earlyretirement said:
...I saw the writing on the wall about 2 years ago. I even remember posting some posts on this board a while back and reading from some posters that were denying there were issues/problems there...
Me too. Might have been more earlier 2010 when I started really wondering, but I think that was because 2009 was a really bad year for me anyway and I wasn't concentrating too much on what was going on in Argentina specifically. Too busy trying to save my business for reasons that had nothing to do with here.
No one believed me though. I posted a few things on the board, but had already found out that too many people who frequented the board in that moment were using the "love it or leave it" attitude many times on things that were even only slightly negative. I actually left off posting for a good time.
But family and friends didn't want to believe it. They couldn't see the beginnings of problems, or thought they were just slight little things because of the "crisis mundial" and what turned out to be the temporary drop in commodities futures. I had one or two expat buddies that were in agreement, if not a little too pessimistic, which of course tempered my own opinions a bit.
My family didn't want to go back to Paraguay at all. They didn't believe that anything was happening here. They didn't want to go back because they are tainted by having grown up dirt poor, and Paraguay is NOT a place where you want to be poor (neither is Argentina, but not as bad as Paraguay in my opinion). They weren't used to thinking in terms of how they could live there now, and even how they could help their own fellow countrymen if they did.
When Cristina started getting heavy on the currency controls, that changed for them. They were limited in how much money they could send back to Paraguay. When I first came here, the peso was something like 3,200 to the guarani and it really meant something to Paraguayans. Pesos were at least as popular in Paraguay as the dollar. Now, it's worth around 700 guaranies. Not only is it difficult to send money, impossible to send dollars, but what they send back is only worth a fraction of the value it once was. The base guarani unit is basically 1,000 (they are talking about stripping off the 3 zeroes soon), so the Paraguayans feel proud that their guarani is now more valuable than the peso!
Now they are all talking about going back and living in Asuncion for the most part. They are all talking about what businesses we can run there. One of my brothers-in-law wants me to back him buying cattle and butchering them and selling to carnicerias around a town near where the family lives outside of Concepcion. They have a couple of uncles that are butchers and are happy to butcher the cows for only half of the tripa as payment. They've made tentative deals with the carnicerias. The family can also sell meat to neighbors because there isn't a carniceria nearby where they live.
Places like Paraguay are open to opportunities. The government still sucks there, but for the most part they leave business alone. Argentina is going to find itself bereft of foreign investment, ideas, and workers, and is going to cause its own brain trust to leave if it's not careful, not to mention plunge everyone who doesn't leave (the vast majority, obviously) in terrible shape with little opportunities (again).
I thought I saw posted somewhere else about the new law being considered, related to forcing closed neighborhoods ("countries" and barrio cerrados) to remove their physical barriers, but couldn't find it again.
The reasoning for this new law is that the closed neighborhoods block too much traffic by not allowing cars to pass through and they must go around. That may be the case in the city, although I've never actually seen a country in the city. But out in the suburbs, I never noticed a problem when I was driving around. Hell, there are not many roads out there to begin with, certainly not many paved roads. Maybe they are talking about places like NorDelta and Tigre, Olivos, etc. I don't do too much driving around there, although in Tigre I have and haven't noticed a great issue although I saw many countries.
I think this is some kind of social brown-nosing being done by Cristina to garner more poor votes. Most of them are envious of the rich in a socialist way (i.e., envious and despising at the same time). They resent the wealth, they resent the isolation that the rich put themselves into (and I'm not even saying there isn't some valid reason for them to feel this way, here, at least to an extent).
But imagine what a big thing this is! Houses in the suburbs of any level beyond lower middle class are usually surrounded by walls out there, either individually or as neighborhoods. Why? Because there is a lot of thievery and an even lesser police presence than in the city. EVERY closed neighborhood has renta-cops (with guns) that attend the entrance(s) to the neighborhood and patrol the neighborhood regularly. They are rotated out every couple of weeks to avoid guard collusion in robberies.
When I was living out there in a closed neighborhood, we would have confirmed invasions of the perimeter at least a couple of times a month. A couple of times a week we would get a report from the security people that detailed security issues of the neighborhood. Most of the time it was unconfirmed breaches or animals, but at least twice a month they chased people off. Not once in nearly two years did we have an actual robbery, although the neighborhood on the other side of the street did (it was about 3 times our size).
It sucks to have to live that way, but Argentina isn't ready for the kind of neighborhood I had in the States. The streets there were open to the public, it wasn't gated or fenced in, except on the side with the cow pasture (we had woods along two sides of our closed neighborhood in Tortuguitas). But people didn't generally drive through the neighborhood in the States, for two reasons: one, they are planned (at least in the suburbs) so that they don't need to be used for through traffic and two, people in the States (well, at least in Houston) wouldn't drive through a neighborhood like that except in emergency because they respect the privacy of the inhabitants.
Plus, we didn't need more than the county constable driving through there a couple of times a night to make us feel secure. We had a real low crime rate in a neighborhood of almost 600 upper middle class homes, something like 4 actual burglaries a year. I never was broken into.
We had 50 lots, about 45 houses, in the closed neighborhood in Tortuguitas. It was a small one, sure. All around us were lower middle class homes open to the public streets, as well as upper middle class behind walls and a few countries. Yet still we had a criminal element. I know where they came from - not too far away.
To me, this is a direct assault on property rights. People in those neighborhoods paid for EVERYTHING on that land, including the walls and the roads. They are responsible for maintaining it. They sunk large chunks of money into a place they wanted to consider safe for their kids to play in and relatively safe for their possessions. It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with their lifestyle, or think they're idiots for it, whatever. They should be able to spend their money as they see fit.
Who's going to pay for the road maintenance now? How are the renta-cops going to secure their perimeter? How are the kids going to play in the neighborhood with traffic running through all the time?
Call it eminent domain if you want - I'm equally opposed to that.
, will wait and see
