In the first months of Milei’s government, poverty in the Argentine capital doubled
Afp
The newspaper La Jornada
Sunday, July 21, 2024, p. 27
Buenos Aires, Jonathan Gómez sweeps the sidewalk, adjusts his mattress and lights a brazier to beat the cold on a street in the Argentine capital, where homelessness has doubled in a year while more than half of the country’s population is poor.
The 30-year-old man worked in the restaurant business, but this year he lost his job and his life fell apart.
Two cans and a lighter make up his improvised kitchen; a cart is all he has. We have three blankets and a hug against the winter, he laughs, while hugging his partner María de los Ángeles López, 33, who introduces herself as housewife.
The two are lying on a mattress just a few meters from the luxurious buildings of Puerto Madero and the most exclusive gastronomic center in Buenos Aires.
In the first months of Javier Milei’s government, the city’s statistics institute reported a poverty rate of 16 percent, double that of the first quarter of 2023.
Four homeless died of hypothermia in recent weeks in the middle of the Buenos Aires winter. The police sometimes bring you mattresses and blankets so that you go to a shelter that looks like a prison and so that people with money don’t see the economic and social crisis and sweep us under the carpet.says Jonathan.
The Catholic University of Argentina reports that in an economy in recession, vast sectors of the middle class have become the new poor.
There is a loss in households, not only due to the purchasing power of salaries, but also due to the unemployment of heads of household.explained Eduardo Donza, a researcher at the institution.
We have structural poverty, with a third generation of children and adolescents born into exclusionhe defined.
This is the case of Gabriela Costas, who at 45 years old has been living on the streets since she was nine. I lived on the street all my life. When they throw things in the trash cans we pick them up and eat like that.he tells AFP.
Her son Alexandre Barrales, aged 18, lives and studies high school in a foundation home, where he found shelter when he was 13.
With my future I plan to do a project to sell food, set up a stand on the street, whatever I can to get ahead.it states.
While the government resists a court order to distribute tons of food to hundreds of soup kitchens that it has put under audit, university students are reviving a response to hunger.
In a warehouse of the National University of Quilmes, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, a line of people waits to receive a plate of Supersopa, a food developed by this research center to offer low-cost protein to vulnerable sectors, in a cattle-raising country that consumes less and less meat due to rising prices.
