Photos by Wellington Almeida
On 13th September, a British tourist was raped by a Buenos Aires taxi driver. Leaving a Palermo Viejo club alone at 5am, the girl hailed a taxi to return to her hostel. The driver made an abrupt U-turn and took her to the west end of the city where he put a hood over her head and raped her at gunpoint. He then stole all of her money and her mobile phone, leaving her stranded and traumatised a few blocks from her hostel.
Horror stories like this one abound in Argentina’s volatile capital city. They are circulated in the media, whispered about in endless bank queues and used as ammunition for protective parents hoping to prevent their ducklings from wandering overseas. They cause beads of cold sweat to form between the shoulder blades of trembling young girls as they cower alone in backseats, hoping against hope that amongst all the black and yellow cabs whizzing down the avenida, they haven’t selected the one with a depraved criminal at the helm.
A taxi driver is in a unique position of power. As soon as the door is closed, the person in the backseat is almost entirely at the mercy of whoever’s foot is on the gas pedal. The majority of drivers respect this imbalance by completing their task exactly as expected. Some choose to take advantage by driving dangerously, taking convoluted routes or much worse. A handful, however, take this fleeting moment of unnatural proximity between two strangers as a chance to reach out to a fellow human being.
I stumbled upon one such man on a Sunday night in October. I was rushing out to a friend’s party in San Telmo. A Pídalo Radio Taxi stopped on Córdoba to let passengers out, and I stood by, ready to swoop. Peering impatiently through the back window, I saw four laughing passengers exchange handshakes and warm kisses on the cheek with the driver. “You’re in for quite a ride,” one of them warned as I plonked into the backseat.
That was how I met Rodolfo A. Cutufia, ‘El Taxista de la Agenda’.
Rodolfo has been a Buenos Aires taxi driver for 21 of his 58 years. Leaning in towering piles against a wall in his apartment are 46 overflowing agendas. Each is filled with scrawled messages of admiration and solidarity from the hundreds of thousands of people he has conveyed around the capital, as well as their contact details so Rodolfo can send them holiday greetings and updates about his charitable foundation.
Photos by Wellington Almeida
The thought process that guides Rodolfo’s actions is simple. He has to drive his taxi in order to make money, because ours is a society founded on labour. Many of his friends in the service industry complain that they hate their jobs, and often feel frustrated and angry. Searching for a way to enjoy his work, it occurred to him that the natural first step was to open communication with the ‘other’ sitting behind him. As soon as he did, he was delighted to learn that many of his passengers were “capable, creative, good people… people who want to help others.”
In his prior career at an electricity company in Buenos Aires, Rodolfo gave seminars about retirement, teaching seniors how to cope with the “transition from activity to passivity”. When he became a taxista in 1987 he continued to be passionate about the challenges facing senior citizens, and would often discuss this with his passengers.
“Many were receptive,” he tells me, “And some responded with, ‘I like elderly, but I prefer the cause of street kids’… or the environment, or domestic violence. I realised how many people help others, reach out their hand to others, but all individually, all separately. I thought: why don’t they join forces? And out of all this chit-chat came a project.”
The project is a charitable foundation called ‘Estrechando Manos’ (Shaking Hands) that aims to use education and culture to tackle social issues. To demonstrate, he holds out his hand to show me that, if each finger represents a cause, the palm is the foundation that connects them. “Like an octopus,” he laughs. “The unifying principles are respect, morals, ethics and the Argentine flag.” Why the flag? “Well what’s more difficult, breaking a structure that’s already in place, or working within the structure to perfect it?”
I wonder how frequently passengers misunderstand what Rodolfo is trying to accomplish. “At first, of course, a lot of people are suspicious. They are climbing into the atmosphere of mistrust that is a taxi, and they are closed up. They think, ‘What’s this agenda, who is this guy?’ I’ve had really ugly moments. But now I have a lot of messages, and once the people see the agenda, they want to participate. And when I offer them candies, ask them if the music is ok, keep the car clean, smile at them… all of these things show respect.”
Rodolfo strives to find common ground with all of his passengers, even those who do not speak his language. His goal is straightforward but ambitious: “To improve the quality of life on a global level. For there to be more love and less evil in the world.” His mission begins with ideas and ends with participation, for “without participation there cannot be change”. Though the foundation continues to exist on a purely grassroots level, the agendas (with their cartoon drawings, messages in Arabic and Korean, and scrawled notes of encouragement from famous New Zealand rugby players) prove that people are participating, and ripples from Rodolfo’s work are being felt across the planet.
My chance meeting with ‘La Taxista de la Agenda’ was soon followed by a similarly enlightening taxi experience. I was fleeing a nightclub maimed and emergency room-bound as a result of an unsavoury encounter between my foot and a piece of broken glass. My friend helped me hobble into a waiting cab, and explained the situation to the driver. I glanced at him in the mirror, cynically expecting a lecture about keeping my bloody foot away from the seat.
When we reached the hospital, Jorge (the taxista) took me inside, spoke to the medical staff on my behalf, and waited while I was given stitches. Afterwards he congratulated me with a purple glow stick bracelet, and stopped at a 24-hour pharmacy so I could pick up my antibiotics on the way home. All the while I was babbling my profuse thanks, to which he continually replied: “Promise me that next time you see someone in your country who needs help, you’ll do the same thing for them.”
Now, I don’t mean to paint myself as a wide-eyed ingénue full of dreamy notions about the kindness of strangers. Just last week a portly, slobbering taxi driver asked me whether Canadian girls are “liberated…you know, sexually…?” When I asked Rodolfo about the general security of Buenos Aires taxis, he very wisely pointed out that “the good and the bad are very mixed in this world”.
Although the bad continues to fester in the form of gruesome accounts of rape and robbery, it is important that, once in a while, we pause to acknowledge the good.
Rodolfo’s taxi is a Pídalo Radio Taxi, Chevrolet Corsa Classic marked #74, and the website for his foundation is www.estrechandomanos.com.ar
