Every evening, the “ghost train” leaves from the Buenos Aires train station, Costitution. This train is for the paper gatherers who every day, from five in the afternoon until three in the morning, descend upon the Argentinean capital to gather up scrap paper and then re-sell it. This is one of the effects of the economic crisis. The International Monetary Fund has always considered Argentina its model student. For years it has lent the various governments money, adding to the country’s foreign debt. Today, Argentina is the most catastrophic example of the Monetary Fund’s intervention in a nation’s economy.

“It is frightening to see how from one day to the next a person can lose everything in which he believed all his life” (S. Mordini).