Tag: Argentina

On a Shooting

Antofagasta is a Chilean harbor town located about a quarter of the way down the coast of the shoestring nation. If you traveled inland from the town, you’d come close to where the borders of Bolivia and Argentina meet. Back in 1905, Antofagasta was a boom town; it owed its existence to the mining of first silver then copper in the nearby Andes Mountains. And it was the scene of a brutal killing of a young police officer on fateful August evening of that year.

It seems that a couple of drunks in a bar started something. They either mouthed off to the wrong person or the wrong person mouthed off to them. Pistols were brandished. Sensing that some frontier-style violence was about to happen, the barkeep sent word to the local constabulary that they had better come to the cantina, quickly. When the police arrived, the officers told the brawlers to take their disagreement outside, to the street, that the establishment wanted no trouble inside. As the argument began to move through the saloon doors, a shot rang out. One of the police officers was instantly killed at close range by a pistol.

Well, in the ensuing chaos, an arrest was made. It seems that the man who did the shooting was actually an American, one Frank Boyd. He argued that his Smith & Wesson revolver went off accidently, but that didn’t make the policeman any less dead. The 24-year-old officer, Arturo González, was buried the next day with full police honors, including a procession, marching band and the flower-bedecked hearse. His beautiful young widow and two-year-old son followed closely behind.

Boyd appealed to the US Consulate for help. The US representative, one Frank Aller, posted $50,000 bond and stated that he would allow Boyd to stay in his house as a condition of his release. At the bond hearing, Boyd’s business partner, a man called Thomas Fisher, testified that, while he was not present at the shooting, that he could vouch for Boyd’s character, saying that they two had come to that part of South America to invest in the cattle business. He further swore that he trusted Frank Boyd with his life. The release of Frank Boyd was granted.

Well, you can guess what happened. Boyd (and Fisher) skipped out of Antofagasta the next day and never looked back, leaving the family of Officer González without anyone held responsible for his death and the US Consulate $50,000 poorer. But legend says that within a couple of years later the pair would be killed by Bolivian troops in a shootout, so maybe justice of a sort was served.

But we can’t be 100% sure what really happened after Antofagasta to Fisher and Boyd, better known to you as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

On a Cheating Spouse

Emily’s husband was a cad.

That’s the nicest way to put it. When the man had immigrated to Argentina in the late 1940s, he had brought not only Emily, his wife of 21 years, with him, but he also brought his mistress as well as several servants and other hangers on. Now, you might be saying to yourself that any self-respecting person wouldn’t put up with this type of behavior, that any spouse would demand that the husband or wife get rid of the third person in the relationship or face divorce.

But Emily wasn’t like that. First of all, she loved her charming and dashing husband, and she knew that, like the other dalliances, this one, too, wouldn’t last. In fact, she had made a pact with herself, knowing that he was a brilliant–flawed, certainly–and generous man. She told herself that as long as he came back to her, that she would be there, waiting. And so, she was, for most of her life.

The move to Argentina proved to be yet the latest in a series of get rich schemes that Emily’s husband pursued in his professional life. He had made money–lots of it–over the years, but, sadly, he lost it all or gave it away. His theory was that there was no trick to making money, so it didn’t matter how he spent it. He had expensive tastes in clothes, food, furniture, and, as Emily could testify, women.

The Argentina experiment failed, miserably. The man was no farmer, and the people he’s hired to help him turned out to be equally inept at raising nutrias for their fur. By 1958, the small enterprise was bankrupt, and Emily’s husband left Argentina with a promise that he would go back to Europe and make money and then send for her.

So, Emily waited.

For decades.

And her husband never returned. She never received a good explanation why. Well, she knew that he had died in Germany of liver failure in 1974 at age 66. To fill her time, Emily began adopting cats in the neighborhood, becoming, by the time she passed away in her 90s, the proverbial crazy cat lady. People who asked her about her husband were told the truth by Emily; he was a drunk, a womanizer, a spendthrift, and a man she would’ve taken back in a moment if he had ever walked back through her doorway. Others spoke of Emily’s husband in kinder, almost sacred tones, and she would often wave a dismissive hand at them.

But until the day she died, Emily insisted that Oskar Schindler was the love of her life.