From this month's designer - Brief Article

New Internationalist, May, 2003

BUENOS AIRES, January. Half a world away powerful gear for war, here the economy is in tatters -- but as South Americans from Guevara to Galeano would tell you, there's always time for football. So I left David, the editor of this magazine, transcribing the previous day's interviews and set out to visit the spiritual home of the most famous living Argentinean, Diego Armando Maradona.

I passed bespoke tailors and furriers with liquidacion painted across the windows, bored shop assistants watching children pick over the garbage outside. Through the financial district, every bank bore graffiti labelling them ladrones -- thieves. I crossed the Plaza de Mayo where the painted icons of the Mothers of the Disappeared sit in judgement before the Government headquarters. In the old dockyard quarter of La Boca, US tourists posed for photos with tango artistes beside the most evil-smelling, polluted river I've ever come across. This is your reward for being the IMF's star pupil -- everywhere the corrosive effects of inequality, as replicated throughout Latin America. Almost everywhere...

Luis, the guide at Boca Juniors' stadium, was a typical porteno -- charming, garrulous and possessed of a wry, slightly acid wit. He indicated four seats picked out in yellow, the best in the house: 'Those belong to Maradona, he bought them in perpetuity.' I imagined the nation's hero, brought low by drug addiction, receiving his fanatical public. 'He doesn't attend many matches,' Luis continued. 'He can't get the treatment he needs in Argentina. So now he lives in Cuba.' And I'm sure Luis smiled at that point.

Ian Nixon for the New internationalist Co-operative