HORACIO RODRÍGUEZ LARRETA, a Harvard MBA who wants to be Buenos Aires’s next mayor, has a good story to tell. He is the handpicked candidate of the current mayor, Mauricio Macri, who created a rapid-transit bus network and festooned the city with cycle lanes. The polls say Mr Larreta will win in a run-off on July 19th. Mr Macri hopes that will be a springboard for his own campaign to become Argentina’s next president later this year.
But in Buenos Aires’s shantytowns Mr Larreta’s boasts ring hollow. Electricity is erratic and flooding is frequent; ambulances and the police take hours to arrive. The candidate has not given up. Posters extolling him appear amid the aluminium-and-brick shacks of Villa 31, a slum that borders the posh neighbourhood of Retiro. But traditional campaigning will not suffice in the city’s 56 villas, which collectively house 275,000 people, about a tenth of the population. To win votes in such service-starved neighbourhoods Mr Larreta and his rival, Martín Lousteau, a congressman, will quietly rely on local power brokers called punteros (point people).
...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1Lmg5YV
No comments:
Post a Comment