Annie Kelly » Journalism

Scandal hits Argentina’s mothers of the disappeared

Annie Kelly — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:53:07 +0000

For more than 30 years the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo have been a symbol of courage against adversity and the enduring battle against injustice.

Clad in white headscarves, the Mothers first appeared during the dark days of the Argentine dictatorship, a group of ordinary women valiantly facing down a brutal military government as they silently marched in front of Argentina’s national congress demanding information about their missing children.

But now the headscarf has slipped as the Mothers have become engulfed in a corruption scandal that has stunned Argentina and could threaten to destabilise President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her government, just five months before national elections.

Last week the group was forced to fire one of its most high-profile executives over alleged misuse of funds meant for government-backed social housing projects. Prosecutors accuse the group’s former legal adviser Sergio Schoklender, his brother and more than a dozen others of fraud and money laundering and of siphoning off substantial chunks of public money into personal businesses. Media reports allege that while Schoklender earned the equivalent of £13,000 to help Argentina’s poor, he acquired an 18-room mansion, a yacht and sports car. Schoklender denies any wrongdoing.

Kirchner was reportedly furious when news of the scandal broke, particularly given her close association with the group. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo split into two factions in 1986, and the largest and most powerful group – headed by the 82-year-old Hebe de Bonafini – is a huge political ally and public relations tool of her administration.

Kirchner’s late husband, the former president Néstor Kirchner, went to great lengths to establish close ties with Bonafini and the Mothers, an alliance continued by her government after she was elected in 2007.

Few political rallies are complete without a white headscarf appearing prominently next to the president, who has staked much of her public reputation on championing human rights.

Kirchner’s government has also helped the Mothers transform themselves from an advocacy group into a powerful anti-poverty organisation.

Since Bonafini declared in 2006 that “there is no longer an enemy in the Casa Rosada [Argentina's seat of government]“, the Kirchner cabinet has handed the Mothers more than 187m pesos (£28m) to complete thousands of social housing projects. Last week opposition politicians claimed that only 35% of these projects had so far been completed and that the Mothers and federal officials had shown a shocking failure of responsibility to the Argentine people.

Influential union leaders and the heads of other human rights groups including Las Abuelas, the group of grandmothers working to identify babies stolen from political prisoners during the dirty war of 1976 to 1983, have all called for Bonafini to be formally investigated.

Bonafini, who helped found the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo after the disappearance of her two sons and daughter-in-law, denies knowledge of any wrongdoing and has accused the Schoklender brothers of being “traitors and scammers”.

“The Schoklenders are one thing and the Mothers are a completely different thing,” she told Argentine national radio. “We personally carried on with the battle to vindicate our children … and no one is going to hurt our public image.”

Government officials are struggling to contain the scandal and preserve the integrity of the group’s reputation.

Argentina’s foreign minister Héctor Timerman stated that any attack on Bonafini was inextricably an attack on the government itself.

As the scandal gathers pace, some analysts have suggested it could cause Kirchner to delay announcing whether she will run for re-election in October as her party frantically works to distance itself from the allegations.

Shaming the dictators

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo came together during Argentina’s military dictatorship between 1976-83 when some 30,000 suspected people were “disappeared’ in state-sponsored violence against suspected leftwing subversives. In 1977 mothers of some of the disappeared started to meet every Thursday outside congress in Buenos Aires to demand information about their missing children. With the return to civilian government in 1983, the Mothers resisted the decision to pardon “dirty war” officials and vowed to continue their fight for justice.

In Argentina the enduring memory of the Mother’s bearing placards covered with the faces of their disappeared children has helped them become a powerful political and social force in the decades since the fall of the dictatorship. They are widely considered Argentina’s moral compass as the country still struggles to atone for the crimes of the past. They have also become one of the world’s most renowned and respected human rights organisations.

This article appeared as a news story in The Guardian on 12 June 2011

Honduran police turn a blind eye to soaring number of ‘femicides’

Annie Kelly — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:48:09 +0000

According to those who loved her, Grace González was a hard-working, happy woman who liked to laugh too loudly and dress too brightly. Her enchiladas, she declared, were the best in the barrio. Last month, neighbours watched in silence as her bloodstained body was wheeled out of the front door of the small house she shared with her two daughters on the outskirts of the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.

Hours earlier, a man had come into her house and tried to rape her 15-year-old daughter, Rosa. When Grace tried to protect her child, he held her down and slit her throat. Almost a month after she buried her mother, Rosa says she doesn’t expect justice. What she does expect is for her mother’s murderer to come back and kill her too.

“I told the police that I knew the man and saw him kill my mother, but since then they have done nothing. There is no investigation. They tell me that he has left Honduras but I don’t believe them,” she says.

“Now this man knows I went to the police so he will come back and kill me too. There is nobody who will stop him. Women die here all the time and nobody does anything.”

Women are being killed in Honduras at a rate of one a day in a wave of gender-based murders – or “femicide”. Gender-based violence is now the second highest cause of death for women of reproductive age in this tiny Central American country. Human rights campaigners say that more than 2,000 women like Grace have been killed in the past five years.

A report launched by Oxfam Honduras and a Honduran NGO, the Tribunal of Women Against Femicide, says that women are dying because of a deadly mixture of gun crime, political instability and the “systematic indifference” of the police. Convictions for these crimes are rare – between 2008 and 2010, there were 1,110 reported cases of femicide, yet only 211 made it to court. Only 4.2% of these cases resulted in a conviction.

The report says the number of women being killed in Honduras has dramatically spiked since a rightwing military coup deposed President Manuel Zelaya in July 2009. Yesterday, Zelaya returned to the country after two years in exile, in a move that sparked nationwide celebration and hopes for a return to order.

But in the month after the coup, there was a 60% rise in the number of femicides, with the bodies of more than 50 women found in the two largest cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula.

The report also accuses the new government of Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, voted in three months after the coup, of inaction and complicity in the growing wave of murders.

“Since the coup in July 2009, we’ve seen a sharp rise in gender-based killings, with many of these crimes simply going unreported,” says Maritza Gallardo of Oxfam Honduras. “We don’t even really know just how many women are being killed because families of victims are afraid to report violence and murders because they realise the legal system gives impunity to those responsible for the killings.”

A surge in violent crime is also claiming the lives of hundreds of Honduran women as Central America’s notorious Mara gangs extend their power.

“In many cases the women who die are not directly involved in gangs, drug-dealing or commercial sex work. In most cases they are the victims of vengeance attacks, carried out to send a message to male family members,” says Gallardo. “In other cases, family members have identified members of the police as the executors of these murders, killing women as retaliation for gang attacks on police officers. The lives of these women are simply seen as collateral damage as gang violence gets worse.”

For many women the only chance of survival is to flee the country. Luisa Silva, 21, spoke to the Observer from an immigration lawyer’s office in San Antonio, Texas. She says she was raped, beaten and threatened over a two-year period after she spurned the advances of an influential businessman.

“After he beat and raped me for the second time, I went to the police, who said they would do nothing and that I should do what the man wanted,” she says. “After that the violence got worse. He threatened to kill my family. There was nobody to protect me or help me, so the only option I had was to run.”

She was recently granted asylum by an American judge. “There are many women with the same story as me in Honduras, but most of them die,” she says. “If I had stayed, I’d be dead too.”

This article first appeared in The Observer on 29 May 2011

Ecuador’s fight to eradicate child labour

Annie Kelly — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:43:20 +0000

Pick up a banana in any supermarket in Europe and there is a strong chance that it would have been grown, picked and boxed in Ecuador. The South American country is the world’s biggest banana producer, exporting more than 5m tonnes of bananas every year with just under a third being shipped to Europe and the UK by companies such as Dole, Del Monte and Chiquita.

Ten years ago there was also a chance that the banana you bought in the same supermarket would have been picked from the tree by a child.

But in 2002, Human Rights Watch exposed the shocking extent of harmful child labour in Ecuador’s banana industry. Its report revealed widescale abuse of children as young as eight working in hazardous environments, often exposed to violence, and paid a pittance by the international companies that relied on children’s cheap labour to make hefty profits.

The report and the resulting wave of media coverage had an almost immediate impact in Ecuador, leading the Ministry of Labour to declare the elimination of child labour a “political priority” and putting enormous pressure on the international banana producers to clean up their employment practices.

Nearly 10 years on, campaigners say great progress has been made and Ecuador has taken significant strides forward in eradicating harmful child labour from its banana plantations.

“There have been encouraging advances,” Gustavo Guerra, the technical director of child protection agency DYA (Desarollo y Autogestion) told me over the phone from his office in the Ecuadorian capital, Quito.

“It’s now rare to find child labourers on the large banana plantations. Neither the government nor the producers want the bad publicity they received in the past and the banana industry is too lucrative to take any more reputational risks. So it is now in everybody’s interest to take care to ensure that new child labour regulations are adhered to.”

The regulations that Guerra is referring to were hastily put in place in 2003 after the US, Ecuador’s largest banana customer, threatened to impose sanctions after HRW’s exposé. The new code for children and adolescents raised the legal age of employment, increased penalties against employers and prohibited children from working in dangerous environments.

The laws didn’t ban child labour completely. Instead they set a minimum age for employment at 15, as long as children weren’t working more than six hours a day, and more than five days a week, and had access to education.

The Labour Ministry also has 29 inspectors operating in 22 provinces across the country. According to official figures, in 2009 these inspectors visited 3,992 workplaces where they removed 2,056 children from work that violated Ecuadorian labour laws. Illegal child labour was reduced from 800,000 children in 2001 to 600,000 in 2009. Ministry of Labour officials admit that they are a long way from making child labour a thing of the past, but significant advances have clearly been made.

Yet child protection groups applauding Ecuador for making strides in the right direction also add a note of caution. They warn that although seemingly tough regulations make all the right noises, they sometimes just push the spectre of harmful child labour out of sight.

“Problems occur when you regulate the formal employment sector because if it is not carefully done then all you do is push a large number of children into the informal work or sub-contracting sectors, where they are often exposed to even more dangerous working environments which remain hidden from view,” says Jonathan Blagbrough from Save the Children UK.

Local groups like DYA also concur that so far the new regulations have often not managed to extend into areas where child labour is still prevalent and dangerous. While the big plantations might have cleaned up their acts, it’s the small family farms and plantations that have stayed under the radar of the inspectors where informal and illegal child labour still thrives.

The reality is that on many of these farms the existence of child labour is often a matter of basic survival. In 2006, 18% of the 285,000 children born in Ecuador were to families that survive on less than $1 a day. Many families can’t afford for their children not to work.

“Up until now many families employed by the smaller farms are employed on an informal basis and are not being paid a decent wage and so feel they have no option but to put their children to work as well,” says Guerra. “It’s a vicious cycle and very hard to regulate because you don’t get inspectors travelling out to these farms. What happens there remains unseen.”

However, this week there is hope that change could be on the horizon.

On the 17 May, Ecuadorians overwhelmingly voted in favour of proposals put forward by the government in a national referendum that stated that employers must register all workers at Ecuador’s Social Security Institute.

Child labour campaigners believe that, if enforced, this will clamp down on illegal child labour by regulating the informal work sector, forcing employers to register workers with the Labour Ministry and providing proper work contracts and labour conditions.

Perhaps more importantly it also means that due to the public enthusiasm for these new measures, the government will be throwing more resources at formalising the labour sector.

This should mean more cash for more workplace inspections and more heat on smaller businesses to clean up their act, when it comes to employing children illegally.

Now these campaigners are turning their attention to what they consider the biggest missing link in Ecuador’s efforts to eradicate child labour – its Ministry of Education. Despite the law stipulating that all children in work must also be in school, campaigners are critical that Ecuador has no formal education policies that make this a reality for many of Ecuador’s child labourers.

Campaigners like Guerra now want to see specific policies using programmes like cash transfers and scholarships to help poorer families that need their children to work to also be able to send them to school. “In the past there has been a blanket emphasis on poverty reduction as a way to stamp out illegal child labour but this just isn’t working, it’s too ambitious and too slow-moving,” says Guerra. “Focusing on education will have an immediate effect. Get children in school and you will get them out of the workplace within a generation.”

So, can Ecuador’s progress provide inspiration for other countries struggling to tackle the problem of child labour?

On a global scale child labour figures are decreasing, but there are still 215 million children at work. Although child labour is conspicuously absent from the MDG framework, ILO figures still show that 6.7% of all children in Latin America, 15% in sub-Saharan Africa and 5% in Asia Pacific are engaged in some form of hazardous work.

In Ecuador, child labour was pushed to the top of the political agenda when the country’s main export industry was hung out to dry. Many other children around the world work in industries where we can’t make the simple connection between a banana in our fruit bowl and a child on the other side of the world.

This article was first published on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog on 26 May 2011

Liberia struggles to cope with refugees from Ivory Coast

Annie Kelly — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:31:39 +0000

More than two months after the disputed elections that sparked an eruption of violence in Ivory Coast, hundreds of refugees are still pouring over the border into neighbouring Liberia.

Ivory Coast has been caught in a political deadlock since the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, refused to cede power to his political rival Alassane Ouattara following national elections in November.

With both Gbagbo and Ouattara still laying claim to the presidency, bitter political divisions in the country have led to worsening violence.

Regional and international bodies, including the UN and the EU, which acknowledge Ouattara as the legitimate election winner, have repeatedly called on Gbagbo to step down. So far all sanctions and mediation interventions have failed to break the stalemate.

This week humanitarian news service Irin reported further bloodshed in the northern district of Abobo, where Ouattara supporters have been fighting security forces. Thousands more have been displaced by violence in the west. In January The UN estimated that up to 500 people are continuing to cross the border into Liberia every day, fleeing violence or the threat of violence.

Over 38,000 refugees have been registered since the conflict began in December. Many are staying in Liberian villages in north-eastern Nimba province, sheltered and fed by relatives or locals who say they remember their own dark days of terror and fear.

The UN is now predicting that the numbers of refugees in Liberia could top 100,000 by April. Two refugee camps are now being built to try and deal with the overflow as the UNHCR warns that humanitarian conditions for refugees have deteriorated. How much longer these villages can absorb the steady flow of refugees is uncertain.

Equip Liberia, an NGO working in the border areas, said that health services are at breaking point. Already healthcare provision in rural border areas is scant and badly resourced, with many local people having to walk up to six hours to access medical help.

“All healthcare staff working in these clinics are dedicated to getting help to both Liberians and refugees, many of whom have suffered considerable health problems as a result of their journey and experiences,” said David Waines, director of Equip Liberia. “But healthcare staff who were seeing 25 people a day are now trying to treat 60. They can’t cope with the demand.”

Equip has doubled the number of healthcare workers and sent extra midwives to the border, but is faced with a huge national healthworker shortage and is having difficulty finding staff who are willing to work in remote rural areas.

Vaccines are also running low. NGOs including Unicef and the Red Cross have started running emergency vaccination programmes to try and halt the spread of infectious diseases, but Equip is worried that stocks are could run out.

Since the civil war ended in 2003, Liberia has made impressive advances towards rebuilding its shattered infrastructure and making progress towards the millennium development goals. For example, Waines says the country has cut infant mortality from close to 30% to 9%. However, a chronic shortage of health workers, crumbling health infrastructure and insufficient government funds means the healthcare system is just beginning to make the transition from emergency to development phase.

There are fewer than 100 government doctors for a population of 3.5 million. Maternal mortality rates have risen by 74% since the civil war ended, and over 60% of Liberians still live on less than $1 a day.

Waines is concerned about the potential impact that emergency relief operations for the increasing numbers of refugees could have on healthcare and development reconstruction in Liberia’s rural border areas.

“I’m very worried about the impact that the apparatus of international emergency response operations will have,” he said. “Already this has put a huge strain on infrastructure here. The food distribution in the past weeks saw 10-tonne trucks destroying bridges and churning up roads, which has made it impossible for ambulances to reach rural villages and for people to get to the clinics. We’ve found money to rebuild these, but it will be difficult to imagine it happening again.”

Waines said emergency relief responses like mobile clinics could also bypass national healthcare services and potentially draw staff away from public facilities. Instead, he wants efforts to help the thousands of people displaced by the threat of violence in Ivory Coast to continue to be channelled through the Liberian health system, which must receive additional international donor support.

“The concern is that a largescale international response would bypass or replace existing services and divert funding away from support for strengthening the Liberian health system,” he said. “We need to find a way of supporting the very vulnerable people coming over the border with honouring our responsibilities to the Liberian people. It’s going to be a very tough balancing act, and we’ve got a tough month ahead.”

This story was first posted on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog on 18 February 2011

Battle lines drawn over Argentina’s abortion ban

Annie Kelly — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:26:50 +0000

In December 2008 Sophia González sat in an NGO office in one of the large slums surrounding the city of Córdoba in Argentina and described her desperate search for an abortion.

With five young children, no work and her husband gone, she says prostitution is the only way she can afford to buy food for her family. When a violent encounter with a client left her pregnant for the sixth time, she says she had no choice but to try and get a termination. “I don’t believe in abortion but I was terrified,” she says. “I knew there was no way I could get food for this baby, I was all on my own and I was doing what I was doing for the sake of the children I had already. I couldn’t see a way out.”

She borrowed 50 pesos ($13) from neighbours and went to a place where they “know about these things”. The man there used a plastic catheter and a knitting needle. She didn’t have the extra 250 pesos for anaesthetic. “The pain was so bad afterwards I thought I was going to die,” she says.

Despite heavy bleeding she didn’t want to go to the hospital because she was scared she’d be send to prison for having an abortion. In the end her daughter persuaded her to go, something she said probably saved her life. She told me she was one of the lucky ones. “Girls die from abortions all the time,” she says. “But when there is no alternative, what choice for you have?”

Argentina’s strict abortion laws prohibit terminations except when the life or health of the pregnant woman is in danger or if the pregnancy results from the rape of a mentally disabled woman. The government has rolled out national contraceptive campaigns, but despite this there are still up to 500,000 clandestine abortions in every year.

In a country that has one of the highest levels of healthcare and education in Latin America – and where 98% of women give birth in hospital – the link between the ban on abortion and preventable maternal mortality couldn’t be more exposed.

Campaigning groups estimate that up to 400 Argentinian women die every year as a result of botched terminations. According to a UNFPA report last year, abortion remains the leading cause of “elevated” maternal mortality in Argentina and is the primary reason the country has a relatively high and stubbornly resilient maternal mortality rate of 44 deaths per 100,000 births.

In fact, women’s groups point out that haemorrhaging and infection/sepsis, identified by the World Health Organisation as the second and third causes of maternal mortality in Argentina, are also likely to be related to illegal abortions after women are admitted with post-termination complications.

Despite pledging to slash maternal mortality by 2015, the numbers of women dying in some regions are rising, fuelled by increasing poverty and crumbling health services. In August last year, just a month after Argentina celebrated becoming the first country in Latin America to legalise gay marriage, a damning Human Rights Watch report challenged Argentina’s reputation as a human rights champion by saying that prejudice, failing health services and a failure to act on laws guaranteeing free and universal contraception were needlessly killing hundreds of girls and women every year through risky abortions.

In recent months international criticism of Argentina’s poor record on maternal mortality has turned up the heat on politicians to do something to change this.

Now, almost exactly two years on from my meeting with Sophia González, could things be changing?

Last December Argentina’s congress made the historic announcement that it would open a debate on the legalisation of abortion for the first time in it’s history. Fifty members of congress have signed a petition backing a partial legalisation, and have promised to make it a key debate in the runup to elections in November.

While acknowledging this was a huge step forward, campaigners say they still face an uphill struggle to convince politicians and health practitioners that changes to the abortion law will reduce maternal mortality rates.

In December, under-secretary of community health Guillermo González said there were still insufficient efforts being made to reduce abortion-related complications.

Fusa, an NGO working in a hospital in the poor La Boca neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, said doctors were still refusing, “as a matter of conscience”, to operate on women who could legally request an abortion under current laws or who were admitted with post-abortion complications.

Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who has seen a surge of support following the death of her husband – former president Nestor Kirchner – has been outspoken in her support of the current abortion ban. Ahead of national elections, many groups worry that abortion is just too much of a political hot potato.

This year will be crucial in the battle over Argentina’s abortion laws. Whether groups like Fusa can turn what is still a one of the country’s most controversial social, political and religious issues into a question of public health and poverty will mean the difference between life and death for hundreds of women like Sophia González.

This article was first posted on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog on 15th February 2011

Gay weddings boom under Argentina’s new liberal laws

Annie Kelly — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:17:39 +0000

For more than 25 years Arturo Lodetti dreamt of walking down the aisle with the love of his life. Now finally, with his wedding only a few months away, he is planning to make it the biggest, most fabulous party that Buenos Aires has ever seen.

“I never thought I’d see the day when I would be able to make Héctor my husband,” he says, selecting a huge yellow headdress from a selection of sequins and feathers in a fancy dress shop. “I just want it to be like a carnival, the most enormous celebration of our love, our marriage and the years we have spent fighting for this day to even happen.”

Five months ago Argentina became the first country in Latin America, and one of only a handful of nations in the world, to legalise same-sex marriage. Since then the country has seen hundreds of gay couples saying “I do” and the birth of a booming new economy catering for the increasingly lucrative gay wedding market. For many people, business has never been better.

Launched in 2009 as the wave of support for the legalisation of same-sex marriage gained momentum, event company Gay Planners is a case in point. Since the law was passed it has organised more than 25 weddings, with dozens more clients on the books.

“We literally haven’t stopped since July and we probably get two or three new calls a day,” says Vanesa Marini, co-founder of Gay Planners.

“We have organised everything from huge crazy disco parties with white limousines and musical floor shows to intimate ceremonies for just a few family and friends and the calls aren’t stopping. We expect 2011 to be the year of gay weddings here in Buenos Aires.”

Five hundred same-sex marriages have taken place in Argentina since the legislation was passed on 22 July, with hundreds more planned for the new year.

Marini says that in recent months she has seen dozens of other gay wedding planning businesses launch in the capital, with more than 300 suppliers now trying to target the gay market.

“Attitudes have changed since the legalisation,” she says. “This time last year, when we called hotels or restaurants scoping potential venues for parties or civil partnerships, we’d get told that they didn’t cater for those kind of functions.”

Now, she says, everyone is desperate to get in on the action. “We get the same places calling us begging us to bring our gay clients in to do viewings. Suddenly people have realised that the gay community is enforcing its right to get married and couples are spending a lot of money doing so.”

Gay couples often far outspend their heterosexual counterparts. The wedding industry in Argentina estimates that gay couples spend up to 30% more on their big day, with budgets stretching to $25,000 (£16,000). The average cost of weddings among middle and upper classes is about $12,500.

“There are still so many stereotypes. Mainstream wedding companies think they can offer the same wedding services but throw in a couple of pink feather bowers, but it doesn’t work like that,” says Marini.

“Because we are part of the gay community we understand what people want, the need to combine a really fun party with a meaningful statement of commitment and love in a way that is personal to the couple.”

Buenos Aires-based Delicias Gourmet creates bespoke wedding cakes and now largely caters exclusively for the gay market. It has also seen their business booming.

The company’s workshop in a chic neighbourhood in the capital proudly displays its range of tiered wedding cakes adorned with rainbow flag icing and small marzipan grooms in matching white iced tuxedos.

“In Argentina traditional heterosexual weddings are very formal and people can be very conservative,” says Monica Piazzi, co-owner of Delicias Gourmet. “It’s normally the bride who has to sort everything out and many want their wedding cake to be like everybody else’s; there is a need to fit in. Working with gay clients you can be more creative. There isn’t an established wedding culture; we’re making it up as we go along.”

Like Lodetti and his boyfriend, many of Gay Planners’ and Delicias Gourmet’s wedding clients have been together for decades. While civil partnerships have been permitted in Argentina since 2003, couples say the legalisation of same-sex marriage finally gives them the same rights as heterosexual couples.

“For decades we have been considered second-class citizens,” says Lodetti. “Before July, even though we have been together for a quarter of a century, if my boyfriend had an accident, I wouldn’t be considered next-of-kin. Now we’re equal in the eyes of the law.”

Many of Argentina’s same-sex weddings take place in the capital, but services are being held across the country.

“Buenos Aires has always had a very vibrant gay scene, but in other parts of the country it’s very different,” says Lodetti. “Now these weddings are big public celebrations helping to smash the culture of Latino homophobia. I’m proud Argentina is leading the way.”

Alongside their event planning services, Gay Planners also offers a range of legal services for foreign clients travelling to Argentina to take advantage of the new laws.

Since July the country has seen dozens of gay and lesbian couples from all over Latin America apply for marriage licences. Because of Argentina’s open-door immigration policy, many choose to start their life as a married couple here.

Lodetti’s wedding, planned for early February, will be a highlight of Gay Planners’ 2011 event calendar. As well as a future groom, Lodetti is also the company’s creative director and has big ideas for his special day.

“In my head, I see a huge masked ball, with hundreds of guests decked out in tuxedos and headdresses dancing under the stars, a night nobody will forget,” he says, fingering a trail of sequins. “I have spent the past five months helping other couples organise their special day, and now it’s my turn.”

Unfortunately his long-term boyfriend has other ideas. “He doesn’t really share my vision,” sighs Lodetti. “He’s very publicity shy; he’d be happy to just go down to the register office in jeans. But I think all couples have these little disagreements over their wedding. I’m sure he’ll come around.”

This article was first published in The Observer on 26th December 2010