BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — As a Brazilian journalist living in Argentina, Luciana Taddeo says she is increasingly trying to refute wild rumors.
He said that the Argentine presidential palace had been invaded, that other people had to leave the keys in the ignition of their cars so that the government could use them at any time, that the government had abolished the right to inherit property.
“Journalists have been forced to spend more and more time saying, ‘Look, this is real, it’s not happening,'” he said.
Many of those rumors have been stoked during presidential elections in neighboring Brazil, where current President Jair Bolsonaro has turned Argentina, already a bitter soccer rival, into something of a bogeyman, a warning of the horrors his country may face if it doesn’t. elects former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
On Wednesday, Bolsonaro’s crusade began its late-night ad spot on national television with an explosion against Argentina’s leftist leaders, who have been friends with his election rival.
“In Argentina, the leftist candidate subsidized through Lula also promised fried fish and beer for everyone,” one voice said as images showed others complaining about emerging poverty and skyrocketing inflation under center-left President Alberto Fernandez.
Bolsonaro and his allies had long used left-wing neighbor crisis-ravaged Venezuela as a warning, but switched to Argentina after Fernández defeated center-right President Mauricio Macri, whom Bolsonaro favored, in 2019.
“Distant Venezuela and Brazilians didn’t perceive it very well, it’s another world,” said Paulo Pereira, 38, coordinator of da Silva’s crusade in Argentina. “Argentina is the country where many Brazilians make their first trip abroad. “
Neighboring nations also have a deep rivalry around their usual passion, football.
“Between Bolsonaro and his allies there is an obsession with Argentina,” said Andressa Caldas, 46, a Brazilian human rights lawyer who has lived in Argentina for 8 years.
The son of the president’s lawmaker, Eduardo Bolsonaro, used Argentina this month to tackle Argentina’s runaway inflation. In a video posted on his social media accounts, he is seen counting dozens of expenses to pay for a meal at a restaurant.
“Paying for lunch in Argentina,” he wrote on his Instagram account. “If you don’t need that for Brazil, vote for Bolsonaro. “
Political rivalry is also personal. In 2019, Bolsonaro suggested Argentines vote for Macri instead of Fernandez, who had apparently visited da Silva in a prison before Brazil’s Supreme Court overturned the convictions.
“Relations were already bad, but the electoral context was very bad for bilateral relations because it put political differences at the top of the agenda,” said Esteban Actis, a foreign relations professor at the National University of Rosario.
Brazilians living in Argentina largely agree that there is something to criticize: runaway annual inflation of 83%, a stagnant economy and poverty that affects some of the country’s children.
“What is is that instead of focusing on the real disorders that there are already so many in Argentina, they have to exaggerate the situation, which is already serious,” Taddeo said.
Nattascha Dumke, a 30-year-old medical student living in Argentina since 2018, has nearly 80,000 followers on Instagram. She is used to Brazilians asking questions about life in Argentina, but recently the tone of the questions has become much more negative. .
“People who need to live here, examine here, and even parents of schoolchildren here write to me,” Dumke said. “They ask me about violence, if supermarkets don’t have food, if we’re hungry. “
Dumke became so exasperated through a viral video claiming that Argentine supermarkets were full of empty shelves that he made his own video refuting the claims and fully stocked markets appeared.
The woman who helped make the original video of the empty shelves, Maria Laura Assis, 25, rejected claims that she spread lies about Argentina to help Bolsonaro’s campaign.
“What I tell them is to go to the supermarkets and see it,” said Assis, a Brazilian who has lived in Argentina for 15 years. “Today Argentina has a limit on the number of sets of certain products it can buy and suffers shortages of certain products due to the closure of imports. “
When Dumke posted her video showing shelves full of products in several supermarkets in Buenos Aires, many accused her of spreading misinformation.
“Even using videos to prove that they show the truth of the matrix . . . they don’t,” Dumke said. They are not alarmed to receive fake news, they just want to share disinformation for political purposes. “
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