The jacaranda trees are blooming on the streets of Buenos Aires but in some ways the Argentine summer is almost over. Amid the street demonstrations by piquetero [unemployed groups], an authoritarian, self-deluding government is using a recovery bounce to avoid confronting the deep-seated problems that will come back to haunt it in 2005. Argentina is going down the drain.
Even worse, for people like 57-year old Miguel Santangelo – a minicab driver who takes home half of what he did before the 2001 crisis, when the convertibility regime of one peso to one dollar collapsed – the summer never began.
