Bargain Living

"I took some friends to Au Bec Fin, an excellent French restaurant, and a four-course luncheon cost less than $1 a person," the wife of a U.S. businessman who lives in Buenos Aires reported last week. "Movies at five cents, sugar at a penny a pound--if Americans would like the fine, careless rapture of living in 1956 with such items on their budgets, all they have to do is to take the next plane to Bolivia," a U.S. woman wrote from Cochabamba. With the forces of exchange legalization, runaway inflation and currency liberation variously at work, dollar-earners in South America were finding many bargains--along with some sudden price rises.

Cheap Beer. In Argentina, post-Peron devaluation of the official rate of the peso has forced its value on the free market, legalized after the September revolution, from around 30 to a current of 36. Thus traded, a dollar will buy such bargains as a platter-size steak with a bottle of wine, or five pints of good Cordoba beer, or admission to seven first-run movies or a ten-mile ride in a taxi. A rent of $300 a month gets a country house with a swimming pool and big garden.

In dollar-starved Bolivia, the free rate of exchange has slid to 6,800 bolivianos to the dollar, and local price inflation, though high, has not kept up. Result: anyone paid in dollars can buy beef filets for 11-c- a lb., rice for 2-c- a lb., gasoline for 5-c- a gal., cooking oil 4-c- a qt. A maid's salary runs from $1.50 to $2.50 a month; an average taxi ride costs 5-c- --no tip expected.

Dear Wine. In Chile, by contrast, dollar-earners have recently suffered a setback. Freed to find its own rate (TIME, April 23), the peso is hovering around 480 to the dollar; the free market has wiped out an earlier, limited trading in scarce "tourist dollars" at more than 600. The peso's comeback, plus last year's inflation (now checked), has pushed the price of a bottle of gran vino, for example, from 25-c- to $1 for dollar earners. Brazil's cruzeiro has been slipping steadily on the limited free market, but local price inflation has kept step, and only the country's famed gem stones are real bargains. In Peru, too, local prices have mostly caught up with the 1949 devaluation, but $60 to $80 a month will still rent a five-room apartment in a good Lima suburb.

Despite currency shifts, South America is still not the tourist bargain that it seemingly should be; too many of the hotels, guides, shops and agencies have learned to think and sometimes even charge in dollars. And imported goods that are bought with dollars, such as Scotch whisky and U.S. cigarettes, are likely to run high. But for the dug-in, dollar-earning resident or the expert traveler who can track the real bargains down, good living can come cheerfully cheap.

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