having been to both brazil and argentina i get the sense that argentina is a much fairer society, without the massive poverty one can find in brazil, nor the obscene gap between the very wealthy and the very poor. buenos aires itself feels 100 times safer than either saop paulo or rio, and has an elegance and charm that makes it at times feel like an old european capital, like madrid or lisboa. nonetheless, it is still latin america, and that means it has the poverty that expresses itself occasionally in the form of kids begging on streets, elderly people lying in parks, and the more disturbing kidnapping that differentiates crime and poverty in latin america from crime and poverty in the us or europe...