An attempted robbery in the Belgrano neighborhood, an affluent neighborhood in Buenos Aires, ended in a flurry of bills. This Thursday afternoon, a man was banking seven million Argentine pesos, about $33,000 at the official exchange rate, when an attacker struggled to take his backpack. The young man, whom police identified as 26-year-old Juan Cruz, was about to deposit the money when he came across the criminal and some of the money he was carrying on his back flew down the street. A neighbor recorded from her balcony people running down the street to collect the bills. Neighbors had come to the rescue, but 70,000 pesos (about $300) were not collected.
Argentine society talks and thinks in dollars, but not in government-imposed changes. Currency restrictions and inflation are making Argentines flee to the dollar, which is sold on the streets at almost double the official price, to which no saver has access. With a family economy protected in the dollar outside of the banks, most major transactions are settled in cash: from paying rent to buying a property.
The country’s highest denomination, the thousand pesos, equates to almost five dollars in the official price. The man who was robbed this Thursday had 7,000 bills in a backpack that ended up scattered on the street. The parallel change equates to approximately $18,000, the price of a used mid-size car. “You could find thousand-peso bills on any corner until late at night,” joked a TV host.
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