When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

CLARIN
Clarin is the largest newspaper in Argentina. It was founded in August 1945 and is based in Buenos Aires.
Photograph of thousands of migrants marching  to the US-Mexican border under the rain.
Migrant Lives
Alejandra Pataro

Latin America's Migrants Trying To Reach The U.S.: Risk It All, Fail, Repeat

Searching for a safe home, many Latin American migrants are forced to try, time after time, getting turned away, and then risk everything again.

BUENOS AIRES — With gangsters breathing down his neck, Maynor sold all of his possessions in Honduras, took his wife and three kids aged 11, 8 and 5, and set out northwards. He was leaving home for good, for the third time.

"I had to leave my country several times," he said, "but was deported." He was now trying to enter the U.S. again, but the family had become stuck in Mexico: "Things are really, really bad for us right now."

Migration in Latin America is no longer a linear process, taking migrants from one place to another. It goes in several directions. Certain routes will take you to one country as a stopover to another, but really, it's more a lengthy ordeal than a layover, and the winners are those who can find that receptive, welcoming community offering work and a better life.

The aid agency Doctors Without Borders (MSF) calls this an international, multidirectional phenomenon that may include recurring trips to and from a home country.

Marisol Quiceno, MSF's Advocacy chief for Latin America, told Clarín that migrants "are constantly looking for opportunities and for food security, dignified work opportunities (and) healthcare access." These are the "minimum basics of survival," she said, adding that people will keep looking if they did not find them the first time around.

Watch VideoShow less
A person with blonde hair stands half hidden behind the brick wall infront of a house
Society
Guillermo Tella

In The Shantytowns Of Buenos Aires, Proof That Neighbors Function Better Than Cities

Residents of the most disadvantaged peripheries of the Argentine capital are pushed to collaborate in the absence of municipal support. They build homes and create services that should be public. It is both admirable, and deplorable.

-Analysis-

BUENOS AIRES – In Argentina, the increasing urgency of the urban poor's housing and public services needs has starkly revealed an absence of municipal policies, which may even be deliberate.

With urban development, local administrations seem dazzled, or blinded, by the city center's lights. Thus they select and strengthen mechanisms that heighten zonal and social inequalities, forcing the less-well-off to live "on the edge" and "behind" in all senses of these words. Likewise, territorial interventions by social actors have both a symbolic and material impact, particularly on marginal or "frontier" zones that are the focus of viewpoints about living "inside," "outside" or "behind."

The center and the periphery produce very different social perceptions. Living on the periphery is to live "behind," in an inevitable state of marginality. The periphery is a complex system of inequalities in terms of housing provision, infrastructures, facilities and transport.

Watch VideoShow less
photo of drugs on a table after they were seized
Society
Nahuel Gallotta

Pink Cocaine: Is There Fentanyl In Mystery "Dirty Drug" From Colombia?

Also known as 'Tuci,' the "designer drug" has been spreading in Latin America and globally over the past decade. But it's looking more and more like a dirty mix concocted by Colombian dealers with potentially devastating effects, particularly if it contains the deadly opioid fentanyl.

Updated Sep. 11, 2023 at 2:30 p.m.

BUENOS AIRESThe "menu" of options, sent via WhatsApp, arrived like it always did, Josefina (not her real name) recalls. Only this time there was something that caught her eye besides the constantly increasing prices. "Tuci," it said.

Josefina's dealer was offering a new drug, one she'd never heard of before. And at 1,500 Argentine peso (46 euros) per gram, Tuci was the priciest of the lot. Surprised — and also curious — resent the list to a group of WhatsApp contacts. She wanted to see what her friends thought.

"Let's buy it. Come on, let's try it," one of them replied. "It can't be Tuci. It's too cheap," wrote another before adding: "You get 50 doses from one gram. It's nothing considering what the drug's really worth." That was the specialist opinion.

Tuci may be a new option in Argentina, but not elsewhere. In Europe it's known as the "cocaine of the rich," used by stars, models and politicians. In other countries the drug goes by the name 2C-B. It is a synthetic version of a mind-altering substance developed in the United States in 1974. Its developer, Alexander Shulgin, called it pink cocaine.

Other substances mixed in

As Tuci is known to be a heavily mixed substance, it has become easier for drug dealers to add in potentially more harmful substances to the mix. Last month in the Colombian city of Medellin, Dr. Jorge Alonso Marin, a toxicologist at the Soma clinic, reported two cases of intoxication due to the alleged consumption of fentanyl, present in Tuci.

A synthetic opioid, fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine, it can be made pharmaceutically or illegally for recreative use. Thus adding it to Tuci would create a mixture of high-risk psychoactive substances.

At the beginning of August, the Colombian National Police reported seizing 300 doses of pharmaceutical fentanyl vials, the largest shipment found to date in the country. Calavera, a Tuci trafficker in Medellin, told Colombian newspaper El Espectador that he added the highly potent opioid to his preparation of Tuci.

To date, no entity specialized in drug analysis had reported the presence of fentanyl in Tuci. "We are aware that the penetration of this illegal market of mixtures of synthetic substances can put people at great risk," Colombia's Vice Minister of Justice, Camilo Umaña, told El Espectador. That is why we insist that the non-therapeutic consumption of opioids is discouraged due to the harmful impacts it can have".

In a report published by Échele Cabeza, on a project that provides information on risk and harm reduction when consuming psychoactive substances, done by the University of Caldas, 25 samples of Tuci and 56 samples of MDMA (also known as ecstasy) collected in Medellin and Bogota were analyzed. The studies showed that Tuci is mainly composed of caffeine, ketamine and MDMA. This makes the interaction between both stimulation and sedation one of the main effects of this substance mixture. No fentanyl was found in the samples analyzed.

One of the most important findings of the study was the presence of oxycodone in six samples (24%), a different type of substance not previously reported. After heroin and fentanyl, it is the third-ranked opioid responsible for the most overdose deaths in the United States.

Argentinian consumption on the rise

In Argentina, Tuci is consumed discreetly, and in exclusive circles. As far as Clarín could gather by taking to users, Tuci was initially linked to Colombian criminal elements, and consumed at electronic music clubs in the districts of Palermo and waterfront areas of Buenos Aires.

People who were high on the drug caught the attention of other club goers, who wanted to try it themselves. If the interested person was a regular on the nightclub circuit and trusted, a meeting was arranged the following week.

At that time a gram cost 1,000 pesos (31 euros), about three-and-a-half times the cost of standard cocaine. Today it goes for twice that, making it the most expensive drug on the market. Normally it's bought outside discotheques.

In Buenos Aires, Tuci is snorted, while in Colombia and Europe it is taken orally.

The word Tuci is short for tucibi (a phonetic spelling of 2C-B), which is also the alias (Alejandro Tucibí) of a drug pin known in Colombia as the "Pablo Escobar of synthetic drugs." He is said to have traveled to Europe in the decade after 2000, attracted by its electronic music bashes, and supposedly met two chemists there who introduced him to a drug they made for Colombians and the rich. He returned to Medellín with the recipe and began producing and selling the drug at electronic music parties.

The business spread to Cali and Bogota, and in time provoked a war between cartels seeking its formula. According to Semana, one of the crimes related to the fight over 2C-B was the 2012 killing, in Buenos Aires, of the Colombian paramilitary and drug-gang assassin Jairo Saldarriaga.

Tuci is reputedly under Colombian control in Buenos Aires. The drug is thought to arrive from Cali in western Colombia. But a Colombian NGO, Échele Cabeza, thinks the substance sold here is something else, that it may not really be 2C-B. "In 95% of cases they're fakes, adulterated substances, replacements and mixes of mind-turning substances that are very dangerous," the group told Clarín. "Most likely the mix includes Sildenafil (viagra) to increase stimulation. But that as raises the risk of tachycardia and heart attacks."

"People don't know how to take it"

Tomás Pérez Ponisio, a member of PAF!, a civil association that works on drug-related social problems, says he used Tuci just once, at a party in Mar del Plata. He was offered it twice more. "It must be available... because you can get anything in Argentina. But it's not widespread like other drugs. We have had very few experiences reported to our webpage, and considering how they tell us they consumed it and the price paid for it, it wouldn't be 2C-B."

It is a drug to be taken in small doses

In Buenos Aires, Tuci is snorted, while in Colombia and Europe it is taken orally. The doses also vary greatly. In Argentina users buy it by the gram, which in other countries can last for various nights or be shared among a group.

"It is a drug to be taken in small doses," says Carolina Ahumada of PAF! "We're not used to that in Argentina." She says that taking it like cocaine or other drugs could be a problem. "There is a lack of information," she adds. "People don't know how to take it. In any case the Tuci we find in Argentina seems to be at a knock-down price."

Tuci is also increasingly dangerous due to the fact that people do not often know what ingredients there are in it. Tuci does most often contain ketamine, MDMA and caffeine, but can also contain methamphetamines, fentanyl or even other unknown lethal substances.

A Colombian drug dealer currently jailed in Buenos Aires agreed to talk to Clarín. He admits he took Tuci in Bogota and says he found out about its arrival in Argentina while in jail. "Selling Tuci in Argentina is not good business for Colombians," he said. "Those who do it make us bring more than two kilograms per trip. Colombian drug dealers have never worked in small time dealing. This is only worth it if they stretch the drug with other products. There are people from my country who allow themselves the luxury of ordering some for their personal use, or ask relatives or friends traveling here to bring the odd 10 or 20 grams. Just to enjoy the "the original.""

Photograph of ice and water taken in the Patagonian National Park
Green
Jazmín Bazán

Patagonian National Park, A Fragile Beauty At The End Of The World

The Patagonian National Park is a spectacular and unique landscape that illustrates the outstanding beauty of nature. But it is at risk of becoming a victim of the climate crisis.

SANTA CRUZ — The northwestern corner of the Argentine province of Santa Cruz is the setting for the Patagonian National Park, an exquisitely neglected part of a region that has become a byword for escapism.

The songwriter Atahualpa Yupanqui called this windswept plateau, with its elevated floodplains and wetlands, the "night watchman of the Americas." Every day the sun shakes up an explosion of earthy colors here before night returns to cast over them a veil of subtle, indefinable mystery. In this merging point of glaciers and the eternal snows of the Zeballos peak, water in so many forms, a Yellow Cliff (Cerro amarillo), prehistoric artworks, volcanic cones and a star-lit sky, only one thing is certain — that nothing is still in this ethereal part of the earth.

Around the Lake Buenos Aires plateau, the park hosts a unique ecosystem of rare and endemic species such as the hooded grebe, and was the home of several prehispanic cultures that left their petroglyphs. The park has three entry points, with camping sites, bathing facilities and even catering options in peak visiting periods.

Watch VideoShow less
photo of messi making a move
Society
Luis Vinker

Maestro Messi: Soccer As A True Art Form

The Argentine Lionel Messi is the personification of soccer sublime . He has come to move fans in ways that art lovers are moved by a painting.

This article was updated on Sep. 8, 2023 at 4:35 p.m.

-Essay-

BUENOS AIRES — Lionel Messi, that giant of soccer, is entering the twilight of his career by joining an American team, Inter Miami. He has received all the praise and glory anyone could in the world of sports, not to mention an ocean of publicity, online and offline, and all the money you could hope to earn. A while back, Marius Serra, a journalist with Barcelona paper La Vanguardia, counted 564 press articles on Messi in Spanish alone.

One is reminded of the "perfect beauty" evoked in one of Shakespeare's plays, mentioned in the novelist Stendhal's (1829) travel diary, Promenades dans Rome. Indeed, beside Messi's status as an icon for soccer fans from Buenos Aires to Bangladesh, is there an artistic dimension to this personage? His followers speak of him in superlative terms that suggest inspiration bordering on dizziness. That is how Stendhal felt viewing works of art in Florence.

One of his biggest fans is the Englishman Roy Hudson, a former footballer now based in Fort Lauderdale close to Miami. Recently he compared the exhilaration of watching Messi live to watching a Shakespeare play with the writer himself or watching Rembrandt paint. Millions of people living in Florida could now watch the greatest soccer player of all time, he said. In 2016, when Messi was in Barcelona, he compared him to the magician Houdini.

He has been a subject for at least two contemporary artists, Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami. Hirst's triptych, Beautiful Messi Spin Painting for One in Eleven, sold for €448,000 for charity a decade ago. Though still young, he already boasts several biographies. One writer, Jordi Puntí, the author of Todo Messi, sees in him the concepts of lightness, speed, precision, visibility and multiplicity, which the Italian author Italo Calvino foresaw decades ago as shaping art and literature this century.

Watch VideoShow less
Photo of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi
Geopolitics
Marcelo Cantelmi

Why China Has Bet On A Bigger (And Nastier) BRICS To Challenge The West

The BRICS economies' inclusion of new members like Iran may not make business sense, but it fits with the Sino-Russian strategy of drawing states of the Global South into their orbit in open confrontation with the U.S. and the rest of the West.

-Analysis-

BUENOS AIRES — Last month's summit in Johannesburg of BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), leading to a decision to expand the club, felt like geopolitical déjà vu. It recalled the 1960s Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of Third World states that refused, apparently, to take sides in the Cold War, either with the capitalist West or Soviet-led communism.

NAM neutrality was limited, often deceptive, and became obsolete with the fall of the Communist bloc in the late 1980s. The dilemma of what was then called the Third World — now, the Global South — was in the stance it should take toward Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union that shared few of its traits and goals. Ideologically, the end of communism confused NAM: It didn't know what to do with itself.

That is until now, with an apparent resuscitation of its spirit in BRICS (formed in 2009). Yet the idea of equidistance ends there, as BRICS is led by Russia and communist China and increasingly a part of their open challenge to Western hegemony.

Its founders include Brazil, which has its own agenda, and India. Both states have adopted their own versions of neutrality in the Ukrainian crisis, first in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine,then after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022.

So far, says Oliver Stuenkel, a professor at Brazil's Getulio Vargas Foundation, the two states have resisted Russia's systematic bid to use an explicitly anti-Western vocabulary in BRICS documents. This, he says, would explain the vague tone of the group's resolutions.

South Africa, the last member to join the group (in 2010), is a lesser power in terms of economy and political clout. But it symbolizes the worldwide spirit the group would come to embody.

Watch VideoShow less
Dock workers and fishermen unloads the day's catch.
Green
Gonzalo Sánchez

How Argentina Got Hooked On Overfishing — And How To Set Herself Free

Trawling in Argentine waters is wiping out marine life in the southern Atlantic. Whatever the money stakes, Argentina must expand those territorial waters where all fishing is banned.

BUENOS AIRES — Very few people know about trawl fishing, the chief method used to fish, indiscriminately and wastefully, in Argentine territorial waters. It has been used for over 50 years to catch hake (halibut) and prawn, two of the three species that constitute the local industry (the third being squid, which is caught another way).

Bottom trawling, if this is happening at the seafloor level, is "non-selective," and uses a vast, heavy net, 120 meters long and 45 wide, with a "mouth" that can reach 12 meters in height.

The monstrous contraption is submerged and dragged by a boat on the surface, engulfing everything in its path: fish, crustaceans, molluscs, mammals, etc. This means dragging up, and killing, all life in a particular zone just for hake and prawn.

Everything that rises dies before it is loaded onto these floating factories. Rays and sharks emerge as half-crushed remains, and are thrown back into the sea. Within minutes, a place teeming with life is turned into a graveyard.

Watch VideoShow less
A couple sitting on a rooftop in front of skyscrapers.
Ideas

Sincericide, When Speaking Your Mind Can Kill A Relationship

We all know good communication is the bedrock of a healthy relationship. Here's why keeping some of your thoughts to yourself, and a practiced lack of utter sincerity, is a bedrock of a healthy couple.

BUENOS AIRES — We know we can often be hard on ourselves, even if our perpetual, and private, self-evaluation can help us reassess our conduct and do better.

But what if it's your spouse or partner criticizing you? How harsh can they be without harming or even killing a relationship? Ours is a time of limited tolerance for dissent (with a brisk tendency to cancel and "unfriend") and polls show younger generations are keener than before to meet kind and empathetic partners.

While we can always state our views and discuss a point of discord without offending, it is also crucial to understand why and when we feel we are justified criticizing a partner's conduct or decision. Because even the plain truth, blurted out freely and once too often, can do irreparable harm. Some call it "sincericide."

Psychoanalyst and therapist Irene Fuks told Clarín that the dangers of "sincericide" are in the word itself, which combines sincerity with homicide and suicide.

"There's something deadly at work," she stresses, as words become darts. And while some people like to boast they say things "as they are," we need to stop a moment, says another analyst Erika Salinas, and "ask ourselves, this thing I'm going to say, does it add up, is it necessary or does it contribute something?" It is one thing to disagree, she adds, and another "to tell [your partner] what they 'are' or 'are not'," which can be hurtful.

Watch VideoShow less