Pride and Prejudice in the Andes

One is the Paris of the South. The other has followed the model of Los Angeles-all smog and low slung, sprawling suburbs. Less than two hours apart by plane, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile are separated by an imposing mountain range-and centuries of bad feelings.

Buenos Aires built its boulevards, parks, stores, and world-class opera house on the back of an economy that was the envy of more than just the neighbors. On the strength of its fertile land, Argentina was in its heyday one of the ten richest countries in the world, while Chile and its capital were not much to speak of. The little city, embarrassed by its small size and infuriated by the arrogance of the great capital, is eternally resentful.

But in recent decades, one nation’s fortunes have declined as precipitously as the other’s have improved. It is a change that, in the most urbanized region of the developing world, has made its clear mark on the two nations’ capitals, home to 40 percent of the countries’ combined populations. Santiago is growing and Buenos Aires has been humbled, but the age-old tensions live on.

I have my own small place in this give-and-take. I was born in New York to an Argentine mother and a double-expatriate father who had moved from Buenos Aires to Santiago with his family at age twelve. Hardly a year of my life has gone by without a trip to the two cities. My sister and I, from a very young age, felt torn in our allegiances to one city or the other. We had to choose: everyone on both sides always wanted to know which we preferred. In Santiago, the company of our beloved cousins, with whom we only got to play for a few precious weeks per year, was a big draw. But in my mother’s Buenos Aires were fun parks, delicious ice cream, and countless other trappings of the rich urban life we had already, perhaps unconsciously, learned to appreciate.

Some things have changed, since my days of ice cream and merry-go-rounds. Buenos Aires’ beaux arts buildings are in a precarious state of disrepair. In the past year, falling chunks of plaster have become a real menace in the city center. At street level, the facades of bank headquarters have been covered in metal curtains or plexiglass, or else bare the scars of physical beatings they took during the crisis of December 2001. The venerable Harrod’s, moribund even in my childhood, has closed its doors, replaced by malls catering principally to Chilean and Brazilian tourists. My Chilean cousins take shopping vacations in Buenos Aires, while a great many of my Argentine relatives have been forced to leave a country that holds few economic prospects.

Meanwhile, Santiago has grown on the strength of the economic diversification and foreign investment that began in the 1970s. New buildings everywhere-office towers, shopping malls, condos, and suburban tracts-have done little for the city’s charm (it still has none) but a lot for its sense of vitality. In recent years, the number of luxury hotels for international business travelers has skyrocketed. In 1992, the 24-story Hyatt Regency broke new ground in Santiago-a bold round tower looming above the city. It was followed by a Marriott, an expansion at the Sheraton, and this year, a Ritz Carlton, the first in South America and a vaunted symbol of prestige for this provincial backwater of the Spanish colonial empire.

In the 1990s, the coincidence of the Chilean economic miracle with privatization mania in Argentina led to an interesting turn in relations. Argentina sold its assets to the highest bidder, and flush Santiago-based companies jumped at a golden opportunity. The roads around Buenos Aires filled with Chilean supermarket chains like Jumbo and Ekono. The venerable Bonafide, maker of coffee and chocolates since before my mother was a child, now bore on its packaging the name of Chilean chocolate maker Costa. Shopping malls-some Chilean-owned, others Santiago-inspired-popped up all over Buenos Aires. But while in Santiago a shopping center is often the most pleasant place to walk around, in Buenos Aires these enclosed spaces did considerable damage to the many traditional commercial streets. Today Chile is the third-largest investor in Argentina, after the U.S. and Spain, placing it solidly and symbolically in the company of would-be and has-been colonizers. And perhaps for the first time, the east side of the Andes nurses a wounded pride. Investment in Buenos Aires during the privatization wave of the early 1990s left Chilean companies with, for instance, a controlling stake in Buenos Aires’ electric utility Edesur. Diplomatic contretemps followed: one day in 1996, Edesur cut off power to Buenos Aires’ Ezeiza Airport-then administered by the air force-for late payment. Even more humiliating and disturbing to porte—os (natives of Buenos Aires) were the weeks of unexplained blackouts that rolled across the city in the summer of 1999.

The massive government debt default and devaluation of the Argentine peso in late 2001 set off an economically and socially devastating crisis. In the two years since, nervous residents of Buenos Aires have watched thousands of cartoneros try to make a living recycling cardboard from the city’s garbage. They’ve watched the crime rate rise. They’ve seen their savings and their jobs disappear. And many of them have left-for Europe, Miami, the interior of the country, and even Santiago.But the leveling of the playing field has done nothing to make friends of these neighbors. In 2001, former Argentine president and ex-convict Carlos Saul Menem married Cecilia Bolocco, a Chilean TV personality and one-time Miss Universe. The marriage thrilled the Chilean press, but Argentines saw it as an example of the tastelessness of all involved. Bolocco, who claimed before last April’s elections to dream of becoming first lady of Argentina, provoked the wrath of porte—os for daring to emulate Eva Per–n. Menem, in turn, infuriated the Chilean tabloids when he remained in Buenos Aires and allowed his pregnant wife to go home alone to Santiago. Their newborn child might do well to move somewhere else entirely.

When I visited the two cities in June, I expected to find Buenos Aires a shadow of its former self, but this was not the case. The city’s more well-to-do, at least, maintain their enviable lifestyles. Eighty year-old ladies still chat at sidewalk cafŽs, professional waiters cut meat with spoons, and people walk their well-groomed dogs at all hours. But to its inhabitants, Buenos Aires exists in the past tense. The city’s self-image is of how things once were-not what they might be. Buenos Aires remains formidable, but will it be viable?

Santiago, meanwhile, embodies forward motion. Highway billboards advertise the arrival of WiFi technology, and the inauguration of a clover highway interchange recently made the front page of the national daily paper. The city is successfully progressing from poverty to affluence-but is there no room for pleasure? Walking is strictly for those who cannot afford to drive, every other new establishment is an outpost of the same chains that advertise their presence from New York to San Francisco to Taipei, and the mangy dogs sleeping on the streets don’t seem to be going anywhere.

Santiago is a city with a future, the future that so many cities covet. But sometimes even a bright future pales in comparison to a glorious past. No offense to half of my family, but I’ve chosen my “favorite” city. And I hope for their sake that in its rush to overtake its rival, Santiago might see that not everything Argentine should be repudiated. Progress for both cities, and any other, need not mean embracing unpalatable solutions from half a world away; the best ideas may already be right there.