Nickie Muir: Argy-bargy calls for calm-not heroics

Nickie Muir

It can be really hard to explain just how cheap life is in places where a great chunk of society live in the margins between the bread and poverty lines.

In Salta, Argentina, trying to get my dad to back down from being over-charged 10 bucks having been let out of the taxi on the good side of the shanty town, I tried to explain.

Option A: hand the cash over or, option B, he'd head into the shanty town and we'd get rumbled. Option A was looking good and despite protestations to the contrary a right hook is no match for firearms the last time I'd checked.

"It's the principle of the thing not the bloody 10 bucks," he kept muttering. Which may have been right but as he threw the 10 pesos at the mullet-sporting taxista, I wasn't sure his principals were about to cost him (and us) a whole lot more.

I tried to give the taxi driver a further $20, shrugged and said: "He's old. He's insane. I just need to get him home - every family's got one right?"

He agreed, took the money and sped off. I'd already learnt my lesson six weeks before walking home after a 10pm finish along deserted streets.

When the car slowed down behind me I thought he might be asking directions. Then a kid no older than 18 jumped out with a handgun and demanded my handbag. He was young and spotty and obviously more scared than I was.

Pretending not to speak Spanish I went to walk off. No one forgets having cold steel shoved in their neck. I haven't. I knew the rules: always carry cash and always hand it over if I got mugged. "Don't even think about resisting," they'd said.

I hadn't been thinking. I tried to give him everything I had. He was so strung out he left the US$700 I had in my briefcase and took the handbag containing rose-hips from a friend's farm and some dirty laundry. He was so wired the gun could've gone off without him even meaning to do it.

This was no professional crim. This was a young boy off his head who looked like he hadn't eaten in days.

This was Menem's trickle-down economics in action, a country transforming from being a thoroughfare for the narco trade to having its own domestic market.

Where politicians and the police exerted pressure over each other in mutually beneficial arrangements. There is no excuse for murder - as one Argentine friend said: "They had a motorbike, they could have sold it to get drugs if they'd really had to."

But it shouldn't be what is associated with Argentina just as Sir Peter Blake's death resisting thieves doesn't exemplify life in Brazil. Or for that matter, the way far too many foreign tourists are treated here being mistaken for the Kiwi way.

Argies are a proud and hospitable people of a generous and beautiful land that happens to have some very serious problems. Problems we'd do well to study in order to better protect what we take for granted.