Elections

I was wrong. There aren’t only six or seven candidates for Diputado Nacional. There are twenty-four. Twenty-four! And you can only vote for one!

And how candidates take advantage of the poor is done in the most obnoxiously crude and visible way possible. The “top” candidates are normally those who have a lot of money and can pay for an extensive amount of advertising. I can’t walk down the street without seeing hundreds of posters for some guy named Yarade—“Con Vos, Con Urtubey, Por Salta” is the slogan (Urtubey is Salta’s governor). Every single television advertisement is either about a candidate, the up and coming TV show, or cellular phone service. I’m curious to see what happens on TV when Election Day is finally over.

On Election Day, to guarantee that people vote, these individuals drive to the poorer neighborhoods and take the residents on a “field trip” to the voting booths. The candidates walk these people up to the booth, whisper their name in their ear, and escort them back to the neighborhood after they’ve voted. And that’s how they win. Rigging? It should be.

And to top it all off, voting is obligatory. Valeria told me that most people here don’t really care when it comes to voting, but when they don’t vote, it just goes to the majority. So the winner is whoever can ship enough Argentineans to the voting booths and then use the apathetic population to win on a landslide. Absurd.

Now that it is late in the week, with only 3 days until Election Day, the advertising is even more annoying. Every child at el comedor had a pile of pamphlets from various candidates. At the city’s center, there were computers set up for each candidate to vote early and show your loyalty.