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Alfonsin
Cameraman and ReporterI was tired when I got home and I have a TV bolted to the wall at the head of my bed so I could do little but watch it. Almost the moment I turned the news on a notice came on the bottom of the screen announcing Raul Alfonsín, the president who governed Argentina after the fall of the last military coup ended in 1983, had just been pronounced dead. A crowd was forming a few blocks away from my host-family’s house on Avenida Santa Fe. People were crying. Waiting for something to happen, for someone to come out of the doors after the doctor came out to announce Alfonsín’s death. I turned off the television, put my camera in my bag and left.
I wanted to get an idea of what this event meant to the people who gathered by that door and Argentines in general. There wasn’t any sign of a change as I walked up Santa Fe. I had thought that maybe the streets would gradually fill with people shouting and marching towards the crowd they saw on the evening news. But the streets were quiet either because people hadn’t heard or didn’t want to go out in the street with the radicals, or maybe the country had moved on and the group that I’d seen mourning Alfonsín was a meaningless minority. I’m not sure.
The block was marked off and the crowd was growing. I awkwardly moved around people some holding candles, some teary-eyed. In the center of the crowd there dozens of candles. In front of the building were Alfonsín was there were several television crews. I saw the young reporter I’d just seen on TV and looked at all the lights and tripods, microphones and emptied packages of Duracell batteries on the sidewalk. Because I didn’t quite grasp the meaning of Alfonsín to these people I felt like an observer. Wanting to cheer but without the words. And I realized that none of the camera technicians or anchors were crying. This was work and when they weren’t shooting they were scrambling for batteries and a good angle. When they were shooting the cameramen would constantly yell at the people with microphones shoved in their face (these were politicians who seemed used to it) to step down. One reporter, a blonde woman, became known as “ey, rubia flaca” (skinny blonde) after the cameramen told her to crouch down a few dozen times during one interview. These are things one doesn’t see on the news. The rush and the problems, the idea that your job distances you from telling the story that your trying to communicate with feeling to viewers at home.
So there were smiles and tears around Raul Alfonsín tonight. I’m not sure what to think of him but I can say that his death did not cause a media-frenzy or a popular demonstration but rather a contained mixture of both.
