“Argentina has a marvellous pampa: it permits the luxury of being destroyed, only to resurge and keep going”

There are people who go and live in Montevideo to be safer. But the number of murders per million inhabitants in the City of Buenos Aires is lower than in Montevideo. Is Uruguay idealised?

Yes. We have our sins and problems but we’re a village when compared to that gigantic world of Buenos Aires. We’re more family-sized, perhaps that’s what makes many people coming out of Argentina fall in love. We are more small town, down to earth, making us a permeable country. In Uruguay we have 3.5 million people with 13 (sometimes almost 14) million head of cattle or four per inhabitant without counting the sheep. Argentina has a meat problem but it has more or less the same number of animals and people (45 million). You thus cannot compare the two countries. Within our modesty and humility we are a formidable cattle-breeding country but not so agricultural. Argentina has a marvellous pampa – it permits the luxury of being destroyed, only to resurge and keep going.