Old Smuggler

In the 2009, extraordinary Oscar-winning Argentine crime drama “The Secret in Their Eyes”, there’s a memorable scene (one of many, actually) driven by Mario Alarcón, who plays the role of judge Raimundo Fortuna-Lacalle. At the end of that scene, visible on YouTube, judge Fortuna-Lacalle stands next to Pablo Sandoval (played by the immense Guillermo Francella) and describes how he (who in the movie suffers of quite chronic alcoholism) started drinking “a bottle of Old Smuggler” in the middle of a small town in Argentina. The name of the whisky brand is not anodyne and rang a bell in me; the film is set in 1974, right before the start of the “National Reorganization Process”. I was a baby at that point in time, but years later I had to endure the alcoholism of my mother, who would down a bottle of… Old Smuggler, precisely, and sometimes up to 4 times a week. No, she never abused me or anything; no, she wasn’t violent. She was sad. She was deeply wounded, and wouldn’t go to a…