True/Slant was a great venue, and though it is closing after its purchase by Forbes, I still feel the impulse toward almost daily posting and analysis, so I won’t hang up my spurs yet. After all, there is all that buzz lately about the 2010’s being the decade of Latin America, and Latin America ruling the world. Well, I doubt it, but there is enough going on to make for very interesting times.

Please look for updates on where I will be blogging next, and doings meanwhile, at my personal webpage. In September, I’ll be a Lemann Fellow at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs studying Brazil’s economy. Around that time I will definitely take my online writing elsewhere, so do stay in touch. My email is ballve[at]gmail …

¡Arriba!

Marcelo

Venezuelan officials and scientists surround Bolívar's coffin during the exhumation (Image - Venezuelan government)

When Venezuela broke off diplomatic relations with Colombia last week, amidst bellicose talk, the Andean war-risk meter inched up a couple of points. At issue, according to President Hugo Chávez, were the Colombians’ claims that his government was offering sanctuary to narcoguerrillas, claims that Chávez deemed offensive and untrue.

Most analysis of this latest spat (like the L.A. Times article linked above) puts the reasons behind it in the political opportunism category. Chávez, a former army parachutist, facing a deteriorating economic situation at home, wants to shore up his popularity with left-leaning and nationalist Venezuelans. Colombia’s conservative government is a convenient and nearby punching bag.

But that’s a rational explanation for the actions of an administration riddled through with preoccupations that are much more esoteric. Chávez is trying to rewrite South America’s 19th Century history, and his saber-rattling in Colombia’s direction may have as much to do with myth-making as it does with politics or diplomacy.

The dispute with Colombia coincides with Chávez’s ongoing effort to prove that Venezuelan founding father and independence hero general Simón Bolívar was poisoned with arsenic by a Colombian rival, Francisco de Paula Santander, in 1830 (Bolívar died in Santa Marta, Colombia, presumably of tuberculosis).

Santander, persona non grata in Chávez's Venezuela

There is only spotty evidence to support the arsenic theory (mainly the opinions of Johns Hopkins M.D. Paul Auwaerter, who in any case thinks the chronic arsenic poisoning was unlikely to have been deliberate, since contaminated water could have caused it). But nonetheless, Chávez had Bolívar’s remains exhumed on July 16 in order to conduct forensic tests. He is also having Bolívar’s sister’s remains disinterred to verify the identity of Bolívar’s remains.

Why would a convincing case against Santander (Bolívar’s Colombian rival) be significant?

Because it would rewrite South American history in Bolívar’s favor. Bolívar’s death would go from being sad and almost anticlimactic death-in-exile to a tragic injustice, a slow murder perpetrated by a double-dealing rival. And this would go a long way to rehabilitate Bolívar’s image and denigrate that of Santander, who thought Bolívar was amassing too much power. This rewriting of the narrative would play into Chávez’s own personal view of South American history, in which Bolívar’s dream of a united continent has been constantly foiled by sellouts like Santander, who, once Bolívar was out of the way, cozied up to the United States and pushed free trade (much as Colombia’s leaders are doing today).

On July 16, Chávez tweeted the exhumation of Bolívar’s “glorious skeleton” with several overwrought comments expressing his mystical rapture at being in the liberator’s presence: “Bolívar lives dammit! We are his flame!”(Bolivar vive Carajo!! Somos su llamarada!!).

It’s clear that in Chávez’s mind, the 19th Century past, the 21st Century present, the dead and the living, Venezuelan crude oil, imperialist Washington, D.C., Bolivarian dreams, arsenic, and Colombian yanqui bootlickers, all are melded in a kind of mental soup from which his policy decisions emanate. So, those analysts seeking to rate the probability of a Colombian-Venezuelan border war might track the progress of the investigation into Bolívar’s death as an indicator of how high tensions are likely to ratchet up.

Screenshot: Chávez tweets from the crypt (click to enlarge)

Maite Rico, the Bogotá correspondent of Spanish newspaper El País, does a good job of summing up the real-world implications of all the tomb-raiding going on in Venezuela, in a recent article headlined “The reinvention of the liberator,” analyzing Chávez’s experiments in historical clinical pathology. Here are two paragraphs (my translation):

Hugo Chávez was stubbornly determined to exhume Simón Bolívar, and he did not let up until the skeleton was in his hands. He is convinced that the Liberator was assassinated by enemies who, coincidentally, coincide with his own latter-day enemies: Andean oligarchs, the United States and Colombia, all incarnated in the figure of Francisco de Paul Santander, the legally-minded Colombian founding father who ended up as the bitter rival of the militaristic Bolívar.

… Chávez wants to appropriate the figure of Bolívar, just as Fidel Castro, his mentor, did with José Martí in Cuba. It’s true that all of Venezuela’s leaders have sought to cloak themselves with the cult to Bolívar, the Liberator. But Chávez would like to become Bolívar’s heir, rewriting history from top to bottom. He wants to transform Bolívar, an aristocrat to his roots, into a mulatto, child of a slave; an enlightened despot, suspicious of the rabble, into the ideological forefather of 21st Century Socialism. And now, as the victim of an assassination, Bolívar would become the proto-martyr of the anticapitalist struggle.

Meanwhile, Govs. Janice Brewer of Arizona, and Bill Richardson of New Mexico, debated the propriety of states creating and enforcing their own immigration policies (as SB 1070 does for Arizona) in the pages of the upcoming issue of Americas Quarterly.

It’s still not available online, but the journal’s issue features a side-by-side detailed exposition, written by each Brewer and Richardson, about why they’re on opposite sides of the immigration debate on this score. It’s a nice summation of where these two governors stand on immigration. Their states may be next-door neighbors but they definitely don’t see eye-to-eye.

Richardson believes that states should not legislate their own immigration policies, to avoid creating a patchwork quilt of such laws, or worse, as he puts it– creating a kind of immigration “arms race among neighbors.” Brewer, meanwhile, thinks that in the face of federal inaction, states have no choice but to get tough on illegal immigration.

What’s striking about Brewer’s stance is the extent to which she uses organized crime, mainly the  threat posed by Mexican drug cartels along the border, to justify Arizona’s move to make illegal immigration a crime on the state level. She writes:

Because of Washington’s failure to secure our southern border, Arizona has become the superhighway for illegal drug and human smuggling activity. In December 2008, the U.S. Justice Department said that Mexican gangs are the “biggest organized crime threat to the United States.” In 2009, Phoenix had 316 kidnapping cases, turning the city into our nation’s kidnapping capital.

Although crime as a whole does not seem to be a problem in the border states, despite all these nightmare stories, Gov. Richardson of New Mexico knows that it is not necessarily overall statistics, but anecdotally spectacular crimes and incidents, which attract public attention. And so he widely does not soft-pedal the issue, but shares New Mexico’s own strategies against cross-border crime, which, notably, did not include legislating immigration:

In 2005, I declared a state border emergency as a result of violence, damage to property and livestock, and increased drug smuggling near the New Mexico border town of Columbus. That emergency declaration freed up state money to pay for local law enforcement and a National Guard presence at the border to supplement the Border Patrol, which has primary responsibility for enforcement of federal immigration laws.

Working “collectively” with agencies in the United States and Mexico, and calling on both governments to take action, Richardson says, “is a much more productive way to to address the need for immigration reform than enacting a hodge-podge of state laws.”

Interestingly, both governors agree on one thing: that the federal government’s inaction (both of them decry Washington, D.C.’s failure to act) lie at the source of the southwest’s struggle to figure out which way to go on immigration.

SB 1070, which was signed into law by Gov. Brewer on April 23, authorizes police in Arizona to investigate suspects’ immigration status. It’s the first time a state puts such a law on its books (although other states make it a state crime for an undocumented immigrant to solicit work, or for anyone to knowingly transport anyone who entered the country illegally).

It’s not clear whether the judge, Susan Bolton, will issue a ruling before July 29, when the law is set to go into effect.

The U.S. Justice Department’s argument against the law, which Judge Bolton heard this week, is that it encroaches on the federal government’s supreme constitutional right to make the country’s immigration policy. Other organizations, including the ACLU, also filed briefs in an effort to stop the law.

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• Arizona law on illegal immigration fought to the end (independent.co.uk)

Cover via Amazon

The next global economy-wrecking bubble could come in emerging markets. I just finished reading John Cassidy’s book How Markets Fail, which is mainly about bubbles, such as the 2002-2007 mainly U.S.-based but also global credit bubble. So excuse me if all of a sudden I am looking for bubbles everywhere.

But, in truth, I had written about the glut of investment in emerging markets before, and the possibility that it is creating bubble-like conditions. So it can’t be all Cassidy-inspired paranoia.

But, a global investment bubble, focused in countries that only ten or twenty years ago were still considered economically irrelevant?

One of Cassidy’s points in his analysis of the U.S. real estate bubble is that the true believers in unstoppable home prices always said that the U.S. housing market had never declined on a national level, and that any drop offs in home prices had been regional, isolated to certain U.S. areas that for one reason or another had seen peak-and-valley dynamics. No one wanted to believe this could happen countrywide. It did, of course, after hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages were written.

This leads me to wonder if there’s an analogy on offer here. Everyone knows there are risks in emerging markets (even the big ones, China, India, Brazil, Russia), especially political risks. But I wonder if there is enough thought given to the global risks being created by all the money pouring into emerging markets, independent of country or region-specific risks. In other words, are the value of emerging market-based investments being pumped up beyond reason everywhere, because of the enthusiasm for the potential upside in these places?

I’m no economic expert. But others, including “Dr. Doom,” have made a similar point (the following is from a May Bloomberg story):

Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who predicted the global financial crisis, said the Brazilian, Chinese and Indian economies may be overheating and developing asset bubbles.

The outlook for Brazil’s economy is “very positive,” though the crisis in the euro zone countries and a slow “u- shaped” recovery globally could dent the country’s growth, Roubini said today at an event in Sao Paulo.

“In Brazil, like in many other emerging market economies, there is now evidence of overheating of the economy,” Roubini said.

And there’s data already out there showing that the money flowing out of stocks in Europe and the United States is being pumped into emerging markets, according to the Financial Times today (one of the ramifications of this is that the value of emerging market currencies is being pumped up):

Investors are piling into emerging market equities even as they are pulling out of stocks in the sluggish developed world. According to EPFR, equity funds saw a net outflow of $3.16bn globally in the week to July 21 but emerging market equity funds posted a $1.5bn inflow.

Of course, here are plenty of reasons to believe that emerging markets merit all the investment and attention they have received.

Countries like China, India, and Brazil (not to mention Mexico, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, etc.) all are seeing strong growth in their middle classes, big expansions in their consumer bases, and increasingly stable government policies, etc. Many of these countries are rich in the commodities that the developed world still needs, and that emerging giants like China are themselves devouring.

But that doesn’t rule out a bubble forming. Bubbles begin on solid ground, but then standards, oversight and judgment fail as the herd-mind takes over.

Finally, perhaps it is my Americas-centric experience and P.O.V. but it does strike me as a bit suspicious when rumors start to fly of Brazilian companies listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange. My sense is that the listing of Brazilian shares in Hong Kong seems to present a case of investors being chased in a cash-rich place where the information regarding the stocks and underlying companies will be harder to come by.

And in the history of bubbles (like the Latin America debt bubble of the 1980s, or Argentina’s debt bubble in 2001), these sorts of triangulations, and the role of “third country” investors, is well-documented. Also from Bloomberg:

Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd. is currently in talks with more than one Brazilian company over potential listing, according Lawrence Fok, the bourse’s chief marketing officer.

“There is a natural resources company from Brazil which may be interested in doing a secondary listing in Hong Kong,” Fok said at a meeting in Tokyo, citing Hong Kong Exchanges’ Chairman Ronald Arculli …

The operator of Asia’s third-biggest stock market has held talks with Brazil’s bourse over potential listing of Brazilian companies in Hong Kong and Hong Kong companies in the South American country, Arculli said on June 22. The Hong Kong Exchange is aiming to attract new international listings, particularly in the metals, mining and energy industries, according to the exchange’s 2010 to 2012 strategic plan.

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• Brazil, India, China May Be Overheating, Roubini Says (Update2) (businessweek.com)

Why does this triangulation make sense?

Because Hong Kong investors see a future for land and water-rich Brazil as the world’s breadbasket, and recognize China’s need to have its eye on foreign sources for foodstuffs. Here is a piece of the FT story that broke this news:

Ian Watson, Agrifirma Brazil’s London-based chairman, said: “The wealth in the developing world is going to cause foodstuffs to go up in price.” He noted that Brazil had 14 per cent of the world’s freshwater resources, while China’s populous northern provinces and cities were perennially parched. “When you export agriculture you are exporting water.”

(Agrifirma) has raised $179m to date, including investments from two Hong Kong tycoons – Raymond Kwok and Adrian Fu – and Lake House, an investment group.

“There is a shortage of farmland in China itself,” said Mr Fu, a hotel developer. “Eventually China will have to go abroad to source crops.” The Kwok family controls Sun Hung Kai Properties, Hong Kong’s largest property developer.

Agrifirma, which already controls some 70,000 hectares in western Bahia state (about one-fifth the size of Rhode Island), was considering an IPO in Hong Kong, the FT story reported. But a subsequent statement on Agrifirma’s website says the IPO, when it comes, could be held in Hong Kong, Toronto, São Paulo, London, or elsewhere.

Here’s the rest of the statement from Watson, chairman of Agrifirma:

Our recent visit to the Far East has been very productive. Given the rising demand for foodstuffs across the developing world, there is a lot of interest in our strategy of transforming undeveloped land in Brazil into productive farmland. The company’s operations are making good progress … No decision about where or when to list the shares has yet been made however.

It’s tempting to raise immediate questions about whether these UK and Hong Kong-based investors scooping up swaths of scrub-land for agricultural use are bulldozing the environment in the process. But a prior FT story on Agrifirma quotes a representative with The Nature Conservancy in Brazil praising the firm as a “new act” that “wants to do the right thing.”

Fidel Castro earlier this month in Havana (Image: Estudios Revolución)

International media made a big deal about Fidel Castro’s spate of public appearances this month. On July 11, he was on Cuban TV for the first time since he fell very ill in 2006. Later the same week Fidel made his fifth public appearance in just nine days (including a visit to the Cuban aquarium’s dolphin show).

In an editorial, the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned that Fidel’s appearance on TV coincided with the release of dozens of political prisoners by Raúl Castro, who now runs the Cuban government. The newspaper wondered if Fidel’s remarks on Cuban TV warning about the risks of nuclear proliferation were part of a new openness, or whether they were only “observations from an aging revolutionary who craves attention and hasn’t quite accepted retirement.”

My bet: neither. Also, give the guy a break: Fidel Castro, like any retired government executive, has a right to visit institutions, glad-hand, and pontificate on TV. Jimmy Carter does it, God knows Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Al Gore do it. No one gets out the tea leaves when they appear in public.

The one conclusion that can be derived from Castro’s recent appearances, I think, contrary to most press reports’ asides on how “frail” he looks, is that Fidel Castro is much improved, otherwise he would not be showing himself as much. (Newspapers, I think, tend to have a bias toward implying old famous people are half-dead, since their obituary writers and editors need the encouragement to get major obits ready.)

The photo to the left, from a few days ago, shows Fidel looking rather well (compare to another photo from 10 months ago). Physical strength has always been part of Fidel’s mystique. And his resilience after major gastrointestinal surgery has, I think, added another chapter to that dimension of his biography. Even if he were to die tomorrow, his four years of hanging in there since he bowed out of the presidency for health reasons are still, on a simple human level, impressive.

It’s an MGM-produced travelogue video from 1932, probably meant to be shown in the newsreel segment ahead of feature films. It shows Buenos Aires, and Argentina, as it was in the early 1930s. This was still fat-cat Argentina, with wealthy estancieros and businessmen lounging by their riverside estates, at the Hippodrome, etc. As a porteño (native of Buenos Aires), I couldn’t help but share it.

There is one thought I had on how much Buenos Aires has changed in the decades since the film was made. The fountain shown towards the beginning, with the sirens and water gurgling here and there, today is surrounded by an eight foot wall of Plexiglass, hockey rink-style, to keep away vandals, looters (who often plunder Buenos Aires monuments for bronze), and opportunistic bathers. The Plexiglass is an eyesore, but Buenos Aires is no longer in its Belle Époque; instead it’s limping along in its sort of 80-year-long post-boom hangover. As my friend and I mused in an email exchange, Argentina and its capital kind of froze after 1930, when the Great Depression (and a military coup that same year) began to catch up with its once-prosperous democracy and ushered in a long fall from grace, still ongoing.

The old school facets of Buenos Aires that charm the many gringo expats who have taken up residence there (birdcage elevators, art deco and art nouveau buildings, ultra-retro signage, bad plumbing, etc.) are all evidence that things didn’t change all too much once the Depression punctured its for-export beef, grain, and wool economy.

Anyways, enjoy:

The result was a 1500-word article that was published today at New America Media, just as Utah authorities gathered for a one-day immigration summit convened by Gov. Gary Herbert.

Utah, of course, is the headquarters of the LDS Church, and a state where two-thirds of the population belong to that church.

Why is Utah a hot state for immigration politics? Because Utah, just north of border state Arizona, is a likely next stop for a hardline approach towards immigration. Already, a Utah legislator, Rep. Stephen Sandstrom, says he will introduce a Utah law that will mirror Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, set to go into effect later this month, which authorizes police to investigate a suspect’s immigration status. Both Sandstrom and the sponsor of Arizona’s legislation, Russell Pearce, are LDS Church members.

Utah’s immigration situation also became national news last week when a blacklist of 1,300 alleged undocumented immigrants living in Utah (a list illegally compiled by state employees using government databases) was circulated to media and government offices. The blacklist, an attempt to “out” hundreds of people living in the country without papers, was universally condemned (with the exception of some Utah Minutemen, who didn’t like that one of their leaders condemned the list).

All of this, for me, raised the question: How does the Mormon Church, which is the dominant institution in Utah, feel about immigrants?

Here’s the heart of my story:

After the blacklist controversy erupted last week, Peggy Wilson, a Mexican-American and a Catholic, was among the mostly Latino political activists who convened a Salt Lake City press conference Friday to denounce the list.

The activists wore shirts reading “I Could be Illegal” and said the blacklist—which contained Social Security numbers, phone numbers, even the due dates of pregnant women—had terrified the Hispanic community.

Wilson, who described the list as “Gestapo-esque,” said in a phone interview after the press conference that the LDS Church should take a stronger stand in favor of immigration reform, and against anti-immigrant bigotry.

The current LDS Church position is evasive, Wilson said, especially compared to the vocal support the LDS Church gave to a different political cause—Proposition 8 in California, which sought to restrict gay marriage.

“The Mormon Church can come out and support Proposition 8 so virulently and just become very quiet when it comes to immigration reform,” Wilson said. “The silence speaks volumes.”

But other observers said the church already is moving—albeit gradually—to educate itself on the immigration debate and toward more explicit support of ethnic and immigrant communities.

“I get the sense that there are wheels in motion,” said Isabel Rojas, program director at the Utah immigrant advocacy group Comunidades Unidas and a member of the LDS Church. The Colombia-born Rojas said she routinely works with the Church on Hispanic outreach issues and urges its public relations department to be more proactive in defining a message on immigration.

“We are trying, we are working with them,” said Rojas, who added that the message she brings to the LDS Church is simple: “If you don’t define this for yourselves other people will continue to define it for you.”

Another LDS Church member and prominent Salt Lake City Latino activist, Tony Yapias, has written a letter to Church leaders that also asks them to take a position.

LDS Church leaders have, in fact, spoken out publicly in favor of immigrants.

In 2008, as Utah was considering a state law to clamp down on illegal immigration, LDS Church Elder Marlin Jensen asked lawmakers to “take a step back” and act “with a spirit of compassion.”

“Immigration questions are questions dealing with God’s children,” Jensen was quoted as saying in the Church-owned Deseret News.

Jensen, who holds office in a key LDS Church body called First Quorum of the Seventy, went on to say: “I believe a more thoughtful and factual, not to mention humane approach is warranted, and urge those responsible for enactment of Utah’s immigration policy to measure twice before they cut.”

The narco-submarine in its mangrove "shipyard"

Police in Ecuador recently seized a 30-meter (98-foot) fully submersible submarine built, the authorities say, to carry cocaine tonnage across a swath of the Pacific to Mexico.

The DEA called it “the first seizure of a clandestinely constructed fully operational submarine built to facilitate trans-oceanic drug trafficking.”

It was among the most sophisticated narco-submarines ever discovered by authorities. According to the DEA, which assisted in the bust, it has an extra-strength hull, can carry a half-dozen crew members, and was outfitted with periscope, climate control, a hybrid electric-diesel engine (eco-friendly!) and state-of-the-art navigation tools.

An AFP story quotes Joel Loaiza, head of Ecuador’s drug police, who says the “narco-submarine” only required some sealing to the hatch area before it was seaworthy. Loaiza said the sub was set to sail for Mexico, with up to 12 tons of cocaine. It was found in a coastal area of Ecuador near the border with Colombia.

But the most interesting information in the many stories on this narco-sub, which made headlines throughout Latin America when it was found earlier this month, was the estimated cost of the underwater ship.

Loaiza, for one, put the submarine’s price tag at $4 million. Consider first that the submarine can carry up to 12 metric tons of coke. Then consider that the United Nations’ World Drug Report put the wholesale price of cocaine at $7,800 per kilo in Mexico, which means about $8 million for a metric ton (the report’s estimates are for 2004, so if anything, today’s price is probably higher).

Images - DEA

And so that translates to (12 metric tons x $8 million) or $96 million in cargo for each of the submarine’s trips from Ecuador to Mexico. Even with the cost of a crew, and taking into account that the cocaine might have cost a good bit to produce or acquire, the folks who financed the narco-submarine certainly could justify the $4 million expense, which they would more than recoup with just one successful shipment.

These numbers back up DEA Andean regional director Jay Bergman’s warning that narco-submarines present a huge, looming challenge for marine interdiction of international drug trafficking. In the DEA release, Bergman said that over the years drug traffickers have moved from souped-up speedboats; to surface-hugging, radar-evading ships; to “parasitic” vessels designed to cling to the bottom of bigger ships; and now, to submarines.

The Ecuadorean submarine’s “nautical range, payload capacity, and quantum leap in stealth have raised the stakes for the counter-drug forces and the national security community alike,” he said.

Though less sophisticated narco-submarines have been around for at least a decade, it appears the serious technology for trans-oceanic sub-surface prowlers is out of the bag, and the narcos now have the ocean depths as their new frontier.

Given the mind-boggling profits involved, it is surprising that more of these trans-oceanic narco-submarines have not been discovered, but probably they will be.

Inside the sub (enough room to avoid head-bumping)

Carles Puyol (Image by FIFA)

I was thinking of something to write about Spain’s soccer team, which on Sunday will play in the World Cup finals against the Netherlands. But all I could think of was Puyol’s hair. Carles Puyol was the star of Spain’s semifinal 1-0 win against Germany, and he is right now, in economically depressed Spain, a demi-god.

However, look at that mop. Soccer players are known for their mullets and déclassé and risqué hair styles, so it’s not like Puyol is necessarily a standout.

After all, at The New Republic magazine’s World Cup blog, Rabih Alameddine cited Puyol for second place in the worst hair category, but in the end went for a Slovak, Marek Hamsik, and his new wave mohawk as the tournament’s worst hair. And there were enough mullets on the Argentine team alone to build a hair-thread net that would probably contain the Gulf oil spill.

But there is something beyond retro about Puyol’s hair, something magical about it. Those bouncy curls, they must have given special oomph to the ball when the relatively stocky 5′8” Puyol headed the ball for the winning goal. Apparently Puyol has a history of knocking in bullet-speed headers.

Puyol is from Catalonia, that autonomous community around Barcelona, where Catalan is spoken, and where the cliquish natives sometimes consider themselves a cut above the rest of the Iberian peninsula. It is a wealthy forward-thinking cosmopolitan place, but not immune from that Mediterranean predilection for casting an eye back to ancient times. Perhaps it is not so much that Puyol’s crown of hairy oodles is outmodishly cool, but that it harks way back, to princely times, when a bunch of Catalan knight-wannabes bounced around on their steeds with similar floppy dues curling out of their helmets.

Masik wins TNR's worst hair award

But others have found better words than mine for Puyol’s hair. Sean Kenny of the Irish Times put it this way in his live blog of the Germany-Spain game, “what is commonly believed to be Carles Puyol’s hair … is, in fact, a pair of damp poodles which have been clinging resolutely to the rough-hewn defender’s skull since 1998.”

That is very well put. And Kenny wrote that spontaneously in the course of live-blogging a game.

Anyways, looking forward to the final, in terms of hirsute qualities, no one on the Netherlands team has anything on Puyol. Wesley Sneijder, and the rest of the Dutch crew prefer the modern, clean, metro-sexual close-cropped head of hair. They believe that that look is flattering to the fact that most of them seem to be balding.

In any case, this whole post is obviously a sublimation of an Argentine’s rage (I was born in Buenos Aires) that his team, incontestably the team with the worst haircuts in the World Cup, from head coach Diego Maradona on down, was knocked out of the World Cup in disgraceful style last weekend. As consolation, I will cheer on Puyol’s poodles and the rest of the Spain side.

• Puyol “the shark” an unlikely Spanish hero (reuters.com)
• Celebrating Puyol’s World Cup goal in style (guardian.co.uk)
• The Puyolazo: Carles Puyol has previous for scoring incredible bullet headers (origin.101greatgoals.com)