The Argentina Independent plans on launching a free, independent, monthly publication in June. In order to remain 100% independent, we are hoping to raise the funds to cover the initial costs of design, printing and distribution via crowdfunding platform Ideame.

And to remind you of all the good things we have done over the course of the past six years as a publication, as well as giving you a reason to support us in our bid to go into print and help us keep doing such things, we will be bringing you a taste of some of the good times each week! This week – a selection of our best content.

If you would like to support us in our fundraising campaign, please visit our Ideame page where you can either make a donation (every cent counts), or help us by spreading the word!

Endangered: Argentina’s Disappearing Languages

Every two weeks, one of the world’s languages dies out, and Argentina is not immune to this mass linguistic extinction. Kate Granville-Jones’ investigated this phenomenon and discovered of the 35 languages spoken in Argentina in pre-Columbian times, now just 15 remain, and one has only two living speakers.

Gatillo Facil and Deaths in Police Custory

“2009 was not just another year. It started with a new Miguel Bru that was Luciano Arruga, and finished with a new Walter Bulacios: Ruben Carballo. Police repression and violence grew to the point of taking the life of someone every 24 hours.” Any student of Argentine history is familiar with the dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s, and the thousands of students, unionists and activists that were “disappeared” by the military regime. A subject which is less-publicised, however, is that state violence and repression did not end with the return of democracy in 1983. As Daniel Edwards discoverd in his 2010 report, federal and provincial police forces continue to routinely use extreme violence and torture against suspects and detainees in their facilities, which often results in the death of the victim.

Guaraní Suicide

After a 2008 report indicated that the Guaraní indigenous group had the highest rate of suicide as a people in the world, Kristie Robinson headed up to community in Misiones, just 15km from the world-famous Iguazú Falls, to meet with Guaraní leaders to talk about the alarming rates of suicide and what is being done to tackle the issue.

Paco: Drug Epidemic Sweeping the Streets of Buenos Aires

Anthony Bale’s 2008 article on paco, a by-product of cocaine that is wreaking havoc on the lives of many shantytown inhabitants, brought the stark reality of life in Buenos Aires’ underclass home to many of our readers.

Secret Squats and Silent Evictions: A Response to BA’s Housing Deficit

In 2009 Harriet Hernando’s looked into Buenos Aires’ social housing crisis and the city government’s handling of the situation, highlighting mass migration to the cities and inadequate government policies, as well as violent police crackdown on illegal squatters as the main culprits in the crisis.

Having grown to love foreign languages and having fostered a desire to be fluent in as many tongues as possible, you can only imagine the constant torture that I have given my own father over his decision not to teach me Turkish as a child. I have always grilled him about my floundering speech and over-excessive use of hand gestures at family reunions; about my inadequacy to order a kebab at the local Turkish take-away and my failings to follow simple instructions and directions. But the one time when Turkish would have proven to be invaluable to my own safety was in the summer of 2005, when I decided to go paragliding in Ölüdeniz, a charming town situated on a postcard lagoon of the Turkish Riviera.

Ölüdeniz is famous, among many things, for its extreme sports. It was to my father’s horror that my mother, my godmother, her daughter Shanice and I, decided to do a paraglide jump of 2,000m from the Taurus mountain range that overshadowed the small town. My mother, being my mother, sent my father off to the local tourist stand to barter with the paragliding tour operator in Turkish and returned ten minutes later, ashen-faced brandishing a receipt. Our flight was booked for the next day at the crack of dawn, under our family name ‘Mustafa’.

Before the jump, we had a 90 minute drive up into the mountains in a jeep where my mother’s nervous but hysterical laughter drowned out the instructors words of encouragement as we were told about the running jump that we were about to make off the mountain side. I am not sure whether it was the fear, the altitude or a mixture of both that during the ride up the mountain prompted my godmother to leave the following answer message on her elderly mother’s telephone:

“Hello Mum. It’s Tina. Having a lovely holiday in Turkey. Shanice and I are about to jump off a mountain.” Cue nervous hysterics from my mother. “Love you lots. Bye.”

At the mountaintop, I was greeted by my personal pilot who smiled profusely after I gave him my receipt, handed me a helmet and strapped me into the harness.

Before I knew it, I was running. Within seconds we had caught a breeze and I was soaring into the sky and gliding through the valleys of the mountains before hovering over the Mediterranean. From that height, I was able to see the entire lagoon, the Greek island of Rhodes but not my own impending doom. After half an hour of gliding, free-fall tricks and high speed descents, we were coming down to land and picking up quite a speed.

Suddenly, the pilot shouted at me in Turkish.

“What did you say?” I tried as we came to our final plunge.

The pilot shouted again in Turkish, this time more panicked.

“I don’t speak Turkish. What did you say?” I tried.

“Stand up!” He managed in English.

By this point, it was too late. I remember seeing my dad with a video camera on the shoreline. After that was pure carnage. My knees buckled as I tried to stand and we crash landed onto the promenade. The sheer force of the rough landing thrust me forward on my bare legs, painting the concrete with blood as I went. The upside…I broke the poor pilot’s fall.

He unclipped himself from the harness and gave me a grave stare. A stare that wasn’t concerned with my bleeding knees or his gushing elbow but a stare that said, ‘shame on you! A Turkish boy that speaks no Turkish.’ Needless to say, my father then received a stern telling-off from the pilot about his son’s uselessness in the Turkish language. Something along the lines of ‘he has the blood of a Turk, he should speak like a Turk’, but as this accident proved, I could have been lost in translation.

Lead photo by Steve Calcott