Latin American

Extract

As you approach Buenos Aires, sailing slowly through the dredged channel of the vast brown River Plate, you are aware of a skyline that is exceedingly strange. It is not just the fact of the towering skyscrapers. This is America, and north and south alike seem committed to this monolithic invasion of the sky. What is extraordinary is that you can see through so many of these blocks of stone: the blue that fills the window-spaces is innocent air. It is bomb-damage in reverse, or even, you may think, in anticipation. Later you will be reassured. Here, it appears, building goes on as long as the money lasts, and work can be suspended for years at a time. (In a suburb one saw a completed ferro-concrete steeple, improbably balanced on the bare skeleton of a church yet to be built.)

Building is a South American disease, or, more accurately, it is the symptom of a disease. In Argentina, as in Brazil, the fantastic growth of the cities has gravely disturbed the national equilibrium. Buenos Aires, the largest city in the southern hemisphere, has a population of four million, and including the province of the same name, accounts for half the total for the whole republic. Even though Argentina were far more developed industrially than she is (and the facts of nature have determined the primary role of the country as one of the greatest food-producing areas of the world), so disproportionate a head for such a body induces a sort of vertigo whose effects are immediately seen.