15 years of No to the FTAA: Welcome to the train | The…

He was no longer working in the newsroom after so many years. But when they called me and asked me to go to Mar del Plata on the Alba train, which would go to the counter-summit where Chávez and Néstor would bury the Alca with Bush himself in the nose, I Said yes of course they would, and I started to pack my backpack, by inertia. I didn’t even need a change of clothes because they didn’t ask me to cover neither the top nor the counter-top – just the train ride. I was to arrive in Mar del Plata at dawn and have coffee first and then another bus that would take me back to the capital, to write the note.

It was during the same trip, just started, or rather before, during the press conference that Maradona gave at the crowded station before departure, that I began to understand something of what was going on. It was only then that I adored Maradona, after a long period of conflicting relationship that he never discovered. Why there, In this train, which was full of actresses, actors, singers, famous people, leaders like Evo, union leaders, the truth about the Milanese was Maradona.. It was the engine, the blood drive that gave enormous volume to this awakened journey through the Great Homeland. Everything Maradona wants to say, he put it at the service of a project which, at the time, was to ruin the party for Bush..

Kusturica, who was filming his documentary, followed him everywhere. The first cars, where the most important were located, were inaccessible to the rest of the passengers. Likewise, many notes could be taken in the midst of the general crush: if you were pushed you would turn around and you were surely a “famous thinker”, the kind who gives you good sentences. So it was the morning when the door to the dining car opened and something like a flare came in: it was Maradona with Kusturika in the back and the entourage following him everywhere..

I shrank in the seat because the weather in the dining car was sweltering, but suddenly a hand grabbed mine and it was Maradona’s. He had gone to greet one by one of us blocking the train. Should I say that since, me, Marado Marado? Because I came back to the touch and wrote the column which was published the next day, but I also saw and read what had happened at the Summit and the Counter-Summit, and the unusual and magnificent vibration of the train there. had taken shape. He had found his chain.

I saw Maradona tilt her head on Chávez’s shoulder in the stadium. I saw and heard Nestor’s speech and the face Bush wore as he spoke. Something sleepy was stretching: a regional and popular historical cycle would kick in and This had been possible mainly because in Mar del Plata the idea of ​​a eunuca and banana region ready for icy carnal relationships had been abandoned.

Can a train ride change your life? Yes. When in a train like this one concentrates like a perfume extract the will to be free, to travel on it and to spend a sleepless night absorbing this essence, it can be life changing.