In Argentina the Homeless Try Self-Help
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
AMD ECONOMO COLLAPSE In Argentina the Homeless Try Self-Help BY ARTHUR M.SHAPIRO Buenos Aires During the night of Friday, January 22, some 250 families of poor people descended on vacant...
...I'd have to spend five australes a day to commute there-that's two hours' wages...
...For proof, all you need to do is go to the settlements and see that there are few kids, that more people are there by day than by night -when they return to their real homes -and look at how they dress...
...In the cafés and the press there is talk of the " Alfonsin-Cafierista" alliance of the center, trying desperately to keep the lid on...
...While the lawyers argued, hammers and saws were at work...
...In Argentina "subversive" is a loaded word, not to be used lightly...
...At the height of the terror almost anyone could settle a personal score by denouncing someone, even anonymously, as a "subversive...
...Arthur M. Shapiro, a previous NL contributor, is a professor of zoology at the University of California, Davis, who frequently visits Argentina...
...in it an innocuous poetry-reading club falls under suspicion of being a nest of subversive terrorists...
...The firm of Celestina La Grande was 20 years in arrears on both municipal and provincial taxes, and the two large seizures were of its properties...
...His mission was undercut by the Rico fracas in January and by CGT head Saul Ubaldini's failure to denounce itan inaction that has drawn fire from most of the Peronist movement's political leadership...
...It's all orchestrated by subversive agitators...
...Novelist Humberto Costantini wroteablack comedy aboutthis, called in English The Gods, The Little Guys, and the Police...
...Four days before the squatters made their move, Colonel Aldo Rico's second attempt at a military coup collapsed quickly...
...Well, everyone knows that it is not only in economics that Peronism is incoherent...
...If he has a plan to turn Argentina's economy around, he has yet to reveal it...
...in the absence of a visible Peronist economic policy, a Cafiero victory may indeed be meaningless for them...
...Cafiero Peronists...
...The parcel in Bernal Oeste belonged to Salmun Textiles, alleged to be in similar arrearsalthough this was disputed by the City of Quilmes, which has jurisdiction...
...Just how bad the housing situation is in Argentina can be gleaned from the fact that the government is spending $600 million per year on subsidized public housing construction...
...This was no random migration...
...It is widely perceived that Rico did not seriously expect to topple the government-only to extract concessions from it in the treatment of the military...
...AMD ECONOMO COLLAPSE In Argentina the Homeless Try Self-Help BY ARTHUR M.SHAPIRO Buenos Aires During the night of Friday, January 22, some 250 families of poor people descended on vacant ground in the La Matanza district of greater Buenos Aires, in a neighborhood known locally as Ciudad Evita (for the late Eva Perón...
...The occupied parcels were immediately divided up and laid out as communitiesto-be, with space allotted for streets and for such public amenities as schools, churches, parks, and police stations...
...Yet in Buenos Aires Province alone a million units are needed to bring the local population up to government minimal housing standards...
...The Peronist victories in the fall were a vote of no confidence in Alfonsin's economic policies, not a vote for those of the Peronists, which as usual make no sense...
...We don't want any presents from anyone.' He went on to explain why the activists had rejected free land in the Moreno district instead: "They offer us land in Moreno...
...The tenth general strike called by the CGT recently was a fiasco...
...Siete Dias interviewed a member of the provisional community council in Bernal, who saw things very differently: "We are neither subversives nor manipulated by groups on the Left, even if we in fact have support from some political parties...
...Whatever the political entanglements of the homeless, there is no doubt about economic realities in Argentina...
...The Mayor of Quilmes, PeronistEduardo Caamano, was furious...
...After September's sweep, Cafiero traveled to the United States and Europe to try to convince economic and political leaders that Peronism no longer was synonymous with gangsterism or anarchy...
...Community councils were established to plead the squatters' case for legal recognition and access to municipal services...
...The very next afternoon 800 families-followed over several days by 2,100 more-left the overcrowded slum of Barrio Facundo Quiroga in the Lomas de Zamora district south of the city and established a new settlement a few kilometers away on vacant land that they christened Barrio Don Juan Manuel de Rosas...
...For developments on the political front clearly suggest no relief can be expected from that quarter...
...But the overriding feeling is that since victory in '89 is within Cafiero's grasp, he and his Partido Justicialista will collaborate with Alfonsin to hold the military in line even if the economy gets bad enough to make a successful coup a real possibility...
...It's all orchestrated by the Movement Toward Socialism, the Workingman's Party and the revolutionary wing of Peronism...
...For the little guy, tax evasion and the underground economy have been the only backstops against bankruptcy...
...Unfortunately, they have also crippled the government's ability to implement effective social programs...
...Inflation has made saving impossible, economic mismanagement has eroded the nation's agricultural base, the subsidization of imports has devastated domestic industry, and the entire infrastructure has crumbled...
...On the Peronist side the front-runner is the genial, avuncular Antonio Cafiero, who upset Radical Juan Manuel Casella for the governorship of Buenos Aires Province last September...
...That is the background of the mass squatter action...
...They have exploited the real need of a few in order to grab some land and destabilize things a little, " he told the news magazine Siete Dias...
...Most of the squatters were under some kind of roof within 72 hours after the occupations began...
...President Raul Alfonsin cannot succeed himself in the Presidential elections scheduled to be held next year, and his Radical Party has seemingly already anointed Cordoba's Governor Eduardo Angeloz as its man...
...So is Mayor Caamano, of course, who denounced them...
...In the process, the background of the occupations emerged...
...to pay as we can...
...If these shelters were not up to building codes, there was ample historical precedent for that...
...The victims of the "dirty war"-the 10,000 or so who "disappeared" under the former military government-were thus described, and still are to this day by unrepentant Right-wingers...
...On January 29 another 120 families similarly moved into four blocksin Bernai Oeste, southeast of the city...
...The Minister of Health and Social Action, Ricardo Barrios Arrechea, admits his desperation in the face of such figures...
...This translated into 30,000 new units last year, at an average cost of $20,000 each-grossly inflated through sweetheart deals and featherbedding, of course...
...And if they are Leftists, why did the squatters name their new settlement after Rosas, the first great Caudillo, the folk hero of the Fascist Right...
...We merely want a little piece of land on which to live...
...National social-action programs are strained nearly to the breaking point, while every month more working class people slip into marginality and more of the marginal slip into utter hopelessness...
...Meanwhile, the Peronist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) rings with the conventional populist rhetoric urging, in effect, endless inflation, and the rank and file isn't listening...
...Yet one of the squatter leaders averred to the press, "Not only are we not subversives, we're Peronists...
...Their housing, clearly temporary but presumably better than what they had before, was made of anything that came to hand-scrap metal, canvas, wood, bricks...
...there is simply little he can do...
...This has not happened, but there has been some clarification of the murky political situation...
...On its surf ace Argentina is still a middle-class country, but the veneer is getting thin...
...A quarter of the population-some 8 million people-live below the official poverty line, and conditions as a whole have grown steadily worse through the 1970s and '80s...
...For 10 months pro bono lawyers had probed corporate tax records, seeking to discover businesses whose chronic delinquencies justified a major land forfeiture, and they had struck gold...
...What all that means for the squatters in Lomas de Zamora and Bernal is something else...
...The organizations named by Mayor Caamano are perfectly legal, but the Right detests them and equates them with the Montonero terrorists of the early '70s...
...One may disagree with the activists' logic, yet their frustration is understandable...
...Nonetheless, most pundits see the same forces prevailing next year, assuring a Cafiero victory...
...To the activists who ferreted out the unpaid corporate tax bills, the money unspent on welfare because it was never collected is in itself ample justification for January's land seizures by the poor...
...It's a pity this occurred...
Vol. 71 • March 1988 • No. 5
