Last week it was tent cities on freeways and barter economies. This week 1,715 miles of phone cables have been stolen.

A report from the National Statistics and Census Institute indicates that copper exports grew 16.5 percent in the first six months of 2002 compared with same period last year. The increase occurred despite the fact that Argentina has almost no copper production of its own -- it imports most of the metal to produce the cables.

So where does the copper come from? Eduardo Mirabelli, chief of external communications at Telefónica, another regional telephone company, said the answer has to be the stolen cables. "That's almost 700 tons of metal, and 500,000 people without phone service," he said.

Cable theft has always existed in Argentina, telephone company officials say, but in the past it was generally done as a prank. With the economic crisis now gripping the country, stealing cables has become a serious business, particularly in poor neighborhoods outside Buenos Aires, where the telephone companies have not invested in underground cabling.