Mapuche by Caryl Férey, Steven Randall Page A

military hired Nuevos to tear down the slums in the center of the city and build new apartment buildings, a gigantic project that had given the young entrepreneur a leg up and at the same time expanded his networks. Martínez de Hoz, the minister of Finance under the dictatorship and subsequent governments (he was nicknamed Robin Hood, because he robbed from the poor to give to the rich), had studied at the same business school in the United States from which Campallo had graduated. A simple ideological acquaintance? Nuevos, which was later to become STG and then Vivalia, had quadrupled its turnover during the dictatorship and during the Menem years its sales exploded. Pursuing its policy of privatization, the state had then sold off land with full services in the center of Buenos Aires, hiring Campallo to build a business center there—at a profit of 200 percent. The same type of operation was repeated two years later, with the development of luxury residences in Puerto Madero and the conversion of old buildings on the docks into lofts, once again with record profits that had propelled Campallo into the upper economic spheres. Commissions, money transfers to offshore banks through dummy companies, forgeries—Carlos and his friends suspected Eduardo Campallo of having paid off the political class involved in these transactions in exchange for its generosity.
    Campallo subsequently diversified his activities by moving into the media and communications; he owned several newspapers, celebrity magazines, and scandal sheets, a private radio station and shares in several cable channels. The 2001 bankruptcy slowed the expansion of Campallo’s empire in the center of the capital, but not in the province of Buenos Aires, the most heavily populated in Argentina: Vivalia built, among other things, the ultra-secure community of Santa Barbara, surrounded by walls, some fifty kilometers from the city, with a special highway, reserved for residents, providing access to the international airport, armed guards, sport facilities, urban services, green spaces, etc. Campallo mixed with the country’s elite, who had no lack of supplicants. Some them had naturally become his friends, beginning with the mayor of Buenos Aires, Francisco Torres.
    Rubén finished his pisco sour. Although Carlos had put together a complete file on Campallo, he’d given Rubén little information about the businessman’s family. In 1974, Eduardo Campallo married Isabel de Angelis, who came from the local upper middle class. Now fifty-nine years old, a Catholic, and the mother of two children—María Victoria and her brother Rodolfo, who was two years younger—Isabel Campallo was involved in various charitable activities unrelated to those of her husband and his large personal fortune. Their son Rodolfo worked as a host on his father’s radio station, while María Victoria worked as a camera operator. Often away on business, according to the concierge, who was at those times assigned to feed the cat. What was he doing behind the scenes? Carlos had added a digital photo of María Victoria and the address and access code of the building where she lived.
    Rubén dressed in black and prepared his equipment.
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    The bohemian youth had moved into Palermo, attracting designer clothes shops, bars, and restaurants in the cosmopolitan fashion that delighted tourists and real estate speculators. The neighborhood was now cut in two, Palermo Viejo and Hollywood, which had been renamed since artists and film people had taken up residence there.
    1255 Nicaragua, three o’clock in the morning. A chrome bus in exuberant colors passed by, a fabulous vessel sailing through the night. Rubén crushed out his cigarette in the gutter of broken slabs of marble and punched in the building’s access code. The lobby was empty, and there was no elevator; he passed in front of the drawn curtains of the concierge’s loge and