Argentina: Who’s Underdeveloped?

It was a simple little welcome-home party for Argentina’s President-elect Arturo Umberto Illia, 63. So 18,000 of the folks in Cruz del Eje (pop. 22,000) dropped over to the athletic stadium to tie on the feedbag. Four hours later, when Illia and friends pushed back from the 600 long tables, they had done quite a bit of conspicuous consuming: 25,000 meat pie appetizers, 40 whole roasted calves, 40 chickens, 150 lambs, 8,800 loaves of bread and numberless pounds of fresh fruit, 22,000 bottles of soda pop, 600 bottles of beer and 11,000 bottles of red wine. The marvel was that only ten people fell ill with what the medics called “gastric prostration.” “The very quantity,” mused Buenos Aires’ daily Clarin, “leads one to forget for a moment the notion that ‘Argentina is an underdeveloped nation.’ “