But the restriction on what one could buy here with foreign credit cards began before that, for whatever reason. I never figured out if it was something legal, or bank policy, or what.
I remember when I came here in 2006, I could use my credit/debit cards here to buy time on pay-as-you-go cellphone accounts. I had Movistar at the time. One call, register your card, and you could buy minutes (and get the triple time! if you bought 50 pesos or more, which was a lot of time back then) any time you needed them without going to the kioskos. You could buy things online, like movie tickets.
A couple of years later all that went away. If you didn't have an Argentine credit/debit card, none of that stuff worked any more. I remember even having problems every once in awhile with my foreign cards in some stores, Disco being one that really caused me some problems.
But I was never able to get discounts using my foreign credit/debit cards. The first thing they'd ask me is if it was an Argentine or foreign card and when I told them foreign they'd tell me "sorry".
