Photo: Associated Press

"Ego," the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once memorably observed, "is the little Argentine in all of us." The truth of this pithy maxim never ceased to impress me during the 27 months when I was stationed in Buenos Aires in the late 1980s as Newsweek's South America correspondent. The Argentines' capacity for self-absorption seemed endless and would express itself in a number of ways, from the collective obsession with a storied past, when Argentina ranked among the world's ten richest countries in the early decades of the early 20th century, to the need to highlight their more European society and culture vis-a-vis those of their Latin American neighbors. To this day, the international news sections of Buenos Aires' leading dailies regularly feature stories analyzing how Argentina is factoring into the calculations of top policymakers in Washington, as if the editors at those newspapers can't quite bring themselves to tell readers that their country barely flickers on the radar screens of the Bush White House or Condoleezza Rice's State Department.