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I disagree and think it's pretty accurate. I'll share my experience of being an american in BA - by highlighting some of the extremes. I've lived here for three years. just walked home with my kids from a friend's house at 1:30 and people are still out eating dinner. it's a fascinating, european-feeling city, with a 'faded glory' edge to it. It mostly feels safe and easy to get around. I love many things about it here, I have porteño friends, a software company here with a great group of talented developers, and it's an easy place to raise kids. Other parts of Argentina like Mendoza or Cordoba are even more comfortable and cheap (it's getting expensive in BA for foreigners and certainly for locals as inflation grows). As I write the below, please remember I have no plans to leave and really enjoy it... However, at the political level, generally speaking, it's run by morons from the top to the bottom. All the major government offices are filled with cronies. no one in government will speak on the record (i have friends who work for bloomberg, washington post, al jazeera, etc who confirm this) as they have little real power. See this week's example of the president spending massive amounts of energy attacking the UK for the Falklands (subtitled in english) - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/falkl... She takes this approach to every issue - blocking ships in the port for capricious reasons, like the recent rumor that no Apple products are getting in recently out of retribution for the fact that Foxconn is going to build a factory in Brazil instead of Argentina. They recently held a US Air Force plane for a month here on a training exercise invited by the AR government because they didn't declare the morphine in the safety kit, claiming that the US Air Force wanted to sneak drugs into the country. It's the kind of behavior for which I'd ground my teenager (if i had one)... Unions extort even relatively small businesses. i have a friend with a shipping company 40 employees and he was recently scared for his life due to threats from the trucker's union, which rules the country in many ways; the leader having been put in place by the Kirchners but then he became too powerful. Another friend who runs an import/export business from (an asian country) who has to pay massive (you have NO idea how big) stacks of cash to get his containers through each week, every container. And yet... my company is small and we don't have to worry about the larger political climate. And there's a thriving tech scene. We're organizing RubyConf Argentina and expect to easily have 400-500 attendees, making it the largest Spanish language Ruby event ever... Startups are growing here, there's starting to be more local VC money, etc. It's a great place to be if you're in certain industries, if you are a foreigner wanting to bootstrap your startup, etc. But a lot of what the article says is true - the fix is in; to flourish in Argentina you have to be a) part of the small middle class whose parents at least have some real estate, b) A foreigner, c) from a wealthy elite family that can afford, literally, to ignore politics, or d) one of those guys with the cushy government positions clapping in that video. |
P.D.: I happen to work at one of the companies you are outsourcing to :p