Chilean Chronicles, Part 86: La Nacion and the Struggle for Data in Argentina

I’ve been writing for about a month about the impact of the 2009 Transparency Law in Chile. Hailed upon its passage as a landmark piece of legislation, it called for the formation of a “Consejo de Transparencia," or Transparency Council.

The sweeping nature of the law and the infrastructure of the Transparency Council are two of the elements that led transparency guru Moises Sanchez to say that Chile has among the best frameworks on the continent.

But the law has yet to deliver fully on its considerable promise.

Among the challenges that I’ve learned about so far: many journalists are not using the law, and those that are using it are not connected to non-profit organizations and/or computer programmers who can write the code necessary to scrape website and create interactive applications.

Here in Argentina, the team of data journalists at La Nacion, Argentina’s second-largest newspaper, confront an almost inverted situation from many of their Chilean counterparts, and are meeting the substantial challenges to accessing and processing data in creative, collaborative and innovative ways.

I met with four members of the team today in their new offices in a multi-story, gleaming glass building. (Gabriela Bouret and I had met at the NICAR conference in Louisville in February, and had kept in touch since then.)

Team memberRomina Colman, an information activist, told me today that Argentine law only requires the executive branch to deliver the materials that members of the public request.

The legislature and judges are not held to the same legal standard.

Even within the executive section, emails are exempt from being provided.

Journalists have to specify what they plan to do with the information they request.

The agencies answering the information requests can take as long as they want to answer.

This can be up to three of four months, in some cases.

And, in the instances when they do ultimately provide data, they do so not in a digital format.

Instead, they provide paper.

Notebooks and notebooks filled with hundreds of sheets of papers that have to be entered by hand in order to perform data analysis.

For their ongoing and groundbreaking investigation into fiscal malfeasance by federal officials, for instance, the data team had received information on about 600 elected officials.

The team worked with about 50 volunteers from three separate non-profit organizations to do the data entry.

This took many hours.

After that, they went through and verified the data that had been entered, finding and correcting about 600 mistakes.

From there they did a second, random spot check to confirm the integrity of the entered data.

Then they performed the analysis and reported the story out.

The team is also working with computer coders and the design team headed by Gaston Roitberg to display the data in accessible ways and to have it update as soon as the original source updates.

They also embed the original documents so that interested readers can read them.

Every document that is embedded has to be scanned first.

This whole process can take as long as a year for a single project.

But the team at La Nacion is doing it.

They’re forging a distinctive place in Latin American journalism and gaining well-deserved global recognition for their work.

They’re also helping to change the culture of journalism within the paper.

It’s not just a shift from not using data to have it be an integral part of their work. (The team does a daily post that analyzes data in some way.)

It’s also helping shift from an individual, even secretive method of working in a more open and collective manner.

The paper’s management is backing the approach in more than rhetoric.

Gaby said the team has conducted a number of weeklong trainings for the other reporters outside of the office, away from the constant pull of emails and texts and phone calls.

They're also support this weekend's Data Fest, a two-day extravaganza that will feature the opening, mining and visualizing of public data bases.

Friend and former Python instructor Ben Welsh of the Los Angeles Times and Ryan Murphy of the Texas Tribune will be on hand to present.

I don’t want either to romanticize the team’s work or situation or to claim a knowledge about what they do that is greater than what I have.

But I will say that my visit to their office today showed me yet another way that journalists working in other countries with the benefit of a tradition of freedom of information laws are fighting, and succeeding, in making their country, and by extension, more open and more transparent.

Their work, and their story, deserve to be shared.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 85: Cafe Tortoni and Really Living

When I was growing up and Dad was feeling deep-down good, he’d rear back, slap his right knee and exclaim, “Yee-hah, this is really living!” I felt Dad’s words tonight as he, Dunreith, Lee and I were deciding on the evening’s activities here in Buenos Aires.

Our choices were between going to Café Tortoni, the oldest café in Latin America, spending time in El Ateneo, one of the world’s greatest bookstores, or taking in one of the planet’s most intimate and passionate dance forms, the tango.

This was truly a no-lose situation.

As she has done time and again during the 15 years of our relationship, Dunreith steered me and us in the right direction.

Based on Lee’s stated goal of having ice cream for dinner and her own intention of taking in a classic café, she cast the decisive vote for us to go to Tortoni.

By this point we had already had a full and fantastic day rich in conversation and laughter and language and friendship and connection.

We had spent about an hour in a travel agency with Rosi, a Brazilian widow with long, black hair, an easy smile and an efficient manner who has been married to her second older Argentine husband for the past nine years.

We had had our first parillada, a heaping pile of all kinds of beef and chicken and sausage with Jenny Manrique, a Colombian journalist and friend from the Dart/Ochberg community who has been living in Buenos Aires for more than a year.

Jenny chose Las Cabras, a loud and inviting restaurant in the Palermo neighborhood with low-set red chairs and a seemingly endless supply of meat, to meet us.

Together we wiled away a good chunk of the afternoon, switching back and forth between English and Spanish while Dunreith entertained us with drawing on the paper tablecloth. (Among others, I had the words, “Jeff”, “marido”, “hombre”, “funny” and “broma” directed at me.) After all the eating, we didn’t need much more food for the evening.

Dunreith’s suggestion moved us toward the single place in Buenos Aires that friend and Chilean guide Alejandra Matus said we couldn’t miss.

A short cab ride later, we were outside the fabled establishment.

It didn’t disappoint.

Everything about “Tortoni,” as the tuxedo-wearing waiters called it, oozed class, Old World charm and Argentine swagger.

The high ceilings, much of which is covered with the original stain glass from when the café opened in 1858.

The circular marble tables.

The combination of artwork, artifacts like spoons, photographs and tributes to the place that lined the walls and filled the cabinets that were in nooks and crannies all over the place. The dark wood that framed the main room and the circular burgundy pillars that held it up.

The busts of legendary authors Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Pirandello.

The coner table that is permanently occupied by wax statues of Borges, "King of Tango" singer/songwriter Carlos Gardel and poet Alfonsina Storni.

The bustle of the wait staff and the unhurried way they waited for us to work our way through our decision about what to drink and eat.

The pleased, but unsurprised smile on the lips of the stocky man with a purple tie and thick mustache who stood near the entrance to the tango room when I told him what Alejandra had said.

The intimate and utterly absorbed conversations between well-turned out friends and family.

Dunreith and Lee each ordered dulce de leche ice cream, along with vanilla and chocolate ice cream, respectively. Both of them and Dad had a decaf cortado.

We all sat and talked and marveled at our fortune at being alive and with each other.

I didn’t slap my knee and called out as Dad used to do when Mike, Jon and I were young.

But I did reflect how the past few 18 months have been filled with one expansive and dream fulfilling experience after the next.

Together Dunreith and I have both moved forward together into uncharted territory and back into sharing and weaving with our existing community and family what we have learned and seen.

That process has only accelerated since Dunreith and I boarded a plane in mid-July and flew to Santiago.

We have tickets to fly home to Chicago two months from today.

Plenty more adventures await before then.

Uruguay tomorrow morning.

Tango or El Ateneo tomorrow night.

We’re really living.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 84: Evil and Resistance at the former ESMA Detention Center

It’s a lesson we’ve learned before, and our visit today to the former ESMA Detention Center here in Buenos Aires taught us once again that pure evil takes many forms and knows no boundaries of race, color, history or creed.

The educational facility of the Argentine Navy was converted during the dictatorship into the largest of a network of hundreds of detention centers during the “Dirty War” that lasted from 1976 to 1983.

About 5,000 Argentines were taken, blindfolded and handcuffed, to the sprawling complex in the Nunez neighborhood.

Only 200 survived, according to our guide Emilio, a lean, bearded 35-year-old with blue jeans and rumpled dark hair.

Many of those who were killed and those who survived alike were subjected to all manner of torture in the upper floor of the main building, called the Casino, where high-ranking officers lived with their families.

The torture took place in the place called “La Capuchita,” a diminutive form for being blindfolded. Emilio explained that as many as 200 prisoners at a time lay stacked in rows, separated only by a piece of wood.

Rampant sexual abuse of men and women occurred there, too.

Among the murdered victims were the mothers of the disappeared, whose crime was that they had protested against their sons and daughters being taken at all hours of the day and evening, never to return. Their group, which was established in April 1977, was infiltrated by members of the Argentine military.

Others were mothers of children who were taken there while pregnant, and murdered just days after their children were born. The children were then given to families, some of them military.

The violations were not only physical.

Emilio showed us the cold, antiseptic room where prisoners, as in Nazi Germany, were stripped of their names and given a number.

Some of the people were killed after being told that they were going to another center in the South of the country.

Deceptions like these were an integral part of ESMA, which had a division dedicated to putting out propaganda to counter Argentina’s poor image abroad.

They made a series of cosmetic changes after the 1979 visit by the Inter American Human Rights Commission, all designed to discredit the statements by prisoners of what was happening there.

So, too, was the terror they sought to inflict on the population.

They took people from their homes and on the streets at all times of the day.

One prisoner who had been held as ESMA tried to escape.

They killed him and brought his body back to show the inmates what would happen to them if they tried to do the same.

Yet at least as horrific as the abuses themselves were the names and uses that the torturers gave to the places where they inflicted so much damage.

They called a corridor in the torture area “the Avenue of Happiness.”

They used the code words “Dark side of the Moon” while passing through the chain that provided a barrier between the green watch tower the officials established during the war and the casino building.

They raised their children in the building and on the complex, and used the same room that they planned Operation Condor, the campaign of political terror and assassination in the Southern Cone, for dancing and partying.

Indescribably shameful, too, was the position of the Catholic Church, which said that injecting torture victims with drugs and throwing them from planes into the ocean was not murder because dieing at sea is a Christian death.

This all took place during the war.

Afterward all involved participated in a code of silence, a wall of denial that has lasted until today and that has rarely, if ever, been cracked. This includes the many other officials they brought there and the men and women who cleaned the place.

The top generals were tried and convicted after democracy had returned, but soon after a law was passed granting amnesty to all those below them who carried out their deadly orders.

Layer and layer of evil upon evil.

Of course, each of these actions and techniques had happened in other countries before.

During the Pinochet government, thousands of Chileans were also ripped from their homes, bound, gagged, violated, tortured and thrown from planes hundreds of miles from their homes and their families.

In Nazi Germany and throughout Nazi-controlled Europe, men, women and children had their names removed, replaced by a number.

Victims were told they were going to take a shower shortly before being ushered into the gas chambers.

The Nazis, too, had a Potemkin village called Theresienstadt that the Red Cross visited during the Second World War.

In South Africa, security forces had a barbeque next to the burning flesh of a perceived opponent they had just killed.

Even with all of these layers of evil, ESMA was not only home to destruction.

It was also a site of fierce resistance.

It’s a place where Victor Basterra, a graphic designer and prisoner, shot pictures of many of the functionaries and smuggled documents he had stolen from their homes that were used in subsequent trials.

It’s a place from which three women who were ordered to leave the country after being released filed a complaint in Paris that told the world what had happened.

It’s a land where the amnesty law did not cover the expropriation of babies, so an enterprising group of lawyers filed suit on that basis.

It’s a country where local judges prosecuted cases in other jurisdictions to help bring the truth to light.

It’s a nation where journalist Ricardo Walsh penned an open letter to the dictatorship on the anniversary of their take over. The letter asserted that the junta’s economic policies caused even more damage in the country than their human rights abuses.

He was murdered the next day.

It’s a place from where the survivors told about the numerical system by which they were ordered and the names of those where there so that their loved ones would know what happened to them.

It’s a story of mothers who have marched ceaselessly for close to four decades, refusing to give up their quest for justice for their murdered loved ones.

It’s one of the few countries in the world where an amnesty law has been reversed, and hundred of suits have been filed against officials of many different levels decades after the crimes took place. ESMA is also a site of healing, where poor people who have not had much work are hired to help renovate the large, ailing buildings on the campus.

It’s a place where the city of Buenos Aires, the federal government and non-profit groups are collaborating to transform what was into what it can be.

It’s a site where school group after school group comes six days per week to learn about what happened in their homeland.

It’s a location where women and men work to excavate the signs, the telephone numbers and names the prisoners left behind.

The work is slow and laborious.

Many of the complex’s large, high-ceilinged buildings look shabby and run-down. Broken windows are visible, and the pace of construction does not feel urgent.

The ultimate destination is uncertain.

There are still those Argentines who feel that life was better under the dictatorship, and others who continue to choose not to know.

But if this is true, so it also true that are many dedicated souls, among them survivors, who are committed to healing the country by naming the evil, telling about the resistance and educating the young people about what has come before them so that it need not happen again.

We learned that today, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 83: The Madres of the Plaza de Mayo

The mothers of the disappeared have been marching at Buenos Aires' Plaza de Mayo for more than 36 years.

Meeting in plain view of the Casa Rosada, or the Pink House, the name for the Argentine presidential place, since April 30, 1977.

Demanding a full accounting of, and justice for, their sons and daughters who were disappeared during Argentina's "Dirty War" that lasted from 1976 to 1983.

The government put the figure of the number of people who were tortured before being killed and having their bodies disposed of in rural areas or unmarked graves at about 9,000 to 11,000, but the mothers say the total is closer to 30,000.

They have marched during the 1978 World Cup that Argentina hosted and won.

They have marched during the transition to democracy that saw President Carlos Menem sign an amnesty law that absolved the leaders of the military regime of their crimes.

They marched during the split of their group into two-those who accepted money from the government as partial compensation for the deaths of their loved ones and those who continue to call for a full accounting for what happened.

They have marched when President Nestor Kirchner overturned the amnesty law and opened the door for more prosecutions of top-ranking generals.

And they marched today.

Dunreith and I arrived at the plaza this afternoon shortly after 3:00 p.m.

The sun was strong, the sky nearly cloudless.

We had already absorbed some of the city's ample, European-based charm, walking past classic-looking stone buildings on the wide boulevard on the way to El Ateneo, a magical former theater turned bookstore/cafe.

Two of the mothers were on the periphery of the circle where the women march standing under a blue tent, where they sold books, pens, and other materials about the disappeared.

I asked if they could answer some questions about their experiences.

They were working, they said, and couldn't took.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo-Founding Line, the group that had accepted financial compensation from the government, marched first.

Five women, including two mother wearing white head scarves, toted a white banner with the group's name on it as they marched around and around the square.

Younger supporters marched with them. A half dozen carried black and white pictures of their loved ones with them.

This included a woman with a bullhorn who called out disappeared people's names.

"Presente," the group answered in unison.

Present.

Even though their loved one were not physically there, the mothers were saying that they were present.

The Mothers of the Plaza of Mayo Association went next.

Their group was larger, and led by ten women also wearing white head scarves.

They carried a blue banner with white letter that said, "Until Victory Always Beloved Children."

Their scarves had the words, "Appearance with life, the disappeared, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo" stitched in a blue cross-stitch.

Many of the mother wore glasses and walked with a slow stiffness.

But there was nothing stiff about the way many jointed the crowd behind them in waving their fists, chanted and sang songs about the mother having power and being in the square, about their work being a national project.

Around and around they marched, adding yet another chapter to their ceaseless struggle of witness and justice.

They stopped after about half a dozen laps before standing next to the tent.

The crowd applauded the madres loudly before Evel de Petrini addressed them.

De Petrini, who has searched for her son since the group began, spoke about Sunday's elections.

She said the voters had to evaluate who would actually do what they said they would do before urging everyone to vote for Christine Kirchner, the current president and widow of the former leader.

The crowd cheered again.

Her speech concluded and the group mingled before starting to disperse.

Many of the mother filad back into the white van with the name of the group painted on the side.

Like several others, I stayed outside the roped area that had been set up to give the mothers space to walk into the van.

It had the effect of making them look like stars walking down the red carpet.

A few lone fans clapped again as they went by.

A pair of mothers hugged.

The two women underneath the tent kept selling.

Martha Minow wrote in the introduction to her book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness that no act by the government can bring closure to the kind of wounds these women have experienced because any gesture is by definition insufficient.

But they are also necessary.

These women, all of whom are aging, some of whom are physically frail, have not yet achieved the justice they seek.

But they've also never given up.

In their fierce and unwavering commitment, they've not only honored the memory of their murdered children whose political ideas many have begun to adopt.

They've also provided an example for people across the globe to follow.

They've helped overturn a law that shielded the evildoers from impunity.

They've helped open the door for those people to be punished for what they did.

Any they've shown what is possible from people with comparatively meager financial resources, but a righteous and wounded sense of justice.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 82: Marjorie Agosin's wisdom, SIGAChile.cl and Dan Middleton

In one of her many wise comments, made during a conversation we had about 15 years ago, poet, human rights activist, and dear friend Marjorie Agosin made the point not to assume that there are too many stories.

By that I understood her to mean not that she was diminishing any single person's individual experience.

Rather she was saying that there is a finite number of universal stories with which readers can relate their own personal experience.

You see what Majorie's talking about in The Wire, David Simon's epic five-season take on the American City.

In his final speech before he is murdered, D'Angelo Barksdale explains his understanding of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby in terms that show the story of white decadent wealth in the 1920s has resonated with him across decades, culture and class:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DOy4hCih7w&w=420&h=315]

If what Marjorie says is true for stories, I believe it's also true for people.

Over time, I've come to find more and more that certain people's hair or expression or coloring or walk remind me of others I've known before.

That certainly happened to me yesterday morning, when I attending the launch of SIGAChile.cl at the University of Diego Portales.

It's an innovative new web site that's the product of a private-public-university collaboration that seeks both to give people with disabilities information about access in public spaces like restaurants and to provide them with the opportunity to share reviews of what they learn from going to those places.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C0Oqy63ox0&w=560&h=315]

What my mother would call the mucky mucks were there.

People like Minister of Social Development Bruno Baranda and Maria Ximena Rivas, the head of the country's agency for people with disabilities.

Cecilia Garcia Huidobro, dean of the communication school at our university, was there spoke, as was a high-ranking people from Google Chile.

All talked about the power of the site, which was developed by the digital team of colleagues and friend Arly Faundes and Jorge Gonzalez, with extensive help from students like Katherinee Aburto.

All said that it could play a role in reducing the inequality and isolation faced by so many Chileans with disabilities-a number that one of the speakers placed at 2 million people.

They also talked about the culture change that it can help engender-a shift in which people with disabilities are more fully accepted.

Under this change, people will comply with the law not because they fear punishment, but because they understand that people with disabilities may require some accommodation, but have both equal rights and talents to contribute.

This was the point Felix Orellano made.

He's a Chilean wheelchair user who had lived outside the country for a couple of years-a period during which he got used to having easier access to public places than what he experienced upon his return.

During his presentation Felix said he didn't want his disability to be considered a good or bad thing, something that hindered or helped him.

He wants it just to be a fact.

His comments made sense to me.

And what struck me the most about Felix was how closely he resembled Dan Middleton.

Dan's one of the people outside of my family who's meant the most to me in the 30 years since we first met as freshmen in Rinconada dorm at Stanford.

During our college years we spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours laughing and joking and talking about all manner of subjects.

Starting sophomore year, a number of friends and I developed an informal rotation of helping him get to bed.

The initial goal was to help him defray his medical expenses,

Eventually, though, it became a coveted activity we all wanted to do because it meant we got to spend more time with him.

We've kept up in the more than quarter century since we've graduated, continuing our decades long dialogues and politics and sports and literature and women and family-you know, the stuff of life.

I've not seen Dan in person since 1997-we Skype with some regularity-and I still have the image of what he looks like clearly in my mind precisely because we spent so much time together.

Now I want to be clear about a key point.

I understand that it is an oft-stated stereotype that members of a majority tell members of a minority group that they look similar to other people in that same group.

So when I talk about Felix and Dan it's not because they are both wheelchair users.

I'm talking about Feliix's lean build and broad shoulders and how he sat back in the chair.

About the right part in his longish brown hair and dark coloring.

About his limp fingers that he extended when I offered my hand and how he used his wrists to move his chair.

All of these reminded me so intensely of Dan that for just a moment I felt as if I was seeing him in Felipe.

The presentations and congratulatory video and lofty words ended.

I approached Felix to ask him his last name.

He was wearing a tiny earring in his left ear.

He spoke Spanish, of course.

His voice was not as deep as Dan's mellifluous tones, his frame was not at tall as Dan's 76 inches.

But, because of his resemblance to Dan, I still felt like I knew him better than I actually did.

I left the launch impressed by the work Arly and her team had put into the project, excited about the possibilities to spread the site to other countries and intrigued by the multi-faceted collaboration for a public good.

Yet I also felt grateful for the reminder of Marjorie's wisdom and the opportunity to feel physically close again to Dan for a little while.