Argentina: tanners are the bad guys in new soap opera
24/08/2012
In the story so far, the paths of a retired boxer and a young female doctor cross in a down-at-heel urban district called El Delta. The doctor, Camila, is an indefatigable defender of the poor and vulnerable, and spends a lot of her spare time in El Delta.
Camila is puzzled by the high levels of sickness among the local children and traces the problem to pollution from a local tannery. The children’s parents are too frightened to give evidence against the tannery as it’s the main source of employment in El Delta. Just when she fears no one will help her in her fight for what is right, she meets Ringo, the boxer, now working as a volunteer firefighter.
Showing at prime time in one-hour episodes five nights per week, Sos Mi Hombre (You Are My Man) clearly appears to combine elements of the plots of Rocky and Erin Brockovich. It’s all just fiction, but it is also a fact that depicting tanners as the bad guys does the real industry’s image no favours at a time when senior leather sector figures in Argentina have been subjected to public hostility from vocal campaign groups.
Exactly a year ago, Raúl Zylbersztein, the president of CIMA, the Argentinean Leathergoods Association, was the subject of personal, public vilification from campaign group Greenpeace. In August 2011, Mr Zylbersztein had the temerity to say it was unfair of the organisation to single out the tanning industry for the blame for high levels of pollution in a Buenos Aires river, the Matanza-Riachuelo. He was responding to media enquiries about a high-profile Greenpeace campaign and pointed out that there were plenty of tanneries and leathergoods companies in Argentina that were providing large numbers of jobs while being responsible for no pollution whatsoever and said it was unfair for Greenpeace to tar everyone with the same brush.
All around the world, tanners have much to gain from demonstrating to governments and local communities that good operators take corporate social responsibility extremely seriously and are a force for good in the villages, towns and cities in which they work. Tannery of the Year, now in its third programme, is one of a series of initiatives aimed at reversing the tide of negative publicity and at celebrating good practice in the global industry.
Tannery of the Year (which has the support of industry bodies the International Council of Tanners and the International Union of Leather Technologists and Chemists Societies, and leather chemicals manufacturers BASF, Buckman and Lanxess) believes that a policy of keeping quiet and waiting for controversy to blow over, as the leather industry has done for many years, is not helpful and that the time has come to speak up in favour of leather. Good practice must grow; the rest must follow the example of the best as quickly as possible and the industry as a whole must join in helping the outside world understand that this is a sector that has much to be proud of.
If it is reluctant to communicate with the outside world about its achievements, the outside world will feel free to fill in the gaps for itself, the way the writers of Sos Mi Hombre have done.
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