeast.

Werman: Saccaromyces cerevisiae not just for beer anymore I guess.

Hittinger: No, it’s really one of the champion organisms of biomedical research.

Werman: And just to end on a little linguistic note, Saccaromyces cerevisiae, cerevisiae sounds a lot like the Spanish word for beer, cerveza, is there a connection?

Hittinger: There is indeed, that’s the origin of the Latin name for the species.

Werman: Been a long and beautiful relationship.

Hittinger: It has.

Werman: Chris Todd Hittinger with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, thank you s o much.

Hittinger: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Now head down the eastern slope of the Andes toward the geographical center of Argentina and you can’t miss the city were looking for. It’s Argentina’s second largest city, roughly 400 miles northwest of the capital, Buenos Aires.

And it’s where Argentina’s space agency has a ground station. The command and control center tracks satellites, including a new one that was launched just a few days ago. Argentina teamed up with NASA for the mission: it’s called Aquarius.

So, can you name the Argentine city that’s home to the satellite command center?

The answer is Córdoba, Argentina. It’s home to a groundstation (part of Argentina’s Space Program or CONAE) that will track the new Aquarius satellite that’s designed to provide a global view of the planet’s oceans. The Aquarius mission is a collaboration between NASA and the Space Agency of Argentina (Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales). The World’s David Leveille reports.

Our list includes countries on 3 continents. It begins with Argentina and ends with Venezuela. In fact there are so many countries, that announcers sometimes have a hard time coming up with the one word that suits all:

“And it was a challenge everyone would put out their dictionaries, my Chilean dictionary, my Puerto Rican dictionary, my Royal Academy of Spain dictionary and it’s a challenge.”

The answer is 20! What does that have to do with the excitement surrounding the current NBA Finals? Anchor Marco Werman speaks with leading Spanish language sports announcer Clemson Smith Muñiz.

Europe: Spain

Africa: Equatorial Guinea in West Africa

North and Central America : Mexico, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama

South America: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela.

Puerto and the USA are not on the list:
Puerto Rico: Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the U.S. where Spanish and English are the official languages.
USA: The United States holds the world’s fifth largest Spanish-speaking population, outnumbered only by Mexico, Spain, Argentina, and Colombia but Spanish is not an official language.

Anchor Marco Werman tells us about two new CDs that include the sounds of cumbia. One is the traditional 1960 sounds from Colombia, the other is digital cumbia from Argentina. Download MP3

• Cartagena! BBC Music Review

Young soy (Photo: Julia Kumari Drapkin)

When the wind rustles through the trees and the air smells like wet earth, everyone in the Argentine farming town of General Villegas stops what they’re doing.

“Finally, a storm is coming,” said Gisela Giunti, who grew up here on the edge of the Argentine Pampas, about 290 miles west of Buenos Aires.

Giunti said when neighbors and friends greet each other; they don’t say “How are you?” They say “Te llovio? Did it rain to you?”

It’s an odd phrase. After all, it doesn’t rain to people. But to farmers, nature’s volatility can seem pretty personal.

“Actually, it’s a very clear way of how people feel the weather is part of their lives,” Giunti said.

She would know. Her family is full of soybean farmers. I asked her brother, Ignacio Giunti, if “it rained to him” last night. He said hardly at all. “It moistened the dust on the ground,” Ignacio said, but it wasn’t enough for his crops. A strong La Nina this year has kept Argentine farmers like Giunti on edge about drought.

Rains determine crop yields

Just outside town, fields of young soybeans and corn stretch for miles into the horizon. Without rain, the crowns on the corn crops have turned yellow. Many won’t survive. But the soy harvest still has a chance. Giunti stooped down among the knee-length greens to show me small purple flowers. The flowers mean the plants are just about to enter the critical phase. That’s the time of year when rains determine crop yields. Without water, the soy plants don’t produce beans.

Argentina is the third largest producer of soybeans behind Brazil and the United States, so it’s not just the farmers who get nervous when there isn’t enough rain. Fear of La Nina droughts helped push the price of soy beans up $150 in January. Corn and wheat hit highs too.

“This is creating a lot of nervousness on the prices,” said Sebastian Lago, who advises farmers in General Villegas about global grain markets.

“My job is to help them to sell their grains at the best prices, and what I try to tell my clients is this: in the last 10 years, we had a huge change in the financial markets. We have a lot of new players in the grain markets.”

After the stock market crash of 2001, Wall Street investors looking to diversify their portfolios discovered agricultural commodities. So now in addition to changes in the weather, Lago said, Argentine farmers have to worry about currency markets and interest rates.

Speculating with grains

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the grain markets, but it makes a lot of change in the price of the grains. Why? Because you have a lot of funds speculating with grains,” he said.

Wall Street speculators have added even more volatility to global grain markets because they’re trading food like stocks. “A stock is a part of a company,” Lago said. “But when we’re talking about a commodity, we’re talking about supply and demand.

Today, the problem is the supply. Global grain reserves are at historic lows owing to increasing demand from the world’s two biggest consumers of soy and corn. China’s rising middle class is eating more protein and importing soybeans to feed its livestock.

“China is like the video game Pac man,” Lago said. “Every year they need more soy beans. In the corn market, the Pac man is the ethanol industry in the United States.”

And Wall Street speculators are gobbling up grain commodities. At any given time investors can pull their money out of grains and move it into another market. But farmers who finance their crops with their own money, can’t be so nimble.

So Lago is helping the farmers of General Villegas develop strategies to protect themselves from the additional market volatility, especially when they’re not sure enough rain will come.

Farmers like 72-year-old Jorge Olano meet with Lago every month before the USDA publishes its monthly grain stock reports.

Of course, the first thing Lago asks Olano is if it “rained to him last night.”

Olano responds that it rained to him on both his fields. He’d like more, but it’ll do for now.

Now, it’s back to a booming economy. In fact, this is among the nations that some are calling the “Latin Tigers.” So, can you name South America’s second largest nation?

The answer is Argentina: it’s economy has enjoyed a growth-spurt recently — as have the economies of Brazil, Chile and Peru. But, as Richard Reynolds reports from Buenos Aires — it may be a bit soon to compare them to Taiwan or China.

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• Obama in Chile hails Latin America progress
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• Business stories from BBC Mundo (en españiol)

Peugeot driving near Santa Fe, Argentina (flickr image: Facundo Fernandez)

Hernan Valdez and his girlfriend Milagros Garin are the proud owners of a brand new Peugot. It’s a gray compact, immaculate, and still has that new car smell two months after they drove it home from the dealership.

“It’s a lovely smell,” says Valdez proudly as he shifts the car into gear. A year from now, it still might smell new.

“The traffic in Buenos Aires is pretty hectic,” he says and with a great public transportation system nobody really needs to drive here. Valdez says they plan to keep the car in a garage most of the time. They’ll use it on weekends or holidays, if at all.

Argentines like Hernan Valdez are buying cars to park their savings. With inflation expected to reach 30 percent next year, people reason it’s better to buy a car than watch their money disappear.

“Those who can, buy property, but those who can’t, buy cars,” says Valdez.

Lately Argentines have money to spend. Argentina is one of Latin America’s fastest growing economies, but with currency markets uncertain and double digit inflation, Argentines are turning to cars as surrogate savings banks.

Car sales among local dealers nationwide are up nearly 70 percent from last year, and inflation definitely factors into the decision to buy according to Hernan Dietrich, owner of one of Argentina’s largest car dealerships.

“In one year, you can sell your car for more money than what you paid for it,” says Dietrich. In the United States, a new car depreciates about 20 percent in value as soon as it leaves the lot, but not in Argentina. “Here the loss is absorbed by inflation and the equation balances out.”

With chronic inflation in Argentina, there’s no incentive to save. For higher income earners with access to credit, there’s an added incentive to spend: you can profit.

“It’s a way to earn in one year,” says Hernan Valdez. To buy his new Peugot, he got a five-year loan with fixed payments at 16 percent. Yet with annual inflation believed to be 26 percent, his effective rate of interest is negative.

“Imagine that you could take out a mortgage to buy a house and the mortgage had a negative interest rate. How cool would that be?” posits Carnegie Mellon economist Lee Bransttetter. “If I could borrow at a negative interest rate, I would have bought a much bigger house!”

Branstetter says the reason Argentina has effectively negative interest rates is that the government has been underreporting its official inflation rate to help pay off its own debts. The inflationary spending works great in the short-term, but it undermines the basic foundations of the financial system and long-term growth.

Argentina has had problems with chronic inflation and even hyperinflation since the 1950s. Branstetter likens Argentina’s addiction to inflationary spending to watching a relative with extraordinary potential fall prey to an alcohol problem again and again.

“There’s Uncle Bob-he’s drinking again and he winds back up in jail,” says Branstetter. “I mean some of us have these people in our families and it’s horrible to watch.”

Branstetter says Argentina’s government is unlikely to act on inflation anytime soon given that tackling inflation could result in a recession and next year is an election year. Meanwhile, as Argentines spend more to save more, it stokes even more inflation.

“Those you who can’t buy cars are buying flat screen televisions or cellphones,” says Hernan Valdez. As a financial analyst himself at an international bank, Valdez knows this is the bright side of inflation. “This has to end sometime.You can buy one flat screen TV maybe two, but you don’t really need them. You’re not going to put a flat screen TV in the bathroom.”
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• Cars: Argentina’s new piggy bank