Numbers are sometimes such a hard thing to work out. So abstract, so lost in translation that they seem hard to comprehend in a practical way. What does half a million people really mean? How can we imagine that amount? We couldn’t possibly picture each single person and we would have to settle for a blurred impression of a big mass.

Saturday 21st April: as was his routine, Eduardo Córdoba left home for a rehearsal with the Bolivian folk music group Sikiri Sartanani. On this particular Saturday however, Eduardo was never to make it back home. Later, following a non-violent altercation of words with a bus driver, he was shot and killed at the doors of his local police station.

When Silvia Casas, a volunteer at the Red Cross, cradled in her arms a three-week-old baby abandoned by his mother, she first noticed the blood under his fingernails and his damaged knuckles. A paediatrician confirmed that the wounds were from having continually scratched and thumped at the boards of his cot, having been left alone for prolonged periods of time by his biological parents.

The first recycling classification plant in Buenos Aires, which celebrated its one-year anniversary in May, is still working far below its projected capacity. The plant, in barrio Bajo Flores, has the infrastructure to receive 120 tonnes of waste a day with a workforce of up to 180 people. However, it currently employs 30 and receives three tonnes of waste a day, one of which is recyclable.

A slogan that has been oft-used in Argentina in recent times is ‘Nunca Más’ or ‘Never Again’, whether referring to the disappeared victims of the military dictatorship or the horrendous loss of life in the Cromañon nightclub fire, and this same sentiment is the raison d’être of one museum in Buenos Aires.

With the daily bustle of writing news roundups and reviews, it is often easy to forget people have died for journalism. Thirty years ago, on 25th March 1977, journalist Rodolfo Walsh was shot dead in the street one day after he had penned the ‘Open Letter to the Military Junta’.

Anyone who has ever been to Buenos Aires will have noticed that as the shops start to close up and the city begins to wind down for the evening, a whole section of society comes to life. As regular office workers go home, some 6,000 people’s job is just beginning.

On 30th December 2004, a popular band called Callejeros was playing in República Cromañón – a nightclub in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Once. The place was packed with fans, but at 10.45pm, before the band had even finished their first song, a fire broke out, cutting the power.

1974. The height of the turbulent years of the early 1970s, where left-wing and right-wing factions with polarised ideologies clashed regularly. A left-wing trade unionist, 27-year-old Ramón Pablo Videla, is arrested. In the ensuing years he will be tortured, lose his wife to a brutal military dictatorship, and eventually regain his freedom after a decade in jail.

It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts. Or at least that’s what Víctor Piris says as he defends his team’s final position of 42 out of 48 in this year’s Homeless World Cup in Cape Town. nd the taking part does seem to have counted – as both Piris, 34, and Adrián Camacho, 36, can testify. Both are vendors of Hecho en Bs As (HBA), the street publication sold by homeless people around Argentina’s capital, and had never travelled overseas before.