That picture looks about right.

I've always considered malls to be a real waste. They have their boom, then they fall into disrepair, and are abandoned or relegated to the underclass. Strip malls are just abandoned as new ones are built to follow the suburban shifts.

At least this one is fully utilized. We have amusement parks in ours, they have torture chambers in theirs. Besides, I feel Feinstein and Schumer would disagree with that definition -- the place looks...prosperous.

The worst thing is really that, how much are the historically-unaware teens and young adults born after '83 that are surely the mall's bulk consumer demographic going to REALLY care? That's the way history works: people schlep on and silence the unsavory, if only involuntarily. Klein's "(people) who know their history" are in any society, a rarity.

It's what makes me proud to be a History major.

very interesting. even more so having recently read The Cave by Jose Saramago. i wouldn't be surprised if this in part inspired his story. great book, by the way.

Wikipedia has the info now, along with the intriguing fact that the mall also contains the "Jorge Luis Borges Cultural Centre". Perhaps the Aleph is down in the basement as well.

Which part or chapter of Naomi's book is it? There's extra information at http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources

Looking at the bibliography from http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/bibliography
I'd guess she got the information from one of

"Feitlowitz, Marguerite. A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998"

"Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. New York: New Press, 2003."

"Constable, Pamela, and Arturo Valenzuela. A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991."

"Marchak, Patricia. God’s Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999."

"Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty
War.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997."

But a chapter ref would make it easier to determine.

>Looks prosperous.
Ted, you can be sure that the country's rich are in an even stronger position to exploit its poor than in the US. Of course they're prosperous. It's the folks in the surrounding slums that aren't.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=3129

http://dusteye.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/barrio1.jpg
Context: http://dusteye.wordpress.com/2007/02/06/madres-de-plaza-de-mayo-a-memory-of-tragedy-and-a-hope-for-the-future/

http://www.foundationtodosjuntos.org/site/eng/index.php

Oh, and if you fancy literally slumming it:
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/life/atoz/article_930890.php
Visiting is one thing. Going as a tourist seems different. I guess you'd need a guide either way, but it makes me feel uneasy.

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/03/the_coming_mega.html
The rise of the megaslum.

Is there anyone out there who is reminded that this would make such a great slasher flick...and one that also works as a satire to boot. A bunch of apolitical, bongsmoking teenagers are trapped in the mall after dark, and afterwards the vengeful spirits of political prisoners proceed to hunt them down...along with a masked psycho in an Argentinean military uniform.

Now that I'd pay money to see.

You know, the more I look at that picture, the more I think of the quote:

Our traditional mentality, mores, traditions, literature, and arts and culture and tradition were totally destroyed by U.S. imperialism and its stooges. Social entertaining, the tempo and rhythm of music and so forth were all based on U.S. imperialistic patterns. Our people’s traditionally clean, sound characteristics and essence were completely absent and abandoned, replaced by imperialistic, pornographic, shameless, perverted, and fanatic traits.

That mall looks like something out of southern California. We've successfully shared values with these people. Note the guy with the sweater cape? Very che-che. The vacuous teens at the bottom of the escalator checking out "La GameStop".

Shanty dwellers will get their dignity eventually, it just takes some time for civilization to get from the food court to them. You've got to be patient.

Ted, there is no trickle-down. Without concerted reform there are just peons and pee-ers. Power, control of resources and wealth accumulate within the most powerful institutions and sustained efforts are required to distribute them.

Ted, there is no trickle-down.

Posh! Of course there are trickledowns.

Our ethics and culture trickled down the leg and settled on Argentina. The School of the Americas has some purpose. A second example would be the various countries filling the coalition of the billing; they benefit from the wars that need supporting.

The entire premise of trickling-down doesn't imply torrenting-down (Trickle: To move or proceed slowly or bit by bit). They get the crumbs that we knock off the table.

For the world, I've never understood why economic trickledown was interpreted as torrent-down by those hearing it that they should anticipate torrenting. All along the economists have been using the correct word, and it's been working pretty much exactly as it was used. A bit-by-bit drip that happens whenever the bowl up above gets too full to contain the contents. Sometime the trickledown is caused by the sloshing of moving the contents from a smaller bowl to a bigger bowl up above.

I visited that mall last year when I was in Buenos Aires. Had I known about the history of the secret basement, I would have gone looking for it. It's located on Calle Florida, a bustling street full of designer shops.

Couple of nits.

The mall as you see it in the picture was rebuilt in the early 1990's. It is nothing like a Southern Cal mall. For example, it has no parking lot. It is an urban mall which takes up most of a city block, recycled from an old building. The glass roof was added in the 1990's.

During the dictatorship, the building was government-owned, mostly abandoned, and falling apart. Nothing like the picture shows, though one part of it was used to sell railway tickets, IIRC.

In other words, people weren't being tortured while a crowd such as this was shopping above. Though I can see the cinematic appeal of such an arrangement, it didn't happen.

It doesn't cater to teenagers, by the way. It caters to tourists and downtown office workers and corporate types. Always a bad idea to extrapolate from the US and think you know what you are talking about.

It doesn't cater to teenagers, by the way. It caters to tourists and downtown office workers and corporate types. Always a bad idea to extrapolate from the US and think you know what you are talking about

I think possibly, you are being too literal in the interpretation of some of the comments.

So, no La GameStop in the mall?