The war against terror in Argentina

My dad sent me this funny e-mail. It's a spoof, obviously, argentinean in origin, but it says a lot about life in there...

Washington DC, CNN Special, 11.07.2006, 11:30 a.m.

Secret documents recently made public by the FBI revealed that Al Qaeda had planned to sabotage the Summit of the Americas that took place in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in November of last year. Osama Bin Laden had ordered two experienced terrorists of his organization to hijack a plane and crash it against the Casa Rosada (Argentina's equivalent of the White House), in repudiation of George Bush's attendance to the summit.

According to the records of several secret services offices, the two terrorists arrived in Ezeiza International Airport on Sunday, October 30, at 21:45, on an Air France flight from Paris.

However, their mission meets obstacles from the start, as the terrorists find out that their luggage has been sent to Santiago de Chile by mistake. After some five hours of form-filling and being redirected from office to office, unable to communicate with anyone due to their poor command of Argentinean Spanish, the two individuals are advised to return with an interpreter the following day. They leave the airport at around 3:00 on Monday.

They take a taxi to the city center. The driver, upon noticing that they are foreigners, drives them around for three hours and finally abandons them near the shanty town Villa 31, where three criminals (presumably in league with the taxi driver) rob them at gun point.

The two radicals have managed to retain a few dollars hidden in pouches on the inner side of their belts. They bribe a truck driver with some of it, and the man agrees to take them to a less inhospitable part of the city.

On Monday at 7:30 am, and thanks to the guerrilla training they have acquired in Afghanistan, they manage to jump onto a train and arrive at a hotel in Plaza Once. Subsequently, they rent a car and head again for the airport, determined to hijack a Boeing 747, as planned.

However, since route 39 has been cut by piqueteros, public employees and teachers on strike, the two men are delayed a further three hours. When they finally get to the airport, they are involved in an altercation with the car-rental company, as their insurance policy does not cover the severe dents nor the broken windshield which resulted when the pair attempted to push their way through the strikers' march.

Since they are denied entrance to the airport unless the damage to the car is paid, they return to the city at 12:30, looking for a money exchange office. They do not realize they have been given false banknotes until they drop one in a beggar's tin can, and he spits in their faces.

Finally out of options, the two men have to give up on their original plan and decide to settle for Aeroparque Jorge Newbery. Although equipped only for national flights and thus housing much smaller airplanes, it is within walking distance, and they head towards it at 13:25.

When they arrive there at 15:10, they find themselves in the midst of another protest, this time involving the workers of Aerolíneas Argentinas, who are complaining about new regulations proposing to cut the leg room in the pilot and co-pilot seats so that a new row of passenger seats can be added. The only plane on the runway is one belonging to Aerolíneas' rival company, Austral, but due to a strike of the oil industry it has no fuel in its tanks.

Thought part of the mob of passengers and workers that is wreaking havoc in the airport hall, the two men are among those arrested by the airport police. Taken to Police Station number 54 in the Caballito area, they manage to escape after recovering from the effects of the tear gas and the concussion suffered by one of them at the time of the arrest. The time is 19:00, which coincides with guard turnover at the aforementioned station. Apparently, bribing is also involved in the incident, although it is unclear what the two men could have offered the corrupt policemen, as they no longer had any money with them.

A waiter at a famous restaurant reports two foreign men "dirty, beaten-up and walking funny, kind of bow-legged" begging for scraps at closing time that evening, but the next ascertainable notice of the would-be terrorists is on the morning of Tuesday at 4:30, when they arrive to Hospital Casa de Mayo with a severe case of food poisoning. As there are no beds available, they are driven to four other hospitals, and finally admitted in Hospital Regal at 9:40.

They are released on Sunday at 17:30. Though each of them is missing a kidney, they are now in possession of some cash again, having made a deal with the head physician at that health center.

Since by this time the summit is over, they attempt to leave the country. They buy a bus ticket to Asunción del Paraguay, but when the engine breaks near the city of Rosario, the bus is broken into by a band of highway robbers. Excepting underwear, all passenger possessions are taken away.

In pain, hungry and desperate, they fall asleep in the hallway of an electro-domestics warehouse in a Rosario suburb. Taken in by an ONG with hidden Catholic roots, they spend the next three months at a rural community in La Pampa, where they are fed and allowed to work in exchange for learning and reciting the psalms.

As they recover their strength, they manage to escape and in May of this year walk into the Central Police Station of Buenos Aires. As foreigners lacking documents, they are deported, mysteriously avoiding further physical abuse. "They said they were carriers of an extremely contagious kind of STD", reported an officer.

Washington congratulated President Kirchner on the country's excellent security. "Although the two men managed to get away" said A.D. Ashley, head of the FBI, "the deterrent measures deployed within all levels of Argentinean society make of that country a model to be followed by our allies in the war against terror."