Covid-19 is inspiring separatism in Argentina’s winelands

ON A RECENT Friday evening in Mendoza, the capital of Argentina’s wine country, a group of well-to-do Mendocinos held a Zoom session with Luciana Sabina, a historian. “Self-rule, it’s a big part of our DNA,” she declared, as she took her viewers through earthquakes and economic crises, singing the praises of Italian immigrants who planted fructuous vineyards in the Andes. In her telling, an epidemic was a turning-point in the province’s history. During a cholera outbreak in the 1880s Mendoza wanted to close itself off from the rest of the country. Argentina’s then president, General Julio Argentino Roca, forced the province to open. “We lost the battle for self-rule, thousands of lives too,” Ms Sabina concluded.