Jonathan Gómez busily sweeps the sidewalk, adjusts his mattress and lights a brazier to kill the cold on a street in the Argentine capital, where homelessness has doubled in one year while more than half of the country’s population is poor.
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“I collect cardboard in a very difficult economy, which is getting more complicated every day,” Jonathan, 30, told AFP. He worked in the restaurant and construction industry until last year, but jobs became scarce and his life fell apart.
Two cans and a lighter are his improvised kitchen; a cart is all he owns. “We have three blankets and a hug” to keep out the winter, laughs Jonathan as he hugs his partner Maria de los Angeles Lopez, 33, who describes herself as a “housewife.”
The two are lying on a mattress a few meters from the luxurious buildings of Puerto Madero and the most exclusive gastronomic center in Buenos Aires. After the first three months of the government of the ultra-liberal Javier Milei, the statistics institute of the city of Buenos Aires reported that the rate of indigence reached its highest level since it began to be measured in 2015.
The rate doubled to 16 percent compared to the first quarter of 2023.
“Under the carpet”
Four homeless people have died of hypothermia in recent weeks in Buenos Aires amid a cold wave. Many refuse to sleep in state shelters for fear of being attacked.
“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.
At the national level, poverty was 41.7 percent in the second half of 2023, according to the state-run Indec, which will release its next measurement in September. But projections from the Catholic University of Argentina (UCA) place it at 55 percent, a record that Argentina reached in 2002 during the worst recent economic crisis.
A structural crisis
The current crisis has pushed the poorest into destitution and vast sectors of the middle class have become new poor, said the UCA. The gap between household income and the price of the basket of goods that defines the poverty and destitution line has widened rapidly in an economy in recession, with more than 270 percent year-on-year inflation in June and 7 percent unemployment.
“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, researcher at the UCA Social Debt Observatory. Poverty has been above 20 percent for more than two decades.
“We have structural poverty, with a third generation of children and adolescents born into exclusion,” Donza said. This is the case of Gabriela Costas, who at 45 years old has been living on the streets since she was 9. Neither centre-left nor right-wing governments have managed to get her out of poverty.
“I’ve lived on the streets all my life. When they throw things in the trash cans, we pick them up and eat,” she told AFP. Her son, Alexandre Barrales, is 18 years old and is studying high school in a home run by a foundation, where he found shelter when he was 13. Alexandre helps his mother while he looks for a job: “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,” he says.
Solidarity ‘Super Soup’
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 at the National University of Quilmes, on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires, a line of people wait to receive a plate of ‘Supersopa’ during a soup kitchen, a solidarity mechanism for distributing food.
This is the relaunch of this high-protein food developed by the UNQ during the 2002 crisis to offer low-cost protein to vulnerable sectors in a livestock-producing country that consumes less and less meat due to rising prices.
After years of being closed, the plant was reopened a month ago and has already received orders, including from Chile and Brazil. A patronage system pays for it together with the university. Today “we are once again facing an economic crisis, we are in a food emergency with almost six out of ten Argentines below the poverty line, which means that some 27 million people are going to bed hungry,” Anahí Cuellas, the plant’s director, told AFP.
In the first stage, they will produce 75,000 portions at a cost of 680 pesos per dish (about 60 cents), but they are preparing for much more. “The need will unfortunately grow,” Cuellas predicted.
AFP Agency
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