'We were waiting for this.' -an Argentinian DJ who tried to make the nightclubs safer

01:18 PM EST on Sunday, January 16, 2005

BY MARK ARSENAULT
Journal Staff Writer

BUENOS AIRES -- Seconds after the flare launched from the audience hit black netting on the ceiling, a wave of flame rolled over the nightclub.

AP photo / Natacha Pisarenko

Javier Bernal, a relative of one of the victims of the Buenos Aires nightclub fire, prays last week during a vigil.

Fire rained down on the crowd of some 4,000 people crammed into a space meant to hold 1,000.

They trampled each other in the panic for the doors.

Smoke laced with cyanide gas filled the club.

Those who threw themselves desperately at the emergency exit found the giant door chained shut.

The Dec. 30 fire at the Cromagnon Republic club in Buenos Aires killed 190 people, injured about 700, and inspired yet another street movement for justice -- in a country where justice is often elusive.

Several dozen young Argentinian men and women are now camping in squalor outside the nightclub, in a sidewalk community they call the "Tents of Sorrow." They promise to stay there until the people responsible for the tragedy are held accountable.

Street marches, which have begun at the growing shrine of pictures and candles left for the fire victims, have ended 20 blocks later -- sometimes violently -- in a plaza of palm trees in downtown Buenos Aires, outside the Casa Rosada, an elegant pink mansion in which the president of Argentina has his office.

Protesters have burned tires, roughed up policemen, made threats, and plastered walls with "wanted" posters for Buenos Aires Mayor Anibal Ibarra, who, along with the club's owner, has become a target of public rage.

It is not the fire that killed them, some posters read, it was the corruption.

Street protests have a long, sad tradition in Argentina. The Mothers of the Plaza still march every Thursday in downtown Buenos Aires. They have demonstrated for three decades in the name of 30,000 people who "disappeared" from 1976-1983, when the country was ruled by military dictatorship.

Victims of the unsolved 1994 "AMIA" bombing, which killed 86 at a Buenos Aires Jewish community center, protested for 10 years. Some people were upset when they finally stopped.

Marchers banged pots and pans in the street when the banks closed during the country's economic crisis, which peaked in 2001. There are groups that still bang hammers on bank windows because they never got their money back in the collapse.

None of these groups ever got justice.

FROM HIS second-floor office, Mayor Ibarra can look down over the protests in the plaza.

On the mayor's desk are reports in Spanish, downloaded from the Internet, on the 1977 fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Kentucky which killed 165 and the 2003 fire at The Station nightclub in West Warwick, eerily similar to the disaster in Buenos Aires.

Ibarra, a national political figure as mayor of the capital city of 3.5 million people, has so far defied public calls for his resignation.

"I understand their pain, their sorrow, why they blame me," Ibarra said in an interview last week. "I have two adolescent kids. Losing a child has to be the worst thing that could happen to anybody.

"It will always be that two hundred people died while I was the mayor of the city. There is no formality that can erase it."

Ibarra says he wants to make sure nothing like it ever happens again.

That is what Rhode Island politicians said after The Station.

The Station fire, in February 2003, took 100 lives. The combination of overcrowding, badly-designed exits, flammable soundproofing and fireworks turned into what seemed at the time a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe.

As unlikely as it seems that such a fire could have happened again, the Cromagnon blaze was inevitable, according to a number of Argentinians interviewed last week in Buenos Aires.

"We were waiting for this," said Diego Angeli, a radio disc jockey heard nationally on rock station 95.9 FM. "It was going to happen. Last year, this year, next year -- it was going to happen."

ARGENTINA is on the southeastern coast of South America. Buenos Aires, the nation's capital, has a climate similar to South Carolina, though the seasons are reversed.

Many posh, tree-lined neighborhoods of Buenos Aires look a little like Cambridge, Mass. Some of the city's major avenues could have been transplanted from Manhattan.

There are also acres of urban decay and crumbling blight. Argentina's last economic crisis, from about 1995-2002, plunged more than half the population into poverty and left much of the middle class economically depressed.

The Cromagnon Republic club is in an area called Once (pronounced un-say), formerly a Jewish neighborhood, home now to many immigrants from Bolivia and Peru. The area was hit hard by the country's economic troubles. "Cardboard kids," who look no older than 12, push shopping carts around the neighborhood, collecting boxes to sell to merchants for recycling.

At the center of the neighborhood is Plaza Once, a crowded park where homeless people gather, and where sickly, stray cats lounge on a public monument inside an iron fence, waiting for nightfall.

The park is a busy bus depot, and buses constantly roar around it, filling the air with fumes.

The Cromagnon was in a converted parking garage, attached to a hotel complex near Plaza Once. The police have blocked both ends of the street fronting the club with iron grates. Mourners have covered the grates with pictures, flowers and posters in memorial to the victims. Armed police dressed in flak vests pace behind the wall; just their black caps are visible, sailing back and forth.

Graffiti urges the people who visit the shrine:

No Olvidar

30/12/04

Don't forget.

SALVATORE Albano, an acoustics specialist who lives just outside Buenos Aires, toured the Cromagnon last February after the owner had asked for an estimate on soundproofing the club. Albano is 40, a native of Ontario, Canada. He has lived in Argentina eight years.

The owner, Omar Chaban, wanted soundproofing on walls that faced neighbors and the adjoining hotel, Albano said.

Inside the club, Albano noticed that a massive garage door -- an emergency exit some 20 feet wide -- had a chain on it. "I said to [Chaban], 'Where are your emergency exits?' He pointed me to the big garage door. I said, 'but you have a chain around it.'

"He told me, 'Don't worry, at night the chain comes off -- but you're not here for that, you're here for these walls.' "

Albano said he saw other disturbing things.

Electrical cables for the sound and lights were bare, he said. And the insulation on the air ducts seemed to be a flammable synthetic cotton.

Most disturbing was the black screen draped over cables beneath the club's ceiling. It's called media sombra, literally translated as "half-shadow," and it's used throughout Buenos Aires to shade outdoor parking lots.

It is never for indoors, Albano said.

"One little spark on that thing and in five seconds the fire would go forty meters," he said. "This fabric . . . is a petrol-based plastic or acrylic. It's not fire-rated."

"I told [Chaban], 'You got something dangerous up here.' He didn't want to talk about it."

Albano gave Chaban an estimate of 17,000 pesos for the fire-rated soundproofing he had requested, a little more than $5,000.

He said Chaban never called him back.

ARGENTINA'S fire laws are rudimentary in comparison to the hundreds of pages of technical code in Rhode Island, but they call for commonsense safety. Exits need to be placed so that no patron is ever more than 40 meters (about 40 yards) from a way out. In basement clubs the distance is 20 meters.

The huge emergency exit at the Cromagnon Republic was wide enough to allow 20 people to exit per second, according to Mayor Ibarra -- if it had not been locked.

Almost no clubs in Buenos Aires have sprinklers, but large clubs are required to have fire hoses and pumps. The Cromagnon Republic apparently had hoses; it was unclear last week if anyone had tried to use them in the fire.

No combustible materials are allowed on the walls, floors or ceilings of any nightclub.

Nightclubs in Buenos Aires need an inspection certificate from the fire brigade, which is under the direction of the federal government. City inspectors, who monitor noise pollution, taxes and occupancy, do not control the fire inspections, said Sergio Kiernan, an Argentinian journalist who writes often about architecture.

City inspectors are required to check each nightclub's fire certificate -- they can't close anyone down for running a fire trap, but they can close a club for not having the fire safety paperwork.

Until a few years ago, Buenos Aires conducted nighttime inspections, when the clubs were full. They were cut to save money.

ARGENTINIANS are cynical about government, and many assume that inspectors are crooked. They argue, how else could a dangerous club open? People here remember the 1993 fire at Kheyvis, a nightclub just outside the city, in which 17 people died. Wasn't the government supposed to get serious about fire safety after Kheyvis?

Mayor Ibarra said that club owners often modify their businesses after inspectors have gone, adding dangerous materials.

In Buenos Aires, the responsility for renewing an annual fire certificate falls on the club owner -- no fire inspector shows up until the owner calls for one.

"This is a hole in the law," acknowledged Daniel Rosso, communications director for the mayor, through a translator. Inspectors had last visited the Cromagnon Republic in November 2003, he said.

The club's safety certificate expired 50 days before the fire.

LOCAL ROCK music in Argentina is currently in its second popularity boom in a generation.

The original boom followed the 1982 Falklands war, when Argentina's former military government invaded the British-ruled Falkland Islands. The 70-day war with Great Britain claimed about 1,000 lives and ended in humiliation for the invaders. The defeat soon brought the end of Argentina's military rule.

After the war, it was taboo in Argentina to speak English in public or to play songs with English lyrics on the radio, said Angeli, the rock radio DJ.

"So there was this rise in Argentine rock," he said.

In 2002, after the country's economic crisis, Argentina rock exploded again in popularity, like an echo of the boom that followed the crisis of war, he said.

The new wave of Argentine rock is called rock barrial -- rock from the neighborhoods, or from the edge of town. It's primitive, unvarnished rock 'n' roll, reminiscent of the early Rolling Stones.

With the music comes a dangerous attitude, Angeli said.

What are remembered as the best rock shows? Not the ones where things are orderly and safe.

The best shows -- the ones you never forget -- are the hot, sweaty concerts that are so crowded nobody can move, where the police are nervous and the band is crazy -- with the loudest amps, the brightest lights, the thickest smoke.

Of course everyone knows it's dangerous, Angeli says -- that's why it's exciting. "It is very cool to break the law in Argentina."

Rosso, from the mayor's office, agrees. He quotes a study of Buenos Aires that said "the main characteristic of the typical person here was trying to go against the rules. The fact that they cross a red light in their car is not just that they want to get there quicker, they derive some kind of pleasure from transgressing."

People get hurt every week at Argentine rock concerts, according to Angeli. The DJ says he has been attending the shows for 10 years. "We live so close to tragedy," he said. "This is not the first time this has happened; this is the first time so many people have died."

THE BAND that played at the Cromagnon Republic the night of the fire is called Los Callejeros, which translates to "the street people."

The group comes from an impoverished shanty town outside of Buenos Aires. "It is all working class people," Angeli said. "There are boys there that have no hope for the future, and guys that live in the street -- with their own codes, language and customs."

Those customs, Angeli said, include celebrating rock concerts with banners, flags and fireworks.

LOS CALLEJEROS was big.

In the weeks prior to the fire, they played an outdoor concert that attracted 15,000 screaming fans. The Cromagnon club, with a legal capacity of 1,037, was obviously too small for them, Angeli said.

Pablo, a Buenos Aires rock 'n' roll fan, who said in an interview that he was afraid to give his last name, bought three tickets to the Dec. 30 show, for 15 pesos each, about $5 each.

He gave tickets to his brother and to his cousin, as Christmas gifts, and kept one himself.

Ten days after the show, Pablo was living in a tent at the shrine to the victims.

He is 30 years old. His canvas sneakers are crudely laced with electric wire. His job is "helping out" at a veterinarian office, though he has had no work this month. He wears plastic rosary beads around his neck, and bites them sometimes as he tells his story in Spanish.

They were near the stage, he remembers. People were pressed against each other. There was no opening band, and the crowd was chanting for Los Callejeros.

He remembers the flare hitting the ceiling early in the show, and the fire, and thinking that it would be quickly put out -- as another fire had recently in that same club, he said.

"And two seconds later, the lights cut out, and from there on it was a disaster."

He said he stumbled through a stage door. The memories are hazy.

"God took me out," he said.

But not his brother or his cousin.

Pablo is sunburned; skin flaking from his face catches in his red beard. He has lived outdoors at the site since the day after the concert, except for last Monday, when he went to the funerals.

MARCELLO Calderon learned of the fire from television.

Most of his family was there: his brother, Roberto, 41, an Army sergeant and a veteran of the Falklands war; Roberto's wife, Miriam, 37; and their two teenagers.

Calderon is 33. He is a street musician, who plays folk guitar in parks and on buses for tips. He earns about $15 per day.

In the first hours after the fire, Calderon listened as the names of the dead were read on TV.

He heard his brother's name.

He ran from morgues to hospitals all over the city for the next two days, searching for his family.

"There was no information about who was dead, who was alive," he said in Spanish. "The families were going crazy, they couldn't get the names. There were people who were fainting from exhaustion and frustration, and were being taken away in ambulances to be treated at hospitals."

At one morgue, Marcello had to view 40 bodies. None he knew.

He finally confirmed that his brother and 14-year-old nephew were dead.

His sister-in-law was still hospitalized last week; his niece, 19, was in intensive care, on a respirator, with scorched lungs.

He blames Chaban, the club owner, first. And then the city government, for having accepted a dangerous club. The national government, too, because they control the police and fire brigade.

He blames the band, who should have known the club was too small. Their fans were known to launch flares. "They should never have played in that space, if that was what they were known for," Calderon said. "Certainly the person who threw the fireworks is responsible. We don't know if he is dead or alive."

What ought to happen now?

"It's slow, the justice system here -- we have to pressure," he said.

A local newspaper had a list of 10 of the biggest disasters in Argentina, and the common thread was that nobody was held responsible.

"This is the case where we have the responsible parties," he said. "We can get to the bottom of who is responsible and have them face criminal charges."

THE CONCRETE club was barely damaged by the fire. Two hours after the blaze, a horrendous chemical smell still filled the building, according to a witness who looked inside. The floor was covered with shoes and clothing and puddles from fire hoses.

A judge is investigating the fire. Albano, the Canadian who studied the club for soundproofing, has testified. Mayor Ibarra has not yet been called, but expects to be.

The police arrested Chaban, the club owner, within days.

He faces a criminal charge akin to negligence, which has a five-year maximum penalty, according to Pedro D'Attoli, a lawyer representing Chaban.

The charge could be increased to something closer to manslaughter, which carries a 20-year maximum, he said.

"Omar admits that he has part of the blame," D'Attoli said.

The club owner is resigned that he will go to jail, but insists that others should pay, too, his lawyer said.

Chaban claims he didn't know the emergency door was locked. Chaban, held without bail, "is depressed, like a man with a bomb in his heart, with tremendous sorrow for all the victims," D'Attoli said.

The political repercussions after the fire were swift.

The mayor has so far survived calls for his resignation, but the city's secretary of justice and another officer in "community control" quickly resigned.

"The resignations were not asked for by the mayor," Rosso said. "They were offered and accepted."

Ibarra ordered all dance clubs closed for at least 15 days. The new secretary of justice is directing an inspection blitz, similar to the sweep Governor Carcieri ordered across Rhode Island after The Station fire. Local papers have run photographs of flammable material that was hauled from clubs and piled on curbs.

The number of city inspectors will increase, according to a summary of new fire rules in local papers. Those inspectors will work with the fire brigade to make joint inspections. In the short term, inspectors are checking about 18 clubs per day. There are 108 in the city that operate legally.

Inspectors must now register their findings -- safe and unsafe -- with photographs. The city will publish inspection reports on the Internet.

Each club will need to present an evacuation plan done by a crowd control professional.

And each Buenos Aires nightclub must now post its legal occupancy in a conspicuous place -- also a requirement in Rhode Island that was widely ignored before The Station fire.

The mayor's press staff says that the people will not accept a ban on fireworks, which are sold here in supermarkets. The problem is that so many people don't think fireworks were the problem, they think the club was the problem.

Ibarra's staff said the administration is not responsible for the club's expired certification. "What we're responsible for is having left loopholes that allowed that to happen without action," Rosso said. "The problem here was that there was too much responsibility given to the individuals -- the club owners, the inspectors. The government didn't take responsibility of action. That's where we failed."

WHY IS Ibarra the object of so much anger?

"It's the worst tragedy in Argentine history," the mayor said. "People need to translate their anger toward people, toward a figure."

Ibarra had been considered a possible candidate for the country's vice presidency. Can he get past this disaster? His staff is eager to learn what The Station fire did to Rhode Island politics.

In an unguarded moment, the mayor laments, "Never had things been going better here . . . before this."

Ibarra has met personally with family members of the dead. The gatherings have been very tense. "There has been a lot of anger, especially early in the meetings," Rosso said.

Ibarra said, "It is a necessary important step. From a human standpoint and from the standpoint that they told me things I had not heard before, they are very important meetings."

Calderon, the street musician who lost his brother and nephew, met with Ibarra for two hours on Jan. 6. People from several other families were also there.

"We all knew we had to keep our heads," he said, "because if not, everybody would lose their cool, so we all kept our cool."

He said that Ibarra apologized for "everything he could have done but didn't do."

The mayor's words meant little to Calderon, but "it served me," he said, "to look in the eyes of somebody who I consider to be one of those responsible."

THE FULL-TIME protesters have pitched tents on the sidewalk near the club. About 25 people are living there now. They sit all day on plastic chairs and smoke cigarettes. They pass cups of water to the people who visit the shrine.

"This is a vigil," said Gustavo Roa, 27, a survivor of the fire, through a translator. "We're going to stay here until there is justice, in spite of the fact that we've received threats." He claims, for example, a passing driver menacingly drew his hand across his throat.

The protesters will chain themselves to fences at the shrine if authorities try to remove the memorial, he said.

Pablo, who lost a brother and cousin, said they cannot leave without justice. "From the top politician to the lowest functionary, those who received under the table payments -- all these people have to go to jail."

Mayor Ibarra promises that there will never be another dance club at the site. "We'll talk to the families about putting up some sort of tribute. We're going to respect the memory, but after a time we have to put the place back to normal."

Angeli, the DJ, tried last year to have legislation written in the City Council to ban pyrotechnics at shows, to better control overcrowding and set a minimum age limit at rock concerts.

The proposal was unpopular. It failed. Since the fire, Angeli has become a hot media interview in Argentina.

"Now people are calling me and saying, 'Diego, you were right!' People don't realize that we all have the fault. The people at the concerts [who throw flares] don't think they have responsibility. That's the Argentine way -- it's always the other guy's fault.

"I feel responsible because I was right," he said. "I'm one of the ones responsible because I knew it would happen."

FEW PEOPLE interviewed in Buenos Aires last week had known much of The Station fire before their own tragedy on Dec. 30. Not even the mayor. For many, The Station was a vague recollection of something very sad, very far away.

Some people are surprised that such a fire could take place in the United States. They had cynically thought, "Only in Argentina . . ."

Calderon, the street musician, says that people from Argentina "are known for not having very good memories. They didn't remember Kheyvis [the 1993 fire], which was a disaster here. Rhode Island seems so far away -- right here we had a disaster that did not teach any lessons."

He wonders how many Rhode Islanders know that last August, in Paraguay, a shopping mall fire killed 450 people. What did Rhode Islanders learned from that fire? Did Rhode Island change the way it monitors shopping malls?

"One thinks that these things happen to others, far away. One doesn't see how close it is, to see beforehand how these things can be dangerous, until it touches us. And by the time it touches us, it's too late."

Change is hard, he says. It comes from pain.