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Comment by verisimi | Hacker News Reader

> Argentinians have also learned to not trust banks, even with accounts denominated in other currencies. In 2001-2002, the government enacted something called "el corralito", shutting Argentinians' access to their bank accounts for almost a year. When they could finally extract money again, they found that (a) their USD deposits had to be exchanged for pesos and (b) pesos had lost 2/3 of their value.

That couldn't possibly happen in the West. Its only those silly Argentinians that have to worry about this sort of stuff... right?

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I always considered Argentina part of "the west" - it's in the western hemisphere and the common language is Spanish, along with other cultural connections to Spain. What definition are you using?

Argentina is part of the West. Unless someone narrows down that definition to mean English speaking West, in order to exclude us.

It's a bit arbitrary but everyone I've met uses "the West" to roughly mean anything west of mainland Russia, east of the international date line, and north of the Tropic of Cancer.

In Australia we refer to ourselves as part of the “western world” - despite the geography being nonsensical!

Unfortunately, Latin America is not considered the west by US and a lot of Europe. It shouldn't be hard to guess why.

Latin America is too brown to be from the west?

Argentina isn't very "brown".

Most of America doesn't know that. They equate Spanish with Mexico.

I mean most of Latin American is populated by descendent Spanish, and they have no issues with Spain being the “west” so I don’t think it’s race at all.

Most of the time when people talk about western countries/civilization, they're not talking about Latin America, but rather about USA+western Europe, at least in my experience. Geographically it makes sense, and linguistically too. But culturally (debatable), alliances and wealth-wise not as much.

Linguistically? How so? Most of Western Europe doesn't speak a unified language. Many countries in Western Europe speak romance languages, one of them Spanish!

Geographically it's also dodgy. Is Australia not part of the West?

I wasn't insulting Argentina, at least not intentionally.

But, by your definition are not Mexico or Brazil 'the west' too? Is Argentina not more like these countries that your typical European country? Isn't there a valid distinction there?

For me - and this is a subjective but common understanding - 'the west' is all Anglo speaking countries (inc Australia and New Zealand) and western Europe (France, Germany, Spain, etc). This unit, seems to move in the same way financially, culturally, politically.

If you look at inflation numbers between 1968 and 1981, it did happen in the US -- just not by 2/3.

Those sorts of massive bank controls, though... no, not yet, in the US anyway. Let's not talk about Canada.

No, don't mention Canada that freezes people's bank accounts by edict. Don't mention Greece or Cyprus either.

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