Workers laboring in Vaca Muerta. Although oil has allowed Argentina to become a net exporter, this has not improved living conditions in the province of Neuquén, where most of it is located. Credit: Martin Álvarez Mullaly / Opsur

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 19 2025 (IPS)

For about three years now, Argentines have been hearing almost every month that oil production is breaking new records. Looking ahead, the country is projected to become a major global supplier of what remains the most sought-after energy source. 

These developments, presented as hopeful news for an economy that has been in deep crisis for at least 12 years – with a decline in per capita GDP, worsening income distribution, and rising poverty – nonetheless raise many questions.“The Argentine oil industry has advanced over the last 15 years, regardless of the government in power. Today, the benefits are being reaped, the sector will keep growing, and could reach the goal of US$30 billion in exports before 2030”: Gerardo Rabinovich.

Critics question the distribution of economic benefits, the population’s access to energy, the expansion’s environmental and social impact, and the virtual abandonment of the country’s climate goals and commitments.

The so-called Neuquén Basin, in the country’s southwest, is the epicenter of an oil activity expansion that sectors of academia and environmental and social organizations describe as overly aggressive.

“In the last 10 years, exploration began in agricultural areas. Since 2012, 3,300 oil wells have been drilled, 440 of which were completed in 2024. Over 500 wells are planned for 2025,” researcher Agustín González told IPS.

González, an agronomist and professor at the National University of Comahue, which has campuses in Neuquén and Río Negro – two provinces in the Patagonian basin where the Vaca Muerta geological formation is located – highlighted the impact of this expansion.

This field, which sparked the hopes of Argentine politicians and businessmen in 2011 when the U.S. Energy Administration classified it as one of the world’s largest reserves of shale gas and oil, is finally beginning to yield results, sometimes at the expense of other sectors.

Shale hydrocarbons are extracted using a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and González warns that its widespread use is causing significant impacts in a traditionally agricultural region known for its high-quality fruit production.

An oil rig in Vaca Muerta. This unconventional hydrocarbon field in Patagonia is exploited by fracking, which has a greater environmental impact than conventional extraction. Credit: Martin Álvarez Mullaly / Opsur

Impact on Local Communities

“Fracking is extremely violent. It uses 30,000 liters of water per well, mixed with over 60 chemicals and high-powered pumps to fracture the rock. It has nothing to do with conventional oil activity,” González explained.

“Fracking affects all nearby land uses. When it is done near a river, a farm, or a populated area, it puts them at risk,” added González, who is part of a joint research group on the environmental and social impact of Vaca Muerta, involving the University of Comahue and the Stockholm Environment Institute.

“The development of fracking must be balanced with the protection of natural resources, food production, and social equity, establishing a robust regulatory framework to prevent irreversible damage to ecosystems, agricultural areas, and local communities,” warns a study published last December by this group of researchers.

However, this does not seem to be the best time to discuss these issues in Argentina, where far-right President Javier Milei has downgraded the Ministry of Environment to a minor department under the Secretariat of Tourism and has completely rejected not only the climate agenda but also the strengthening of the state’s role as a regulator of productive and industrial activities.

“The government has defunded the Renewable Energy Development Fund (Foder) and outright closed the distributed energy fund,” Matías Cena Trebucq, an economist at the non-governmental Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (Farn), told IPS.

The expert added that “while previous governments had a debated focus on natural gas as a transition fuel, the Milei administration is now fully committed to fossil fuels and has eliminated any reference to a path toward clean energy.”

In 2015, the Argentine Congress passed a law setting a goal for 20% of the country’s electricity consumption to come from renewable sources by December 2025. In 2024, the sector grew due to older projects coming online, reaching 15% of generation, but it is unlikely to continue growing without state support.

A pumpjack in Vaca Muerta, the unconventional oil and gas field that has been the foundation of Argentina’s significant hydrocarbon production growth in recent years. Credit: Courtesy of FARN

Positive Balance 

Thanks to recent trends, Argentina achieved a positive energy trade balance in 2024 for the first time in 13 years, with exports exceeding imports by US$5.668 billion.

Exports of fuels and energy grew by 22.3% last year compared to the previous year, reaching $9.677 billion, accounting for 12.1% of the country’s total exports, according to official data.

The main explanation for these figures lies in the expansion of fracking in Vaca Muerta, which contributed 54.9% of all oil production and 50.1% of gas nationwide. In December alone, Vaca Muerta produced 446,900 barrels of crude oil (159 liters each), 27% more than in the same month of 2023.

Conventional oil and gas production, on the other hand, continues to decline due to the depletion of the San Jorge Gulf Basin in the Patagonian province of Chubut, which was traditionally the country’s main oil-producing region.

Total production in 2024 was 256,268,454 barrels of oil, 11% more than in 2023. This marks four consecutive years of growth, driven solely by unconventional oil from Vaca Muerta.

Due to the potential of this geological formation, various studies circulating in the sector suggest that Argentina is on track to reach US$30 billion in annual oil exports by 2030 and position itself as a global supplier.

“The Argentine oil industry has advanced over the last 15 years, regardless of the government in power,” Gerardo Rabinovich, vice president of the non-governmental Argentine Institute of Energy (IAE) General Mosconi, told IPS.

He added that “today, the benefits are being reaped, the sector will continue to grow, and it is possible that the goal of US$30 billion in exports will be reached before 2030.”

“In 2022, we had an energy trade deficit of US$4 billion, and in 2024, we achieved a surplus of over US$5 billion. That is very important for Argentina,” he added.

However, the flip side of this reality is that, due to the brutal adjustment of public accounts by the Milei government, domestic demand for gasoline and diesel fell by 6.5% and 5%, respectively, compared to 2024, according to an IAE report, said Rabinovich.

“The Milei government has proposed completely liberalizing oil activity, displacing the state, and aligning local prices with global ones,” Fernando Cabrera Christiansen, a researcher at the Southern Oil Observatory, told IPS.

Cabrera, speaking from Neuquén, where he lives, noted that the growth of Argentina’s oil production has not led to greater well-being for a predominantly impoverished population, nor has it made energy cheaper locally.

He emphasized that, while over US$40 billion in investments have flowed into Neuquén in the last decade, according to data from the provincial Undersecretariat of Energy – an amount unmatched by any other region – social indicators remain as alarming as those in the rest of the country.

“The province uses oil royalties to pay public salaries and other current expenses. It is not enough to build infrastructure or provide social benefits. And poverty levels in Neuquén are similar to the national average,” he concluded.

Young Guarani indigenous people studying for a technical degree in indigenous community tourism in Yriapu, in the extreme northeast of Argentina. Credit: Daniel Gutman / IPS

By Daniel Gutman
IGUAZU, Argentina, Oct 11 2024 (IPS)

A few years ago, Bernardo Olivera moved to Posadas, the capital of the Argentinean province of Misiones, to study mathematics at the public university. Interested in numbers and keen to progress, he felt, however, that the education system put a barrier in his way because of his indigenous origin.

“I did an entire four-month term and couldn’t pass a single subject. Studying was very difficult for me because of the language; I couldn’t adapt,” Olivera, now 27 and the father of an eight-year-old daughter, told IPS.

Like all young people who grew up in the more than 100 indigenous Guarani communities in this province, in the far northeast of Argentina, he is a native Guarani speaker and only learned Spanish at school.“When young indigenous people enter a university or a conventional higher education institution, it does not take into account their mother tongue nor their different pace. Teachers and authorities end up seeing them as a problem”: Viviana Bacigalupo.

Now Olivera has another opportunity, and it suits him better. He is studying again, thanks to the launching in 2023 of the first higher education course in the province of Misiones aimed especially at young indigenous secondary school graduates and designed from the cultural identity and worldview of the Guarani people.

It is a higher technical course in indigenous community tourism and operates in Iguazu, on the triple border between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. It is bilingual – in Guarani and Spanish – and has both indigenous and non-indigenous teachers.

“Today my dream is to create an agency for tourists to visit our communities and learn about our culture. That way I will be able to help my people,” he says.

Classes take place every morning in Provincial Secondary School 117, a bright, single-storey building in the midst of dozens of wooden or mud-brick houses with tin roofs that are scattered throughout the forest and make up the Yriapu indigenous community.

Yriapu is home to some 140 families, who have achieved recognition of the communal ownership of 265 hectares of land that they occupy ancestrally.

With Yriapu’s struggle, the Guarani have managed to rescue a portion of the encroaching tourist development associated with Iguazu Falls, a natural wonder that attracts visitors from all over the world and which this year is on the verge of reaching one million tickets sold, according to data from the National Parks Administration (APN).

The falls, located just 15 minutes by road from Yriapu, are in the so-called Paranaense rainforest, an ecosystem of exuberant vegetation and great biodiversity, which Argentina shares with Brazil and Paraguay.

None of the resources left behind by tourism, however, are felt in Yriapu, where well water is consumed due to the lack of a public water network and people walk the trails carrying large quantities of firewood on their backs, the only fuel available for cooking and heating water.

Argentina as a whole is home to 1,306,730 people who recognised themselves as indigenous in the 2022 census, almost 3% of the total population. Of the 46 million inhabitants of this South American country, 52% live in poverty – according to official statistics made public in late September – and discrimination against indigenous peoples aggravates their situation.

View of one of the dwellings of the Guarani community in Yriapu, on the Argentinean side of the triple border with Brazil and Paraguay. Credit: Daniel Gutman / IPS

Intercultural educational course

“When young indigenous people enter a university or a conventional higher education institution, it does not take into account their mother tongue nor their different pace. Teachers and authorities end up seeing them as a problem,” Viviana Bacigalupo, principal of the Raul Karai Correa Indigenous Higher Institute, which offers the technical course, told IPS.

“What tends to happen is that they start with great enthusiasm and then drop out, which increases their exclusion from the world of labour and their vulnerability. The aim here is to generate an educational offer with the culture, rhythms and worldview of the Guarani people,” she adds.

Bacigalupo, and most of the intercultural team she is part of, come from the so-called Mate Project, created in 2005 to promote the self-management of tourism and cultural resources by the Guarani people of the Iguazu area, which began with short training sessions aimed at improving the labour skills of the communities.

In addition to Argentina, the Guarani people are present in Paraguay, southern Brazil and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia. In fact, students from each of these countries are studying remotely in the technical course.

The strength of its language, which is official in Paraguay, is the biggest Guarani cultural legacy. According to the Mercosur Parliament, it is spoken by 85% of the Paraguayan population, and another 15 million people use it in Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia.

Oscar Benitez, professor of culture and worldview of the Guarani people; Claudio Salvador, academic coordinator; and Viviana Bacigalupo, principal of the Raul Karai Correa Indigenous Higher Institute. Credit: Daniel Gutman / IPS

The technical course currently has 26 students, seven of whom are from communities far from Iguazu, who stay in hostels in Yriapu during the week.

The Institute, run by the government of Misiones, was internationally recognised by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) and the World Indigenous Tourism Alliance (Winta) as a unique model of Intercultural Indigenous Education.

“Indigenous tourism is carried out according to the principles of the people and is attached to their spirituality. It is not a main activity for the communities, but complementary to traditional life,” Claudio Salvador, the institute’s academic coordinator, told IPS.

“Today, for example, when tourists who come to Misiones visit the ruins of the Jesuit missions created by the Catholic Church to evangelise the Guarani, they don’t hear the indigenous story. We want it to be present,” he adds.

Abdon Ojeda, from the Yriapu community, shows one of the traditional traps designed by the Guarani to hunt animals in the forest. Credit: Daniel Gutman / IPS

Loss of biodiversity

The Yriapu community has been receiving tourists for years, attracted by signs on the side of the road linking the hotel zone in Iguazu with the entrance to the falls. The visitors are taken on a tour of the jungle trails and told about Guarani culture.

“We see an opportunity in tourism if we reinforce our knowledge,” Abdon Ojeda tells IPS, as he shows a tree called guaporaity (Plinia cauliflora), whose bark, he says, is used by the indigenous people to make a tea that relieves stomach pain.

In addition to medicinal plants, visitors can see traps made of wood for hunting animals. The Guarani people were hunters, but today the traps are made only to show tourists, because much of the jungle biodiversity has been lost in Misiones.

Communication, tourist services, IT, English, theatre and Guarani culture and worldview are some of the subjects that form part of the technical course. The aim is for them to be taught by teaching pairs made up of an indigenous and a non-indigenous teacher, who work side by side with teaching strategies that alternate equally between the two languages.

“What we are doing has never existed in our province and I am very proud of it,” Oscar Benitez, an indigenous teacher of the Guarani people’s worldview culture, told IPS.

“We want to help the younger generations to have a professional qualification and to be able to integrate, by strengthening our own culture, into a world that is now overtaking us with the power of its communication. And we know that only education is the path to equal opportunities,” he concludes.

Salvador, the academic coordinator, an experienced teacher who became involved with the Yriapu community in 2003, when he joined the struggle for recognition of community ownership of the lands they occupy ancestrally, explains that the plan is for the institute to grow by 2025.

“We see that there is a lot of interest for next year and the idea is to open up to other audiences, other groups, objectives and goals.  Aiming at farmers, other provinces and other cultures. If we do well, we will be fully intercultural from next year onwards,” he argues about the future of the Indigenous Higher Institute of Yriapu.

The Climate Assembly in Bujaru, Brazil, debated between April and May this year on bioeconomy, family farming and cooperatives to influence the design and implementation of local policies on climate change. Credit: Delibera

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 29 2024 (IPS)

Danilo Barbosa had never taken part in political processes until his name was drawn in a lottery to join the climate assembly of the municipality of Bujaru, in the Amazon region of Brazil.

“It was a good experience, a very important channel. People participated, they wanted to talk about the important issues and to have visibility about their concerns. Since people make a living from agriculture, that’s why I wanted to address this issue,” Barbosa told IPS from the municipality of Blumenau, in the southern state of Santa Catarina, where he lives temporarily.

Barbosa, 29, was part of a group of 50 people, chosen at random, to take part in the Bujaru climate assembly and discuss the opportunities and challenges of the climate crisis in the area and how to influence the process of designing and implementing related public policies.

The cultivation of rice, beans, maize and cassava, as well as livestock farming in deforested areas, are the main economic activities in the area, in the northern state of Pará.“There is talk in these times of political disaffection, in a hyper-individualised world, but when you open the doors so that people can participate, give ideas, there is a great desire to be present. We will see the results later": Ignacio Gertie.

For this reason, “we want agriculture that does not affect the environment and looks after the jungle. We need to protect biodiversity. That’s why it’s important that they consider our vision for the municipality, we want to help it grow,” said Barbosa, an administrative and accounting assistant in the real estate sector.

The climate assembly, under the subject Sustainable Bioeconomy: Paths and Options to Generate Jobs, Income and Quality of Life in Bujaru, resulted from a process between August and October 2023 that invited Amazonian cities to participate. Sixteen municipalities from six of the nine Brazilian Amazonian states responded.

During five sessions between April and May this year, the assembly deliberated on how to strategically position themselves and access opportunities in favour of sustainable performance and the bioeconomy, on issues such as forest management, monocultures, deforestation and synergy between technological innovation and ancestral knowledge.

By the end of August, the group will submit to the municipality, of 24,300 inhabitants, their recommendations, which include the design of a municipal agricultural plan with goals and indicators, the promotion of cooperatives, ecotourism and rural tourism.

Climate assemblies are mechanisms of deliberative democracy, discussion and reflection, promoted so that the citizens of a locality assume a central role in decision-making on the impacts of climate change and specific measures to address them.

A climate assembly starts with the random election of its members from the people attending its meetings. The group discusses an agenda of local climate issues and drafts recommendations for municipal and regional authorities. Infographic: Ecovidrio

By promoting local action, they address community-specific issues, because they know the local problems well, and they urge governments to include their concerns.

As such, these meetings sprouted from 2019 in Great Britain, France and Spain, spreading throughout Europe with varied results.

In Latin America they are still new, although the region has a participatory tradition, such as community boards with different names, which decide on local issues, and neighbourhood meetings to design participatory budgets.

Bolivia and Honduras have legal frameworks for public participation, while Bolivia and Colombia have institutional channels for popular participatory involvement, according to data from the non-governmental International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), which promotes citizen participation initiatives.

In 2016, Uruguay was a pioneer with the Decí Agua initiative on citizen deliberation to provide input to draft the National Water Plan, instituted two years later.

In Chile, the Citizens’ Climate Assembly in the southern region of Los Lagos met between May and August 2023 to make recommendations to the regional government on environmental education, energy efficiency and water management, which were delivered the following November.

Similar processes in Brazil and Colombia have shown the importance of citizen participation in the political debate, but had no direct impact on the design of public policies to address the climate crisis.

The Citizens’ Climate Assembly in the Los Lagos region of southern Chile met in 2023 to present advice to the regional government on environmental education, energy efficiency and water management. Credit: Los Lagos Regional Government

Experiments

In addition to Bujaru, other Latin American cities are organising their own procedures with the same objective, part of a regional project that the international network of (Re)emergent assemblies is promoting in four Latin American cities.

In the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León, a Climate Assembly was elected on Thursday 22nd to deliberate and issue recommendations in four meetings, with the aim of improving the territory’s environmental policies and prioritising actions to adapt to the climate crisis in the metropolitan area of Monterrey, the capital.

Bosque Iglesias, a climate advocacy consultant with the non-governmental Instituto del Sur, told IPS that a group of people were invited and an open application form was set up.

“We wanted people to feel called to participate. We prioritised areas in five polygons with heat islands, where there are voices that suffer most from the crisis and tend to be relegated in the public debate. The call has been challenging, because in the first week they came little by little,” he said from Monterrey.

In the draw on Thursday 22, the 50 people in the assembly were chosen from 542 candidates from 11 municipalities in the metropolitan area. Starting in September 7 they will tackle 11 of the 140 lines of action of the state’s climate change programme, supported by the Ministry of the Environment of Nuevo León.

The agenda includes water treatment, monitoring of urban green spaces, mobility and construction of green infrastructure.

In the Argentinian city of Mar del Plata, “it was decided to focus on the climate issue… We have to think of multidimensional, multidisciplinary and participatory solutions, with the challenges that our governments have. Unlike Europe, we have less budget and other more urgent priorities”: Ignacio Gertie.

In 2022, Nuevo León, especially Monterrey – which had 1.14 million people, or more than five million with the suburban area – faced a severe water crisis. The municipal administration declared a climate emergency in 2021, being the first Mexican city to do so. In 2024, heat waves hit the metropolis.

From 13 to 22 August, a climate assembly in the city of Mar del Plata, in Argentina’s southeast Atlantic, discussed recommendations for a new climate action plan for the district of General Pueyrredón, of which it is the capital.

The group addressed training, awareness-raising and community-driven policy-making, solid and liquid waste management, reuse of materials and recycling, as well as disaster prevention and preparedness.

Ignacio Gertie, project leader at the non-governmental Democracia en Red, told IPS that there is a growing demand and need for institutional openness to citizen participation, which is reflected in experiences like the one in the Argentine tourist city.

“It was decided to focus on the climate issue… so we have to think about multidimensional, multidisciplinary and participatory solutions, with the challenges that our governments face. Unlike Europe, we are less resilient, with smaller budgets and other more urgent priorities,” he said from Mar del Plata.

The city, which in 2022 had over 682,000 people and belongs to the Argentine Network of Municipalities facing Climate Change, is drawing up its local action plan to face challenges such as the water situation and heat waves.

Another regional experience is the climate assembly of the Colombian city of Buenaventura, in the southwestern department of Valle del Cauca, with growing climate challenges. It started meeting to deliberate and issue suggestions on the collection and transformation of solid waste in the area.

Its port on the Pacific Ocean, the largest in Colombia and one of the top 10 in Latin America, faces water risks, loss of biodiversity, temperature increase and ocean acidification, as well as coastal erosion, for which the city has had a Territorial Climate Change Management Plan since 2016, currently in the process of being updated.

Monterrey, in Mexico, suffers from water problems, air pollution and high temperatures. Half a hundred people, selected at random on 23 August, will deliberate on measures to tackle the effects of the climate crisis in the city and its surroundings. Credit: Autonomous University of Nuevo León

Pioneers

The first wave of European climate assemblies provides evidence that citizens are willing and able to arrive at climate recommendations that are decisive for the population.

In France, authorities have implemented approximately 50 % of the recommendations or an alternative measure that partially implements the proposal, according to the study ‘Deliberative Democracy and Climate Change’, which Idea-International and the governmental French Development Agency released in June.

In Bujaru, Barbosa, who will return to his municipality in September, is ready to monitor the implementation.

“We will verify if they take into account the recommendations in the plans. It won’t be immediate. We talked about the importance of implementing measures in the area” for the benefit of the population, he said.

Mexico’s Iglesias and Argentina’s Gertie are confident that the citizens’ process will continue to contribute to climate action.

“The challenge is institutional follow-up. It is a major task of the assembly to stay coordinated in order to demand it. Having a group of actors to follow up is key. We hope to weave a joint advocacy agenda and become strong in the collective, and be a relevant subject in the face of the crisis,” Iglesias predicted.

For Gertie, the road ahead is to organise more processes. “There is talk in these times of political disaffection, in a hyper-individualised world, but when you open the doors so that people can participate, give ideas, there is a great desire to be present. We will see the results later,” he stressed.

José Lonardi stands in his tiny candy and beverage shop in downtown Buenos Aires. Customers, he says, have lost all reference points for the price of products in Argentina and so nothing surprises them anymore. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman / IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 16 2023 (IPS)

People in Argentina have become accustomed to the fact that nothing costs the same today as it did the week before and they take price hikes in stride with resignation, says Mariano Cohen. “Almost nobody gets angry or complains anymore. They just don’t buy something if they can’t afford it,” he explains in his disposable goods store in Villa Crespo, one of Buenos Aires’ most commercial neighborhoods.

Mariano sells plastic cups, plates and bowls, cardboard packaging rolls and aluminum containers. He serves bars, restaurants and the public. He has a large sales room, about 80 square meters, and a mezzanine of the same size, which he uses as a warehouse and is a great asset for a merchant who sells non-perishable products.

The business owner tells IPS that he buys and stocks as much merchandise as he can, to anticipate price hikes.

“If I don’t have more, it’s because there’s no more coming in or because they don’t want to sell me large quantities. The other day a supplier suspended a very important delivery from one minute to the next and gave me back the money I had already paid him,” he comments, with the same gesture of resignation that, he says, his customers make when faced with the prices in his store.

The economy of this South American country, with a long history of imbalances and inflation, has entered a spiral of permanent price increases that has already squelched the capacity for amazement of its 46 million inhabitants.

In Argentina, the absurd has been normal for some time: here you can buy a pair of shoes in six installments without interest, with financing subsidized by the government or even by private banks, but to buy a house you must pay in cash, because mortgages are almost non-existent. Today, price rises are so common that people are surprised the few times that a price is the same from one week to the next.

In 2021, there was concern when inflation climbed to 50 percent per year, partly attributed to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced an increase in currency issuance to meet social assistance needs. However, people soon became nostalgic for this figure: in 2022 the index climbed to 95 percent, the highest since 1991.

Even so, the economy of this nation – where more than 40 percent of the population is poor and practically no private sector employment has been created for the last 12 years – seems to be determined to prove that it can always get worse.

This year inflation climbed again, to an accumulative 103 percent in the first nine months alone, reaching 138 percent in the interannual index (from September 2022 to September 2023), according to official data. Projections indicate that 2023 will end with an increase in consumer prices of around 150 percent.

An employee uses a machine to count banknotes in a store in Patagonia in southern Argentina. The constant increase in prices has meant that many products must be paid for with dozens of bills of the devalued Argentine peso and has forced stores to buy counting machines to save time. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman / IPS

Emerging and drowning again

“I feel that the day I get paid my salary is the best day of the month, but also the worst,” Ariel Machado tells IPS, laughing bitterly.

“I’m happy when I get paid, but when I set aside the money for fixed expenses and calculate how much I’ll have left, I feel like I’m drowning again,” says Ariel, who has a son and is separated from his wife, and who is employed by a well-known public relations agency in Buenos Aires and also sells selected wines over the Internet to supplement his income.

A typical member of the strong middle class of Buenos Aires, used to going on vacation to the beaches of Brazil and dining in restaurants a couple of times a week, Ariel says that those things are now just memories and that today he sometimes feels like he’s spinning “on a wheel of unhappiness, because of the amount of things I want to do and can’t.”

He tries to forget about it, but doesn’t succeed. “Worrying about money consumes a lot of energy. Three years ago I couldn’t save either, but this didn’t happen to me. Now there are days when even having a cup of coffee outside the office seems like a wasteful luxury,” he says.

By his own admission, Ariel is not even remotely among the most vulnerable segments of the population, who spend practically all their income on food, prices of which have been rising more than average.

Latin America’s third largest economy is immersed in a process of stagnation and deterioration that began in 2012 and caused the governing parties to lose the last two presidential elections, in 2015 and 2019.

On Sunday Nov. 19, the next president will be chosen in a runoff election in which the ruling party’s centrist candidate Sergio Massa will compete against the far-right opposition candidate Javier Milei.

Only the extravagant proposals of Milei, who calls for the free carrying of arms and the creation of a market for the sale of organs, in addition to immediate dollarization and the elimination of the local peso from the Central Bank, have made Massa, who since 2022 is the Minister of Economy, competitive.

Elections always generate even more instability in the economy and situations that are difficult for visitors to understand.

Those who can afford to do so stock up on items in anticipation of what will happen to prices and consumption after the elections.

Thus, September, the month prior to the first round of elections, showed a strong increase in consumption in supermarkets (eight percent above the previous month, according to private sector data), comparable only to March 2020, when the pandemic confinement began.

In any case, the impact of inflation on the poorest is especially visible in the outskirts of the capital. Greater Buenos Aires is home to 15.5 million people, or one third of Argentina’s population, where more and more people sleep on the streets or wander around in search of something to eat.

The poor suffer from a decline that is measured not only in terms of income but also with respect to access to basic services and to environmental conditions.

A paper published in October by the Argentine Catholic University’s (UCA) well-respected Observatory of Social Debt found that since 2018 a process of reduction of the inequality gap began in Greater Buenos Aires, but due to the worsening living conditions of the middle class rather than to improvements in households in the most impoverished neighborhoods.

Members of these vulnerable sectors of Buenos Aires told IPS that the escalation of inflation is more a problem of the middle class people living in the city, who have to lower their standard of living and who are becoming poorer, while in their case “we were and are so bad off that a jump in inflation of 100 to 150 percent does not change anything for us.”

In addition, part of the poorest population of Buenos Aires and its outlying areas receives social assistance from the central or city governments, or from non-governmental organizations.

A supermarket in Buenos Aires displays a sign from the “Fair Prices” program, which consists of an agreement between the Argentine government and companies to curb the prices of basic products. People frequently complain that the products are often not available, due to the reluctance of the companies to comply with this commitment. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman / IPS

No reference point

José Lonardi owns a tiny shop selling candy, beverages and cigarettes on Paraguay Street, a few blocks from the Obelisk, an icon of downtown Buenos Aires. The prices of the merchandise, he tells IPS, increase almost every week, sometimes by three to five percent, and sometimes by 20 to 30 percent.

“Two or three years ago, customers still complained when prices went up, because they had some point of reference. Today, inflation has picked up so fast that nobody knows how much things are worth and nobody says anything anymore,” he remarks.

Against this backdrop, contradictory advice is rampant. The value of pesos is melting like ice cream under the sun and people want to get rid of them. On afternoon TV programs, a steady parade of economists advise people to buy large quantities of toilet paper to beat inflation.

Many people, however, do not pay attention to them: in different neighborhoods of Buenos Aires restaurants are always full, even on weekdays. “In the Argentine economy nobody knows what might happen next week. So pesos are burning holes in people’s pockets, and people, as long as they have them, spend them,” says José.

Transport barges navigate one of the branches of the Paraná River in Argentina's Santa Fe province. The Paraná, the second longest river in South America, has been turned into a major waterway through which a large part of Paraguay's and Argentina's agricultural exports are shipped out of the region. CREDIT: Fundación Humedales

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Sep 29 2023 (IPS)

In addition to being a majestic river – the second longest in South America after the Amazon – the Paraná River is the waterway through which a large part of the area’s primary goods are exported. Today, its economic importance has sparked an unexpected diplomatic conflict between Argentina and the countries with which it shares the basin.

Argentina’s decision to charge tolls to vessels on its stretch of the river led to a formal complaint from Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay and Bolivia, which argue that the river corridor agreement signed by the five countries in 1994 stipulated that no taxes or tariffs could be imposed without the approval of all parties.

The Paraguay-Paraná Waterway River Transport Agreement created an Intergovernmental Committee as the political body that would ensure its operation and maintain it as a motor for the development of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), established by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay in 1991 and later joined by Bolivia.

Tension reached unprecedented levels with Paraguay, a landlocked country that owns a gigantic fleet of ships that carry millions of tons of soybeans and beef, the engines of its economy, to the Atlantic Ocean and often return with fuels, essential to supply a nation that produces no oil or gas.

“What is happening is very serious. Paraguay has invested three billion dollars in the last 10 years and has 2,500 transport barges, one of the largest fleets in the world,” Andrea Guadalupe, vice-president in Argentina of the Mercosur-Southeast Asia Chamber of Commerce, which groups export companies from different countries, told IPS.

“It is not wrong for Argentina to charge a toll, because it carries out dredging and beaconing works that allow large ships to pass through the Paraná. But what is wrong is that it has not consulted the other countries and has taken a unilateral decision,” she argued.

Paraguayan Pesident Santiago Peña announced that he would resort to international arbitration, saying that his country’s sovereignty was at stake, and stating: “Paraguay has no future without the free navigability of the rivers.”

Although Peña denied that it was a reprisal, Paraguay announced this September that it would keep half of the electricity from the Yacyretá power plant located on the border between the two countries, on the Paraná River, which has an installed capacity of 3,200 megawatts.

Traditionally, although it is entitled to 40 percent, Paraguay has kept only 15 percent of Yacyretá’s energy and ceded the remaining 85 percent to Argentina, a country with a population of 46 million inhabitants, six times larger than Paraguay’s, which means it obviously consumes more energy.

The Rio de la Plata, seen from Buenos Aires, is at the mouth of the Paraná River and leads to the Atlantic Ocean, allowing the transportation to the export markets of a large part of the agricultural products of one of the most productive areas of South America. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman / IPS

Argentina says it invests between 20 million and 25 million dollars a year in dredging work on the Paraná, which in recent years has become more necessary due to a persistent drop in the water level, which has forced barges to carry less cargo and has increased the companies’ logistical costs.

“The situation is affecting the relationship between two countries that are brothers. Argentina’s attitude is not in line with the agreements, and Paraguay is a landlocked country that needs the river to connect with the world,” Héctor Cristaldo, president of the Union of Production Chambers (UGP), which groups Paraguayan agricultural business chambers, told IPS.

Cristaldo said the main impact for Paraguay is in the supply of fuels used for agriculture and livestock and also for land transportation. “Paraguay has no trains; everything moves on wheels,” he said.

The toll crisis escalated into open friction in early September, when a Paraguayan flagged barge heading north with 30 million liters of fuel was held up for several days by Argentine authorities who released it when it agreed to pay some 27,000 dollars in tolls.

The rate for vessels put into effect in January 2023 is 1.47 dollars per ton transported. It was set by the General Administration of Ports (AGP), the government agency that controls the Argentine section of the waterway.

The new toll drew a statement from the governments of Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay, which expressed “special concern because it is a restriction on the freedom of transit” and asked Argentina to collaborate “to facilitate commercial transport, favoring the development and efficiency of navigation.”

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña (L) is greeted by his Argentine counterpart Alberto Fernández on Aug. 15, when he took office in Asunción. Relations between the two countries later deteriorated over navigation rights in the Paraná River basin. CREDIT: Presidency of Argentina

From Mato Grosso to the sea

The Paraná River, together with its tributary, the Paraguay River, form a waterway stretching almost 3,500 kilometers from Mato Grosso in west-central Brazil to its mouth in the Río de la Plata, which in turn flows into the Atlantic. The basin covers almost 20 percent of South America’s territory, and has an enormous biodiversity and a remarkable productive capacity.
The lower section, from the central Argentine city of Rosario to the mouth of the river, has been dredged to allow trans-oceanic vessels to pass through, carrying millions of tons of agricultural products for export each year. In total, some 100 million tons of goods are transported through the waterway every year.

The work began in 1995, when Argentina granted its section under concession to a consortium formed by the Belgian maritime infrastructure giant Jan de Nul and the Argentine Grupo Emepa, to be in charge of dredging and signaling. Thus, the river was deepened from its natural 22 feet to 34 feet from Rosario – the country’s main agro-industrial center – to the mouth.

Further north, the waterway is only 12 feet deep, which only allows the navigation of barges, with which Paraguay and Bolivia export a major part of their soybean production, which is transferred to larger ships in Rosario.

The following year, the Argentine Ministry of Agriculture authorized the cultivation of transgenic soybeans, which would lead to a major expansion of the agricultural frontier and great pressure from agribusiness to deepen the dredging of the Paraná, which crosses the most productive area of Argentina, so that larger ships could enter.

Map of the Paraguay-Parana waterway. CREDIT: Afip

Low cost transportation

“The Paraná was transformed into a waterway that began to fulfill a function analogous to the one played by the railroad until the first third of the 20th century: to facilitate the expansion of the productive frontier and to be a low-cost transit route,” wrote geographer Álvaro Álvarez, vice-director of the Geographic Research Center of the public Universidad Nacional del Centro.

Álvarez maintains that the Paraná today is “a key infrastructure in the insertion of the region as a supplier of commodities into the international economy, a process through which industrial agriculture, mega-mining and hydrocarbon exploitation have been degrading ecosystems for decades, expelling populations from territories and affecting the health of communities.”

One of the main questions about the waterway is that there are no studies of the environmental impact generated by the modification of the river and the constant traffic of large vessels.

Last year, the Argentine Association of Environmesntal Lawyers filed an injunction demanding environmental impact assessments, which is now being studied by the Supreme Court of Justice.

“The State presented a 30-year-old environmental impact study in the file. Since then there has been and there continues to be removal of thousands of tons of sediment from the riverbed, which in many areas is contaminated with agro-toxins from industrial agriculture, and it is not known how that impacts the contamination and the dynamics of the river,” Lucas Micheloud, a member of the Association, told IPS.

“It is not a matter of adapting the river to the size of the ships, but of the ships adapting to the river,” said Ariel Ocantos, a graduate in International Relations and member of the Ecologist Workshop of Rosario, one of the environmental organizations demanding greater citizen participation in the interventions carried out in the Paraná River.

“We made several requests for information to the government because we want to know if they are conducting environmental impact studies. There is very little information and we are demanding citizen participation, which is absolutely necessary,” he said.

"Migration is a right," read the handkerchiefs held by two women at a demonstration in the Argentine capital for migrants' rights. At left is Natividad Obeso, a Peruvian who came to Buenos Aires in 1994, fleeing political violence in her country. CREDIT: Camilo Flores / ACDH

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 27 2023 (IPS)

Remi Cáceres experienced gender-based violence firsthand. She struggled, got out and today helps other women in Argentina to find an escape valve. But because she is in a wheelchair and is a foreign national, she says the process was even more painful and arduous: “Being a migrant with a disability, it’s two or three times harder. You have to empower yourself and it’s very difficult.”

When she came to Buenos Aires from Paraguay, she was already married and had had her legs amputated due to a spinal tumor. She suffered violence for several years until she was able to report her aggressor, got the police to remove him from her home and raised her two daughters watching after parked cars for spare change in a suburb of the capital "The places where women victims of gender-based violence are given assistance are not accessible to people who are in wheelchairs or are bedridden. And the shelters don't know what to do with disabled women. Recently, a woman told me that she was sent back home with her aggressor." -- Remi Cáceres

On the streets she met militant members of the Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA), one of the central unions in this South American country, who encouraged her to join forces with other workers, to create cooperatives and to strengthen herself in labor and political terms. Since then she has come a long way and today she is the CTA’s Secretary for Disability.

“The places where women victims of gender-based violence are given assistance are not accessible to people who are in wheelchairs or are bedridden. And the shelters don’t know what to do with disabled women. Recently, a woman told me that she was sent back home with her aggressor,” Remi told IPS.

From her position in the CTA, Remi is one of the leaders of a project aimed at seeking information and empowering migrant, transgender and disabled women victims of gender violence living in different parts of Argentina, for which 300 women were interviewed, 100 from each of these groups.

The data obtained are shocking, since eight out of 10 women stated that they had experienced or are currently experiencing situations of violence or discrimination and, in the case of the transgender population, the rate reached 98 percent.

Most of the situations, they said, occurred in public spaces. Almost 85 percent said they had experienced hostility in streets, squares, public transportation and shops or other commercial facilities. And more than a quarter (26 percent) mentioned hospitals or health centers as places where violence and discrimination were common.

One of the trainings held by the “Wonder Women Against Violence” project. On the left is Remi Cáceres, who escaped domestic violence and today is Secretary of Disability at the Central de Trabajadores Argentinos central trade union. CREDIT: María Fernández / ACDH

Another interesting finding was that men are generally the aggressors in the home or other private settings, but in public settings and institutions, women are the aggressors in similar or even higher proportions.

The study was carried out by the Citizen Association for Human Rights (ACDH), an NGO that has been working to prevent violence in Argentina since 2002, with the participation of different organizations that represent disabled, trans and migrant women’s groups in this Southern Cone country.

It forms part of a larger initiative, dubbed Wonder Women Against Violence, which has received financial support for the period 2022-2025 from the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women. Since 1996, this fund has supported projects in 140 countries for a total of 215 million dollars.

The initiative includes trainings aimed at providing tools for access to justice to the most vulnerable groups, which began to be offered in 2022 by different organizations to more than 1,000 women so far.

Courses have also been held for officials and staff of national, provincial and municipal governments and the judiciary, with the aim of raising awareness on how to deal with cases of gender violence.

María José Lubertino, president of the Citizen Association for Human Rights, takes part in a feminist demonstration in Buenos Aires. Lubertino coordinates the project on violence against disabled, transgender and migrant women in Argentina that runs from 2022 to 2025. CREDIT: Camilo Flores / ACDH

Fewer complaints

“Argentina has made great progress in recent years in terms of laws and public policies on violence against women, but despite this, one woman dies every day from femicide (gender-based murders),” ADCH president María José Lubertino told IPS.

“In this case, we decided to work with forgotten women. We were struck by the fact that there were very few migrant, trans and disabled women in the public registers of gender-violence complaints. We discovered that they do not suffer less violence, but that they report it less,” she added.

Lubertino, a lawyer who has chaired the governmental National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (INADI), argues that these are systematically oppressed and discriminated groups that, in her experience, face their own fears when it comes to reporting cases: “migrants are afraid of reprisals, trans women assume that no one will believe them and disabled women often want to protect their privacy.”

Indeed, the research showed that 70 percent of trans, migrant and disabled women who suffered violence or discrimination did not file a complaint.

Many spoke of wanting to avoid the feeling of “wasting their time,” as they felt that the complaint would not have any consequences.

Each group faces its own particular hurdles. Migrant women experience discrimination especially in hospitals. Transgender people, in addition to suffering the most aggression (sometimes by the police), suffer specifically from the fact that their chosen identity and name are not recognized. Disabled women say they are excluded from the labor market.

More than three million foreigners live in this country of 46 million people, according to last November’s data from the National Population Directorate. Almost 90 percent of them are from other South American countries, and more than half come from Paraguay and Bolivia. Peru is the third most common country of origin, accounting for about 10 percent.

Of the total number of immigrants, 1,568,350 are female and 1,465,430 are male.

As for people with disabilities, the official registry included more than 1.5 million people by 2022, although it is estimated that there are many more.

Since 2012, a Gender Identity Law recognizes the legal right to change gender identity in Argentina and by April 2022, 12,665 identification documents had been issued based on the individual’s self-perceived identity. Of these, 62 percent identified as female, 35 percent as male and three percent as non-binary.

Women participate in one of the trainings on gender-based violence in Buenos Aires. The project is carried out by the Citizen Association for Human Rights with financial support from the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women. CREDIT: Camilo Flores / ACDH

Different forms of violence

Yuli Almirón has no mobility in her left leg as a result of polio. She is president of the Argentine Polio-Post Polio Association (APPA), which brings together some 800 polio survivors. Yuli is one of the leaders of the trainings.

“Through the trainings, those of us who participated found out about many things,” she told IPS. “We heard, for example, about many cases related to situations of power imbalances. Women with disabilities sometimes suffer violence at the hands of their caregivers.”

The most surprising aspect, however, has to do with the restrictions on access to public policies to help victims of gender-based violence.

The Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity runs the Acompañar Program, which aims to strengthen the economic independence of women and LGBTI+ women in situations of gender-based violence.

The women are provided the equivalent of one monthly minimum wage for six months, but anyone who receives a disability allowance is excluded.

“We didn’t know those were the rules. It’s a terrible injustice, because disabled victims of violence are the ones who most need to cut economic dependency in order to get out,” said Almirón.

Another of the project’s partner organizations is the Human Rights Civil Association of United Migrant and Refugee Women in Argentina (AMUMRA). Its founder is Natividad Obeso, a Peruvian woman who fled the violence in her country in 1994, during the civil war with the Shining Path guerrilla organization.

“Back then Argentina had no rights-based immigration policy. There was a lot of xenophobia. I was stopped by the police for no reason, when I was going into a supermarket, and they made me clean the whole police station before releasing me,” she said.

Natividad says that public hospitals are one of the main places where migrant women suffer discrimination. “When a migrant woman goes to give birth they always leave her for last,” she said.
“Migrant women suffer all kinds of violence. If they file a complaint, they are stigmatized. That’s why they don’t know how to defend themselves. Even the organizations themselves exclude us. That is why it is essential to support them,” she stressed.

A demonstration in the city of Córdoba, capital of the province of the same name in central Argentina, in favor of legal, safe and free abortion and women's rights. The color green has identified the movement in favor of the legalization of abortion, which was passed by Congress in late 2020. CREDIT: Catholics for Choice

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 23 2023 (IPS)

Viviana Mazur is a doctor at the Santojanni Hospital in Mataderos, a working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires. She has witnessed the advances in women’s rights in Argentina, where until 2020 abortion was only allowed on two grounds, while it is now available on demand up to 14 weeks of pregnancy.

“Today what we see at the hospital is that most women come in for a consultation very early; in many cases they do so as soon as their period is late. This makes it possible to resolve almost all abortions with medication, in the woman’s own home, with medical advice and monitoring,” she said."(Medical abortion) is less traumatic and less risky for the woman and it's less costly for the public health system." -- Viviana Mazur

Mazur, who is also coordinator of Sexual Health in the Buenos Aires city government, said there are many advantages of medication abortion over the traditional surgical procedures.

“It’s less traumatic and less risky for the woman and it’s less costly for the public health system,” she told IPS.

In Argentina, as a result of years of struggle by the women’s rights movement, since January 2021 abortion has been decriminalized. In the last stage of the fight, mass demonstrations by women – and also men – wearing green headscarves, which has become a pro-choice symbol in Latin America, filled the streets.

Since then, Law 27,610 on Access to Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy allows any woman to have an abortion up to the 14th week of pregnancy free of charge and without having to explain the reasons for her decision.

Until the law came into force, access was severely restricted: a Supreme Court ruling in effect since 2012 authorized what was called Legal Termination of Pregnancy, only in the case of rape or if the pregnancy endangered the woman’s life or health.

Argentina’s Minister of Health Carla Vizzotti (C) holds the green headscarf that is the symbol for the feminist movement that fought for the successful legalization of abortion in Argentina. CREDIT: Ministry of Health

More abortions recorded in 2022

In 2022, the first full year in which the law allowing abortion on demand was in force, 96,664 abortions were performed in the public health system of this South American country of 46 million inhabitants, according to official data. This marked a significant increase over 2021, when the total was 73,847, partly due to the rise in abortions in the public health system.

“More than 85 percent of abortions in 2022 were performed with medication,” Valeria Isla, the national director of Sexual and Reproductive Health, told IPS.
.
“The good news is that today these are safe practices taking place within the health system. In any case, since until recently most abortions were clandestine, we believe it is too early to draw conclusions with respect to the number. The figures have yet to stabilize,” she added.

Isla explained that her office provides training to health personnel from all over the country on how to perform abortions and that medications are distributed, as well as equipment for manual vacuum aspiration, which is a less risky medical procedure in a doctor’s office than dilation and curettage, which is performed in an operating room.

In this sense, since 2022 the incorporation of mifepristone into the Argentine health system, in addition to misoprostol, which has been used for years to perform medical abortions, has been a great step forward.

The combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, called “combipack”, makes abortions more efficient and less painful for women, and in fact the combination of these two drugs for pregnancy termination is one of the techniques recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2005.

Last year, the WHO ratified both as essential drugs for providing quality health services and backed their efficacy and safety for abortion.

Isla explained that since last year the national government has been distributing mifepristone in public hospitals thanks to a donation from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Since March of this year, mifepristone has been fully available also for the Argentine private health system, since the governmental National Administration of Medicines, Food and Medical Technology (Amnat) authorized its sale in pharmacies.

This has allowed the “combipack” to be used in recent months in the private health system as well, where women now also have easier access to abortion.

“The incorporation of mifepristone has been very important on a day-to-day basis to make abortion easier for women, because it means less misoprostol is used, side effects are reduced and the whole process can be carried out at home, with prior and subsequent checkups,” Florencia Grazzini, a social worker at a primary care clinic in the municipality of Lanús, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, told IPS.

Grazzini began providing support to women who needed access to abortion long before the legalization of voluntary termination of pregnancy. She worked for years at the Kimelú counseling center, formed by feminist activists and serving the southern area of Greater Buenos Aires.

She said that while access to abortion has now been greatly facilitated, for some women termination of pregnancy is still a stigma.

“Despite the fact that with the law there is no need to gjve a reason for abortions up to 14 weeks of pregnancy, the justification for the decision continues to appear in the record of the consultations,” Grazzini pointed out.

She added that, “We are working so that people can share how they feel about their situation, but we don’t want them to feel that they need to explain in order to access an abortion.”

She said the women are told that they do not need to explain why they wish to have an abortion, although psychological assistance is provided to those who request it.

Abortion, however, sometimes encounters resistance from health professionals themselves. This was reflected in May, when the Ministry of Health updated the Protocol of Care and urged the “elimination of all requirements that are not clinically necessary for the safe practice of abortion.”

Specifically, it called for the elimination of waiting or reflection periods and the requirement of parental or partner consent.

A rally at the Ministry of Health in Buenos Aires, where feminist activists showed their green scarves and demonstrated in favor of women’s rights. CREDIT: Ministry of Health

The need for support

More data that shows that the legalization of abortion has not eliminated all the actual barriers is provided by Socorristas en Red (roughly, “Helpers Online Network”), a women’s organization that provides nationwide support for women who need an abortion.

In 2022, the network received 13,292 calls from women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies.

Only 10 percent of them had abortions in the public health system and the rest had abortions that they arranged elsewhere. The organization provided them with psychological assistance, information, instructions, WhatsApp messages, phone calls, and virtual and face-to-face company by “socorristas” or helpers. With all this they found greater comfort than in the health system.

This picture is completed by the visible inequality in access to abortion in different areas of the country.

Although the number of public hospitals and health centers that perform abortions reached 1793 in 2022 – against less than 1000 in 2021 – in some provinces the supply is very limited. For example, in the northern provinces of Santiago del Estero and Chaco there are only eight and nine health institutions, respectively, that perform abortions.

“In some places there is resistance from officials and a lack of knowledge among fellow workers about outpatient treatment with medications,” Ana Morillo, a social worker in the province of Córdoba, in the center of the country, told IPS.

Morillo, who is an activist and member of the Network of Professionals for Choice and the organization Catholics for Choice, said the advocacy work of the women’s rights movement has made Cordoba one of the provinces with the greatest access to abortion, since there are 180 hospitals and health centers that perform the procedure.

“The greatest inequalities are between cities and rural areas, where it is much more difficult to access an abortion. These are the disparities in the country on which we still have to work the hardest,” she said.

A photo of journalists dedicated to covering the agendas of nearby communities, like these ones in a town in Colombia, is uncommon in poor areas of Latin American countries, where millions of people have no access to information of local interest. CREDIT: Chasquis Foundation

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jun 14 2023 (IPS)

Without the means to receive information about what is happening around them, millions of Latin Americans who live in poor remote rural or impoverished urban areas inhabit veritable news deserts, according to an increasing number of studies conducted by journalistic organizations in the region.

There are, for example, 29 million people in Brazil, 10 million in Colombia, seven million in Venezuela and up to three-quarters of the Argentine territory without access to journalism due to the absence of media outlets, or because the few existing local outlets are dedicated to entertainment, rather than news.“When we talk about information deserts, we are also talking about what a robust media ecosystem implies: that there are not only enough media outlets, but also pluralism.” -- Jonathan Bock

“When we talk about information deserts, we are also talking about what a robust media ecosystem implies: that there are not only enough media outlets, but also pluralism,” said Jonathan Bock, director of the Colombian Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP).

This plurality must encompass “the topics that are covered, diversity of formats, media that address different audiences. A healthy ecosystem,” Bock added in a conversation with IPS from the Colombian capital.

A Jun. 7 forum organized by the Venezuelan branch of the Press and Society Institute (IPYS) displayed atlases and maps on news deserts in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela, based on research by organizations of journalists and academics from those countries.

Even without extrapolating from the results of these assessments, it is possible to estimate that news deserts affect a good part of the region, judging by the structural deficiencies of the population, and by conflictive situations in the media and journalism in nations such as those of Central America and the Andes.

“The social and geographical marginalization found in parts of our countries means that important segments of the population are in these news deserts. For example, indigenous populations lacking media outlets in their languages,” Andrés Cañizález, founder and director of the Venezuelan observatory Medianálisis, told IPS.

Journalistic organizations from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela show maps or atlases that indicate, using colors, the most and least deserted areas in terms of access to news in their respective countries. CREDIT: IPS

Atlases and statistics

A study by the Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA), coordinated by Irene Benito, took a census of 560 areas in that country and considered 47.9 percent of them news deserts, 25.2 percent in “semi-desert” conditions, 17.1 percent as “semi-forests”, and 9.8 percent as “forests”, or areas with an abundance of media outlets and news.

“As in other Latin American nations, in many areas there are media outlets and journalists, but there is no quality coverage. They deal with other things, not the interests of their communities, while the propaganda apparatus of the powers-that-be is in overly robust health,” Benito said in the IPYS forum.

In Brazil, the most recent News Atlas, released in March, recorded the existence of 13,734 media outlets in that country of 208 million inhabitants, but not a single one in 312 of its 5,568 municipalities. These 312 municipalities are home to 29.3 million people with no access to local news.

Although hundreds of online media outlets emerge every year “and now more municipalities have at least one or two media outlets, many are not independent or are biased, because they depend on the city government or religious movements,” said Cristina Zahar, from the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (ARAJI).

In a third of Colombia, where 10 of the country’s 50 million inhabitants live – many areas far from the big cities – there are no mass media, and in another third, home to 16 million people, the existing media outlets are dedicated to entertainment, according to FLIP’s Cartography of Information.

In Venezuela, seven million people live in municipalities where there are no media outlets, and that figure rises to 15 million – in a country of 28 million people – if municipalities with only one or two media outlets, considered “semi-deserts”, are included, according to IPYS.

Unlike other countries, “the situation has worsened, with the massive closure of radio stations ordered by the government – at least 81 in 2022 alone, and 285 since 2003 – with radio being the medium that has the greatest penetration in remote areas,” Daniela Alvarado, head of freedom of information at IPYS, told IPS.

Remote rural areas far from the main cities and often in border regions are among the most affected by deficient infrastructure and lack of media outlets that enable local residents access to general information about their local environment and possibilities of participation in decisions that concern them. CREDIT: ECLAC

Exclusion, once again

In the case of Colombia, one cause for the breadth of news deserts is violence, “war, one of whose strategic aims is to pressure or close down news, journalism that can reveal, report, warn and monitor what happens in areas of conflict,” said Bock.

In 45 years of armed conflict in Colombia, 165 journalists were murdered, “strategic killings, because they reported on things, and became symbols,” Bock stressed.

“But it also has to do with a different kind of exclusion, of weak economies and little interest on the part of politics and government institutions in promoting independent and plural journalism, seen in some contexts as the enemy, and with society getting used to it and not demanding” independent reporting, the Colombian analyst said.

Another thing that has happened in countries in the region is that “traditional media, and many new digital outlets, emerged and are concentrated where there was already an audience and sources of advertising, which is combined with pre-existing inequalities to create an abyss between big cities and small towns and the countryside,” said Cañizález.

In news deserts, infrastructure failures abound and there are absences or deficiencies in internet services, with providers that do not access these territories, aggravating the situation of local inhabitants who often only have simple mobile phones and cannot obtain news and information through digital or social networks.

However, news deserts are not exclusive to rural, remote or border areas; in cities themselves there is a dearth of local media outlets, or the outlets have their own agendas on issues in poor urban communities, which are also impacted by the crises that face journalism in general.

This is the case of Venezuela, which “is caught up in a complex and continuous economic, political and social crisis that has led to the deterioration of its media ecosystem,” Alvarado said, adding that it also faces “a communicational hegemony (on the part of the State) that is manifested in censorship and self-censorship.”

Newspapers and television stations were driven to shut down, by government decision or suffocated due to lack of paper and advertising, or their sale paved the way for their closure; or, as in the case of many radio stations, closure is a constant looming threat. Online media suffer from internet cuts and harassment of their journalists.

Even in urban areas, such as this one in Caracas, the adverse climate of news deserts has an impact, for example with the closure of print media outlets caused by political decisions or economic crises, which forces traditional kiosks to subsist by replacing newspapers, which are no longer available, with candy and snacks. CREDIT: Public domain

What can be done?

“The challenge seems immeasurable, but we are not sitting quietly by, we must not give up on what is our right as a community public service,” said Benito.

The State “should promote, at least in the area of ​​its competence, which is radio, television and internet, inclusive policies throughout the nation’s territory, guaranteeing basic rights, including the right to communication and information for all citizens,” stated Cañizález.

Zahar said that “sustainability is the challenge,” due to the difficulties many new media outlets, local or not, face in supporting themselves, and the advantages of digital media “that have fewer barriers to entry, can experiment with formats and financing mechanisms, and make quick changes.”

Bock said “we must think about the financing of journalism where there are fragile economies, see it as a public service but an independent one, to address the training of people practicing journalism in those places.”

Together with the support of the government and the international community, “models could be developed in which the big media sponsor local media in very small places or where there is clearly a news desert,” Cañizález said.

“But that’s still not even discussed in a number of our countries,” he said. “It is an issue that concerns journalism but has not drawn public attention. The debate is still very much confined to reporters.”

Young women from the Brazilian state of Bahia attend an informational campaign which also hands out menstrual hygiene products. Poverty and the lack of adequate information on this subject affect millions of girls, adolescents and adult women. CREDIT: Government of Bahia

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, May 26 2023 (IPS)

Menstrual hygiene management is elusive for millions of poor women and girls in Latin America, who suffer because their living conditions make it difficult or impossible for them to access resources and services that could make menstruation a simple normal part of life.

“When my period comes, I miss class for three or four days. My family can’t afford to buy the sanitary napkins that my sister and I need. We use cloths for the blood, although they give me an uncomfortable rash,” says Omaira*, a 15-year-old high school student.

From her low-income neighborhood of Brisas del Sur, in Ciudad Guayana, 500 kilometers southeast of Caracas, she speaks to IPS by phone: “We can’t buy pills to relieve our pain either. And my period is irregular, it doesn’t come every month, but there are no medical services here for me to go and treat that.”

In Venezuela, “one in four women does not have menstrual hygiene products and they improvise unhygienic alternatives, such as old clothes, cloths, cardboard or toilet paper to make pads that function as sanitary napkins,” activist Natasha Saturno, with the Solidarity Action NGO, tells IPS.

“The big problem with these improvised products is that they can cause, at best, discomfort and embarrassment, and at worst, infections that compromise their health,” says Saturno, director of enforceability of rights at the NGO that conducts health assistance and documentation programs and surveys.

Campaigns that adult and young women have carried out in Mexico and Colombia demanding the right to menstrual health managed to get the authorities to eliminate the value added tax on essential feminine hygiene products. CREDIT: Nora Hinojo/UN Mexico

Universal problem, comprehensive approach

Is this a local, focalized problem? Not at all: “On any given day, more than 300 million women worldwide are menstruating.  In total, an estimated 500 million lack access to menstrual products and adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management (MHM),” states a World Bank study.

“Today more than ever we need to bring visibility to the situation of women and girls who do not have access to and education about menstrual hygiene. Communication makes the difference,” said Hugo González, representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Peru.

UNFPA says there is broad agreement on what girls and women need for good menstrual health, and argues that comprehensive approaches that combine education with infrastructure and with products and efforts to combat stigma are most successful in achieving good menstrual health and hygiene.

The essential elements are: safe, acceptable, and reliable supplies to manage menstruation; privacy for changing the materials; safe and private washing facilities; and information to make appropriate decisions.

UNFPA’s theme this year for international Menstrual Hygiene Day, which is celebrated every May 28, is “Making menstruation a normal fact of life by 2030”, the target date for compliance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the international community at the United Nations.

United Nations Population Fund workers prepare packages of menstrual hygiene items for women from poor communities in Central America. The cost of some of these products makes them unaffordable for many families. CREDIT: UNFPA

The pink tax

Nine out of 31 countries in the region consider menstrual hygiene products essential, which makes them exempt from value added tax or reduced VAT, according to the study “Sexist Taxes in Latin America” ​​by Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

After a “Tax-free Menstruation” campaign, in 2018 Colombia became the first country in the Americas to eliminate VAT – 16 percent – on menstrual hygiene products. Its neighbor Venezuela still charges 16 percent VAT, and Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay charge VAT between 18 and 22 percent on such products.

Colombia was joined by Ecuador, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico – where street demonstrations were held against charging VAT on menstrual products – Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. Other countries have reduced VAT, such as Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay and Peru, while in Brazil VAT differs between states and averages 7 percent.

The so-called “pink tax” obviously affects the price of menstrual hygiene products such as disposable and reusable sanitary pads and menstrual cups, which becomes especially burdensome in countries with high inflation and depreciated currencies, such as Argentina and Venezuela.

According to the average price of the cheapest brands, ten disposable sanitary pads can cost just under a dollar in Mexico, 1.50 dollar in Argentina or Brazil, 1.60 dollar in Colombia, Peru or Venezuela, and almost two dollars in Costa Rica.

“It’s an important problem,” Saturno points out, “in a country like Venezuela, where the majority of the population lives in poverty and the minimum wage – although it has been increased with some stipends – is still just five dollars a month.”

Adult women, young women and girls participate in a session to share information and experiences organized by the Colombian association Menstruating Princesses, which emphasizes the importance of education to combat taboos and make menstruation a normal, stress-free experience. CREDIT: Menstruating Princesses

Hostile environment, scarce education

“If you often can’t buy sanitary pads, that’s the smallest problem. The worst thing is the shame you feel if you go to work and the cloth fails to keep your clothes free of blood, or if you catch an infection,” Nancy *, who at the age of 45 has been an informal sector worker in numerous occupations and trades in Caracas, told IPS.“Poverty causes women and adolescent girls to miss days of secondary school or work because they do not have the supplies they need when they menstruate. It becomes a vicious circle, because their academic or work performance is affected, hindering their chances of developing their full potential and earning a better income.” -- Natasha Saturno

The mother of four young people lives in Gramoven, a poor neighborhood in the northwest of the capital. Her two unmarried daughters, ages 18 and 22, have had experiences similar to Nancy’s on their way to school, in the neighborhood, on the bus, and on the subway.

“The thing is, the period is not seen as something natural, boys and men see it as something dirty, at work they sometimes do not understand that if you are in pain you have to stay at home,” said Nancy. “And when you work for yourself, you have to go out no matter what, because if you don’t go out, no money comes in.”

Saturno says that “poverty causes women and adolescent girls to miss days of secondary school or work because they do not have the supplies they need when they menstruate.”

“It becomes a vicious circle, because their academic or work performance is affected, hindering their chances of developing their full potential and earning a better income,” she adds.

But the problem “goes far beyond materials, it does not end just because someone obtains the products; it includes education and decent working conditions for women,” psychologist Carolina Ramírez, who runs the educational NGO Menstruating Princesses in the Colombian city of Medellín, tells IPS.

For this reason, “we do not use the term ‘menstrual poverty’ and speak instead of menstrual dignity, vindicating the need for society, schools, workplaces and States to promote education about menstruation and combat illiteracy in that area,” says Ramírez.

To illustrate, she mentions the widespread rejection of using tampons and cups “because of the old taboo that the vulva shouldn’t be touched, that the vagina shouldn’t be looked at,” in addition to the fact that many areas and communities in Latin American countries not only lack spaces or tools to sterilize products but often do not have clean water.

A concern raised by both Saturno and Ramírez is the great vulnerability of migrant women in the region – which has received a flood of six million people from Venezuela over the last 10 years, for example – in terms of menstrual and general health, as well as safety.

Another worrying issue is women in most Latin American prisons, which are unable to provide adequate menstrual hygiene, since they do not have access to disposable products or the possibility to sterilize reusable supplies.

Throughout the region, “greater efforts are required to break down taboos that violate fundamental rights to health, education, work, and freedom of movement, so that menstruation can be a stress-free human experience,” Ramírez says.

*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the interviewees.

Excerpt:

A picture of photovoltaic panels in the solar park in the small town of Armstrong, in the Pampa region, the heart of Argentina’s agricultural production. The park belongs to an electric cooperative, which until 2017 only bought energy to distribute, but now generates electricity as well. CREDIT: FARN

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, May 26 2023 (IPS)

When the residents of Armstrong, a town of 15,000 in western Argentina, began to meet to discuss a renewable energy project, they agreed that there could be many positive effects and that it was not just a question of doing their bit in the global effort to mitigate climate change.

“The proposal was to use the rooftops and yards of our houses to install solar panels. And I accepted the idea basically because I was excited by the prospect that one day we would become independent in generating our own electricity,” Adrián Marozzi, who today has six solar panels in the back of the house where he lives in Armstrong with his wife and two children, told IPS.“Community-based projects, which are feasible, have several advantages: they improve local autonomy in the generation of electricity, they allow money to be saved from the energy that is not purchased, which can be reinvested in the city, and they promote the decentralization of decision-making in the energy system.” -- Pablo Bertinat

His home is one of about 50 in Armstrong with solar panels generating power for the community, added to the 880-panel solar farm installed in the town’s industrial park. Together they have contributed part of the electricity consumed by the inhabitants of this town in the western province of Santa Fe since 2017.

This is a pioneering project in Argentina, built with public technical organizations and community participation through a cooperative where decisions are made democratically, which has since been replicated in various parts of the country.

With an extensive area of ​​almost 2.8 million square kilometers, Argentina is a country where most of the electricity generation has been concentrated geographically, which raises the need for large power transmission infrastructure and poses a hurdle for the development of the system.

In this context, and despite the financing obstacles in a country with a severe long-lasting economic crisis, renewable energies are increasingly seen as an alternative for clean electricity generation in power-consuming areas.

Marozzi is a biologist by profession, but is dedicated to agricultural production in Armstrong, almost 400 kilometers northwest of Buenos Aires. The town is located in the pampas grasslands in the productive heart of Argentina, and is surrounded by fields of soybeans, corn and cattle.

How to bring electric power to widely scattered rural residents was the great challenge that the Armstrong Public Works and Services Provision Cooperative, made up of 5,000 members representing the town’s 5,000 households, grappled with for years.

The institution was born in 1958 and in 1966 it marked a milestone, when it created the first rural electrification system in this South American country, with a 70-kilometer medium voltage line that brought the service to numerous farms.

Once again, in 2016, the Armstrong cooperative pointed the way, when it began to discuss in assemblies with community participation the advantages and disadvantages of venturing into renewable energy production by means of solar energy panels.

“Those of us who accepted the installation of panels in our homes today receive no direct benefit, but we are betting on a future in which we can generate all of the electricity we consume. In addition, of course, we care about environmental issues,” Marozzi said in a conversation from his town.

The 880-panel solar park with 200 kW of installed power is currently being expanded to 275 kW thanks to the money that Armstrong saved from energy that was not purchased in recent years from the national grid. The local residents who make up the cooperative decided that the savings from what was generated with solar energy should be invested in the park.

Two workers carry out maintenance tasks at the solar park in Monte Caseros, a town in the Argentine province of Corrientes, in the northeast of the country. The park was inaugurated in 2021 by the local cooperative, which provides electricity to the residents and is also involved in agricultural activity. CREDIT: Monte Caseros Agricultural and Electricity Cooperative

A replicated model

In Argentina there are about 600 electrical cooperatives in small cities and towns in the interior of the country, which were born in the mid-20th century, when the national grid was still quite limited and access to electric power was a problem.

These cooperatives usually buy and distribute energy in towns. But the members of dozens of them realized that they too could generate clean electricity, after visiting Armstrong’s project, and launched their own renewable energy initiatives.

One of the cooperatives that also has a solar park is the Agricultural and Electricity Cooperative of Monte Caseros, a city of about 25,000 inhabitants in the northeastern province of Corrientes.

“The cooperative was born in 1977 out of the need to bring energy to rural residents,” engineer Germán Judiche, the association’s technical manager, told IPS. “Today we have a honey packaging plant and a cluster of silos for rice, the main crop in the area. Since 2018 we have also distributed internet service and in 2020 we partnered with the province’s public electricity company to venture into renewable energy.”

The Monte Caseros solar park has 400 kW of installed capacity thanks to 936 solar panels. It was inaugurated in September 2021 and has provided such good results that a second park, with similar characteristics, is about to begin to be built by the 650-member cooperative, because it supplies only rural residents of the municipality.

“We have done everything with the cooperative’s own labor and the design by engineers from the National University of the Northeast (UNNE), from our province,” said Judiche. “It is definitely a model that can be replicated. Renewable energy is our future,” he added from his town, some 700 kilometers north of Buenos Aires.

Solar panels can be seen in the backyard of Adrián Marozzi, a resident of the town of Armstrong. Neither he nor the other residents who agreed to give up part of their yards or rooftops receive direct advantages, since the energy savings are capitalized by the cooperative, which thus has to buy less electricity from the national grid. CREDIT: FARN

A slow and bumpy road

According to official figures, the distributed or decentralized generation of renewable energy for self-consumption, which allows the surplus to be injected into the grid, has 1,167 generators registered in 13 of Argentina’s 23 provinces, with more than 20 megawatts of installed power.

Electricity cooperatives that have their own renewable energy generation projects operate under this system.

In total, in this country of 44 million people, renewable energies covered almost 14 percent of the demand for electricity in 2022 and have more than 5,000 MW of installed capacity, although there are practically no major new projects to expand their proportion of the energy mix.

Most of the electricity demand is covered by thermal generation, which contributes more than 25,000 MW, mainly from oil but also from natural gas. Hydropower is the next largest source, with more than 10,000 MW from large dams greater than 50 MW, which are not considered renewable.

Pablo Bertinat, director of the Energy and Sustainability Observatory of the National Technological University (UTN) based in the city of Rosario, also in Santa Fe, explained that in a country like Argentina it is impossible to follow a model like Germany’s widespread residential generation of renewable energy, because it requires investments that are not viable.

“Community-based projects, which are feasible, have several advantages: they improve local autonomy in the generation of electricity, they allow money to be saved from the energy that is not purchased, which can be reinvested in the city, and they promote the decentralization of decision-making in the energy system,” added Bertinat, speaking from Rosario.

The UTN Observatory was in charge of the Armstrong project, in a public-private consortium, together with the cooperative and the National Institute of Industrial Technology (Inti).

The expert said that the cooperatives’ renewable energy projects are advancing slowly in Argentina, despite the fact that there is no credit nor favorable policies – an indication that they could have a very strong impact on the entire electrical system and even on the generation of employment, if there were tools to promote renewables.

“Our aim is to demonstrate that not only large companies can advance the agenda of promoting renewable energy and the replacement of fossil fuels. In Argentina, cooperatives are also an important actor on this path,” Bertinat said.

The case of Armstrong also sparked interest from the environmental movement, which is helping to drive the growth of renewable energy in the country.

Jazmín Rocco Predassi, head of Climate Policy at the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN), told IPS that this is “an illustration that the energy transition does not always come from top-down initiatives, but that communities can organize themselves, together with cooperatives, municipal governments or science and technology institutes, to generate the transformations that the energy system needs.”

Soledad Arnedo is head of the La Negra del Norte cooperative textile workshop, which works together with other productive enterprises of the popular economy in the Argentine municipality of San Isidro, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, May 5 2023 (IPS)

Nearby is an agroecological garden and a plant nursery, further on there are pens for raising pigs and chickens, and close by, in an old one-story house with a tiled roof, twelve women sew pants and blouses. All of this is happening in a portion of a public park near Buenos Aires, where popular cooperatives are fighting the impact of Argentina’s long-drawn-out socioeconomic crisis.

“We sell our clothes at markets and offer them to merchants. Our big dream is to set up our own business to sell to the public, but it’s difficult, especially since we can’t get a loan,” Soledad Arnedo, a mother of three who works every day in the textile workshop, told IPS.

The garments made by the designers and seamstresses carry the brand “la Negra del Norte”, because the workshop is in the municipality of San Isidro, in the north of Greater Buenos Aires.“In Argentina in the last few years, having a job does not lift people out of poverty. This is true even for many who have formal sector jobs.” -- Nuria Susmel

In Greater Buenos Aires, home to 11 million people, the poverty rate is 45 percent, compared to a national average of 39.2 percent.

La Negra del Norte is just one of the several self-managed enterprises that have come to life on the five hectares that, within the Carlos Arenaza municipal park, are used by the Union of Popular Economy Workers (UTEP).

It is a union without bosses, which brings together people who are excluded from the labor market and who try to survive day-to-day with precarious, informal work due to the brutal inflation that hits the poor especially hard.

“These are ventures that are born out of sheer willpower and effort and the goal is to become part of a value chain, in which textile cooperatives are seen as an economic agent and their product is valued by the market,” Emmanuel Fronteras, who visits different workshops every day to provide support on behalf of the government’s National Institute of Associativism and Social Economy (INAES), told IPS.

Today there are 20,520 popular cooperatives registered with INAES. The agency promotes cooperatives in the midst of a delicate social situation, but in which, paradoxically, unemployment is at its lowest level in the last 30 years in this South American country of 46 million inhabitants: 6.3 percent, according to the latest official figure, from the last quarter of 2022.

Women work in a textile cooperative that operates in Navarro, a town of 20,000 people located about 125 kilometers southwest of Buenos Aires. Many of the workers supplement their income with a payment from the Argentine government aimed at bolstering productive enterprises in the popular economy. CREDIT: Evita Movement

The working poor

The plight facing millions of Argentines is not the lack of work, but that they don’t earn a living wage: the purchasing power of wages has been vastly undermined in recent years by runaway inflation, which this year accelerated to unimaginable levels.

In March, prices rose 7.7 percent and year-on-year inflation (between April 2022 and March 2023) climbed to 104.3 percent. Economists project that this year could end with an index of between 130 and 140 percent.

Although in some segments of the economy wage hikes partly or fully compensate for the high inflation, in most cases wage increases lag behind. And informal sector workers bear the brunt of the rise in prices.

“In Argentina in the last few years, having a job does not lift people out of poverty,” economist Nuria Susmel, an expert on labor issues at the Foundation for Latin American Economic Research (FIEL), told IPS.

“This is true even for many who have formal sector jobs,” she added.

On five hectares of a public park in the Argentine municipality of San Isidro, in Greater Buenos Aires, there is a production center with several cooperatives from the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (UTEP), which defends the rights of people excluded from the formal labor market. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) estimates that the poverty line for a typical family (made up of two adults and two minors) was 191,000 pesos (834 dollars) a month in March.

However, the average monthly salary in Argentina is 86,000 pesos (386 dollars), including both formal and informal sector employment.

“The average salary has grown well below the inflation rate,” said Susmel. “Consequently, for companies labor costs have fallen. This real drop in wages is what helps keep the employment rate at low levels.”

“And it is also the reason why there are many homes where people have a job and they are still poor,” she said.

Social value of production

La Negra del Norte is one of 35 textile cooperatives that operate in the province of Buenos Aires, where a total of 160 women work.

They receive support not only from the government through INAES, but also from the Evita Movement, a left-wing social and political group named in honor of Eva Perón, the legendary Argentine popular leader who died in 1952, at the age of just 33.

The Evita Movement formed a group of textile cooperatives which it supports in different ways, such as the reconditioning of machines and the training of seamstresses.

“The group was formed with the aim of uniting these workshops, which in many cases were small isolated enterprises, to try to formalize them and insert them into the productive and economic circuit,” said Emmanuel Fronteras, who is part of the Evita Movement, which has strong links to INAES.

“In addition to the economic value of the garments, we want the production process to have social value, which allows us to think not only about the profit of the owners but also about the improvement of the income of each cooperative and, consequently, the valorization of the work of the seamstresses,” he added in an interview with IPS.

The 12 women who work in the Argentine cooperative La Negra del Norte sell the clothes they make at markets and dream of being able to open their own store, but one of the obstacles they face is the impossibility of getting a loan. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The high level of informal employment in Argentina’s textile industry has been well-documented, and has been facilitated by a marked segmentation of production, since many brands outsource the manufacture of their clothing to small workshops.

Many of the workers in the cooperatives supplement their textile income with a stipend from the Potenciar Trabajo government social programme that pays half of the minimum monthly wage in exchange for their work.

“Economically we are in the same situation as the country itself. The instability is enormous,” said Celene Cárcamo, a designer who works in another cooperative, called Subleva Textil, which operates in a factory that makes crusts for the traditional Argentine “empanadas” or pasties in the municipality of San Martín, that was abandoned by its owners and reopened by its workers.

Other cooperatives operating in the pasty crust factory are involved in the areas of graphic design and food production, making it a small hub of the popular economy.

The six women working at Subleva Textil face obstacles every day. One of them is the constant rise in the prices of inputs, like most prices in the Argentine economy.

Subleva started operating shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, so it had to adapt to the complex new situation. “They say that crisis is opportunity, so we decided to make masks,” said Cárcamo, who stressed the difficulties of running a cooperative in these hard times in Argentina and acknowledged that “We need to catch a break.”

The carts of “cartoneros” or garbage pickers stand in front of a merchandise purchase warehouse in the La Paternal neighborhood in the city of Buenos Aires. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 6 2023 (IPS)

It’s a Monday morning in April on Florida, a pedestrian street in the heart of the Argentine capital, and a small crowd gathers outside the window of an electronic appliance store to watch a violent scene on a TV screen. But it is not part of any movie or series.

The scene, broadcast live, is happening a few kilometers away, in a poor suburb of Buenos Aires: colleagues of a city bus driver who was murdered during a robbery throw stones and fists at the Minister of Security of the province of Buenos Aires, Sergio Berni, who had come to talk and offer the government’s condolences in front of the cameras.

No one seems surprised among the office employees watching the scene on TV, and several make no effort to hide a certain sense of satisfaction that other ordinary people have decided to take action against a representative of the political leadership, the target of widespread discontent, as reflected by the opinion polls.“There is growing social polarization in Argentina, with an increasingly weak middle class. Each crisis leaves another part of society outside the system.” -- Agustín Salvia

“This was bound to happen sometime, if the politicians earn a fortune for doing nothing and we work all day to earn a pittance… And on top of that you go out on the street and they kill you just to rob you,” comments one of the viewers, as the rest listen approvingly.

The scene reflects the climate of tension and the sense of being fed-up that is felt in large swathes of Argentine society, in the midst of a long, deep economic crisis, which in the last five years has constantly chipped away at the purchasing power of wages, due to inflation that occasionally stops growing for a couple of months, only to surge again with greater force.

If there was room for modest optimism in 2022, as the result of a recovery in economic activity after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems distant today, since the beginning of this year brought news that reflects the magnitude of the breakdown of the social fabric in this Southern Cone country.

On Mar. 31, the official poverty rate for the second half of 2022 was announced: 39.2 percent of the population, or 18.1 million people in this South American country of 46 million, according to the most up-to-date figures.

Since 2021 ended with a poverty rate of 37.3 percent, this means that in one year a million people were thrown into poverty, despite the fact that the economy, thanks to the rebound in post-pandemic activity, grew 4.9 percent, above the average for the region, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

But these data are already old and the figures for 2023 will be worse due to the acceleration of inflation, which is surprising even by the standards of Argentina, a country all too accustomed to this problem.

The price rise in February reached 6.6 percent, exceeding the 100 percent year-on-year rate (from March 2022 to February 2023) for the first time since 1991.

When you look a little closer, perhaps the worst aspect is that prices grew much more than the average, 9.8 percent, for food, the biggest expense for the lowest-income segments of society.

To this picture must be added an extreme drought that has affected the harvest of soybeans and other grains, which are the largest generator of foreign exchange in Argentina. The estimates of different public and private organizations on how much money the country will lose this year in exports range between 10 and 20 billion dollars.

This is one of the reasons why the World Bank, which had forecast two percent growth for the Argentine economy this year, revised its estimates at the beginning of April and concluded that there will be no economic growth in 2023.

Luis Ángel Gómez sits in the soup kitchen that he runs in the municipality of San Martín, one of the most densely populated areas in Greater Buenos Aires. For the past 10 years, he has been serving lunch and afternoon snacks to about 70 children, but lately he has also been helping their parents and grandparents. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Soup kitchens

About 15 kilometers from the center of Buenos Aires, in the Loyola neighborhood, the cold statistics on the economy translate into ramshackle homes separated by narrow alleyways, with piles of garbage at the corners and skinny dogs wandering among the children playing in the street.

In a truck trailer that carries advertising for a campaigning politician, a dentist extracts teeth free of charge for local residents, who have increasing problems accessing health services.

The neighborhood is in San Martín, one of the municipalities on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Eleven million people live in these working-class suburbs (almost a quarter of the country’s total population), where the poverty rate is 45 percent, higher than the national average.

“I have never before seen what is happening today. Before, only men went out to pick through the garbage (for recyclable materials to sell), because the idea was that the streets weren’t for women. But today the women also go out,” Luis Ángel Gómez, 58, born and raised in the neighborhood, who does building work and other odd jobs, told IPS.

Indeed, the carts of the “cartoneros” or garbage pickers, which used to be seen only in the most densely populated working-class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires after sunset, when the building managers take out the garbage, are now seen throughout the city and at all hours.

A market selling clothes at low prices in Parque Centenario, one of the best-known markets in Buenos Aires, located in Caballito, a traditional upper middle-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires. This type of street fair has mushroomed in Argentina in the face of persistent inflation that is destroying the purchasing power of wages. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Gómez has been running a soup kitchen in Loyola for 10 years, where he provides lunch three times a week and afternoon snacks twice a week to more than 70 children and adolescents. It is in a room with a tin roof, a couple of gas stoves and photos of smiling boys and girls as decoration.

“The municipality gives me some merchandise: 20 kilos of ground meat and two boxes of chicken per month. Besides that, I cook with donations,” said Gómez. “This box was given to me by the company that collects garbage in the municipality,” he added, pointing to cartons of long-life milk.

But the soup kitchen cannot meet all the needs of the local residents, said Gómez. “My concern was to give the kids a better future and I fed them until they were 14 or 15 years old. Today I also have to help their parents and grandparents.”

The carts of “cartoneros” or garbage pickers, which until a few years ago were only seen after sunset in the most densely populated low-income neighborhoods, today have become a common image in every part of Buenos Aires at all times of the day. One is seen here in the neighborhood of Flores. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The middle class on the slide

The crisis has picked up speed since 2018 and deepened with the pandemic, but Argentina is going through a period of stagnation, with low economic growth and very little formal private sector job creation for more than a decade.

A study recently presented by the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina (UCA) shows that since 2010 access to food, healthcare, employment and social security have steadily worsened, despite social assistance, affecting five million households out of a total of 12 million.

“There is growing social polarization in Argentina, with an increasingly weak middle class. Each crisis leaves another part of society outside the system,” sociologist Agustín Salvia, director of the UCA’s Social Observatory on Argentine Social Debt, which is considered a chief reference point in the country, told IPS.

Salvia explained that the improvement in economic activity after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic drove the creation of new jobs until the third quarter of last year, although poverty grew just the same because they were almost all precarious low-wage jobs.

“The post-pandemic recovery cycle is over. Since the last quarter of 2022 there has been no more job creation, which added to inflation will cause poverty to grow in 2023,” added Salvia.

The expert said structural or chronic poverty used to be 25 or 30 percent in Argentina, but has now held steady at 40 or 45 percent, with a deterioration marked by the stagnation of quality employment, which has pushed many formerly middle-class families into poverty.

Photo of an assembly of members of the Lhaka Honhat indigenous association in the province of Salta, in northern Argentina. Their claim to their ancestral territory has been recognized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, but they have not yet gained exclusive use of their land. CREDIT: Courtesy of CELS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 6 2023 (IPS)

In 1994 Argentina recognized in the constitution the ethnic and cultural pre-existence of indigenous peoples. However, enforcement of respect for their rights has fallen short and almost 30 years later the question of land is generating growing conflicts, which sometimes pit native communities against the rest of society.

On Feb. 5, a long convoy of some 500 vehicles driven by agricultural producers drove through the midwest province of Mendoza to defend “the sovereignty of our lands and private property” against growing and increasingly visible claims by indigenous people to their ancestral lands.

The demonstrators said that they do not want the same thing to happen in Mendoza as in the southern province of Río Negro, where there have been various violent incidents in recent years, which peaked in September 2022, when a group of indigenous people claiming their ancestral territory set fire to a National Gendarmerie mobile booth.“Due to economic interests over the land, we do not have a complete survey of indigenous territories in Argentina. That is the basic need, a diagnosis that is indispensable in order to solve this problem.”-- Noelia Garone

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the country’s indigenous communities are still waiting for community property title to the lands they have ancestrally lived on, which they point to as the key to access other rights that have remained empty words in the constitution, such as participation in the management of their natural resources.

“There is no political will to resolve this issue, because there are very powerful interests in the oil, mining, or agricultural industries that oppose it,” Silvina Ramírez, a member of the Association of Indigenous Rights Lawyers (AADI) and professor of graduate studies at the University of Buenos Aires, told IPS.

“This has been aggravated because there is a communication campaign trying to spread the idea that indigenous people want to prevent progress and are the enemy,” she added.

On the other side, Andrés Vavrik, a cattle producer from Mendoza and one of the organizers of the demonstration there, told IPS: “No one is against indigenous peoples, but we are concerned that the national government recognizes the right to territory of anyone who self-identifies as indigenous, because there we enter a very debatable terrain.”

“We came out to defend private property,” he said from the town of General Alvear in Mendoza.

A leading role in the march was played by a group of veterans of the Malvinas/Falklands Islands War, which Argentina lost in 1982 against the United Kingdom, which occupied the South Atlantic islands 190 years ago.

The reaction came after the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs (INAI), the official body in charge of the study and delimitation of indigenous territories, recognized the rights of native communities to over 21,500 hectares of land in Mendoza.

Although the INAI clarified that its resolution “does not imply in any way the restitution or handing over of land,” since the agency does not have that power, the Mendoza government objected to the decision before the Supreme Court.

More than 500 vehicles participated in a march in defense of national sovereignty in Mendoza, a province in central Argentina, which culminated in a demonstration in the city of Malargüe. The convoy was triggered by indigenous claims to their ancestral land in that province, to which agricultural producers are opposed. CREDIT: Courtesy of Diego Frutos

Land emergency

Argentina is a country that formally promoted European immigration and the exclusion of indigenous people since it became a unified nation in 1853.

In the 2010 census, 955,032 people self-identified as descendants of or belonging to indigenous peoples, just over two percent of the total population. In the 2022 census, which showed a population of 46 million inhabitants, the question was asked again, but the results have not yet been released.

Although the recognition of the rights of native communities in the 1994 constitutional reform was a landmark from a legal and symbolic point of view, implementation has been another question, with the issue of land ownership seen as the central hurdle.

For this reason, in 2006 Congress enacted Law 26160 on Emergency Matters of Land Possession and Ownership of indigenous communities, which banned evictions of native communities for four years, blocking existing court rulings ordering evictions.

The first three years were to be used to carry out a survey of the lands where indigenous communities lived and promote the issuing of collective land titles.

However, 17 years later the law is still in force, since it had to be extended several times, which demonstrates the failure of its implementation.

A photo of Kolla indigenous women in the extreme northern Argentine province of Jujuy. Although the rights of indigenous peoples have been recognized in the constitution since 1994, they have not been enforced. CREDIT: Courtesy of Amnesty International Argentina

The INAI completed surveys for only 46 percent of the legally constituted communities, as reported in late 2022. And today the road is much longer than before, because in 2007, when the communities started to register legally and the survey began, 950 registered, and the number has since grown to 1825.

But the survey does not imply that the land titling process is being carried out. This is an even more complicated step, because there is still no law in the country that regulates indigenous community property, which is different from the multi-owner residential development provided for under civil law, when there is more than one owner.

The community property law is another longstanding demand of indigenous peoples and human rights organizations, which Congress has not met.

Although some communities in the country have received their property title from the hands of provincial governments under different legal statuses, it is not known how many there are or what area these indigenous territories cover.

“The indigenous territorial emergency law was passed in a very particular context of expansion of the business of growing and exporting soybeans in Argentina, which caused a serious situation of constant evictions of indigenous communities,” Diego Morales, a lawyer with the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a human rights organization, told IPS.

“Since then, no government has wanted to hand over land to indigenous people and not even the associated communities in Lhaka Honhat (living in the province of Salta, in the north of the country) have been able to access a community property title and fully exercise their rights, even though they obtained a favorable sentence from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,” he added.

Morales said the situation today is more difficult to resolve, because indigenous communities that have historically been discriminated against and neglected, who in recent years have become more aware of their rights, now not only lay claim to the land where they live but are also making cultural claims to territories from which their ancestors were driven.

A demonstration by indigenous Kolla people in the arid, mountainous landscape of northwestern Argentina. The country has declared a “territorial emergency” for indigenous peoples since 2006, but the vast majority of communities do not have title to their lands. CREDIT: Courtesy of Endepa

Violence and debate

Diego Frutos, who suffered several occupations and attacks on his property in Villa Mascardi, in the province of Río Negro, by groups laying claim to his property for Mapuche indigenous communities, said there are people who are trying to take advantage of indigenous rights to reclaim land that does not belong to them.

“I do not deny the rights of the Mapuches, but those who attacked my property are not a registered community. They cannot be, because they do not have blood ties and they cannot show that they have had an uninterrupted occupation of a territory. They are a group of young people who seek to take advantage of the umbrella of indigenous rights,” Frutos told IPS from his town.

Frutos is convinced that those who attacked his property are backed by the administration of center-left President Alberto Fernández, who feels pressure from both sides while walking a minefield between indigenous people and the agricultural producers who settled on their lands, with neither side feeling satisfied with what his government has done.

Sandra Ceballos, a member of the Kolla people and vice president of AADI, the association of lawyers for indigenous rights, told IPS that the government is persecuting indigenous people, as demonstrated by the fact that an unusual joint command of federal and provincial forces was assembled in Río Negro, after the acts of violence in September.

Noelia Garone, a lawyer from the Argentine office of Amnesty International, said the lack of recognition of the right to land has triggered multiple violations of other rights of indigenous communities, such as education, healthcare, water or work.

“Due to economic interests over the land, we do not have a complete survey of indigenous territories in Argentina. That is the basic need, a diagnosis that is indispensable in order to solve this problem,” she told IPS.

Two of the six Russian women who were detained by the Argentine immigration authorities when they reached the country on Feb. 8 and 9 sleep in the Buenos Aires airport. A federal judge ruled that they were placed in a situation of vulnerability and ordered that they be allowed to enter the country. CREDIT: TV Capture

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES , Feb 16 2023 (IPS)

They began to arrive en masse in Argentina in the second half of 2022, a few months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They are pregnant Russian women who land in the capital to give birth, with the hope of gaining an Argentine passport, given the fact that so many countries refuse to let in people with Russian passports today.

Authorities are investigating whether they are the victims of scams by organizations holding out false promises.

“Of the 985 deliveries we attended in 2022, 85 were to Russian women and 37 of them were in December. This trend continued in January and so far in February,” Liliana Voto, Head of the Maternal and Child Youth Department at the Fernández Hospital, one of the most renowned public health centers in the Argentine capital, located in the Palermo neighborhood, told IPS.“One thing are human trafficking networks, which make false promises in exchange for large sums of money, and another thing is the rights of women to enter Argentina and have their children here. They are victims.” -- Christian Rubilar

“Some come with an interpreter and others use a translation app on their phones. We do not ask them how they got to Argentina, but it is clear that there is an organization behind this,” added Voto.

In this South American country, public health centers treat patients free of charge, whether or not they have Argentine documents.

The issue exploded into the headlines on Feb. 8-9, when the immigration authorities detained six pregnant Russian women who had just landed at the Ezeiza international airport, on charges of not actually being tourists as they claimed.

The six women filed for habeas corpus and on Feb. 10 a federal judge ordered that they be allowed to enter the country, after some of them spent more than 48 hours on airport seats.

The ruling handed down by Judge Luis Armella stated that the authorities’ decision not to let them into the country put the women in a vulnerable situation that affected their rights “to proper medical care, food, hygiene and rest,” and said he was allowing them into the country to also protect the rights of their unborn children.

In addition, the judge ordered a criminal investigation into whether there is an organization behind the influx of pregnant Russian women that is scamming them or has committed other crimes. The results of the investigation are sealed.

On Feb. 10, shortly after the court ruling was handed down, 33 Russian women who were between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant arrived in Buenos Aires on an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa. (There are no direct flights between Russia and Argentina.)

As reported by the national director of the migration service, Florencia Carignano, in 2022, 10,500 people of Russian nationality entered Argentina and 5,819 of them were pregnant women.

The immigration authorities carried out an investigation in which it interviewed 350 pregnant Russian women in Argentina. They discovered that there is an organization that “offers them, in exchange for a large sum of money, a ‘birth tourism’ package, and gaining an Argentine passport is the main reason for the trip,” Carignano tweeted.

The Fernández Hospital, in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, is one of the most prestigious public health centers in Argentina. In December 2022, 37 Russian women gave birth there. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“Argentina’s history and legislation embrace immigrants who choose to live in this country in search of a better future. This does not mean we endorse mafia organizations that profit by offering scams to obtain our passport, to people who do not want to live here,” she added.

Under Argentine law, foreign nationals who have a child born in Argentina are immediately given permanent residency status, in a process that takes a few months. To obtain citizenship, they have to prove two years of uninterrupted residence here, in a federal court.

“Becoming a citizen is a difficult process that takes many years. If the organizations promise Russian women a passport in a few months, they are lying or there is corruption behind this,” Lourdes Rivadeneyra, head of the Migrant and Refugee Program at the National Institute against Discrimination (INADI), told IPS.

Rights in Argentina

“One thing are human trafficking networks, which make false promises in exchange for large sums of money, and another thing is the rights of women to enter Argentina and have their children here. They are victims,” Christian Rubilar, a lawyer for three of the six women who were held in the Ezeiza airport, told IPS.

Rubilar pointed out that the constitution guarantees essential rights “for all people in the world who want to live in Argentina.” He added that the country’s laws do not mention “false tourists”, and that therefore the immigration office exceeded its authority by denying them access to the country.

Argentina received different waves of European migration from the end of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century. This created a culture of respect for the rights of immigrants among citizens and in the country’s legislation, which see Argentina as a land that welcomes foreigners in trouble, such as Venezuelans who have arrived in large numbers in the past few years.

Since Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, hundreds of thousands of people have fled Russia, in what has been described by some as a third historic exodus, after the ones that followed the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.

Although there are no official figures, recently the English newspaper The Guardian estimated that between 500,000 and one million people have left Russia since the beginning of the war. Many leave out of fear of being sent to the front lines, or because they are in conflict with the government or due to the consequences of international economic sanctions on the country.

The RuArgentina website offers a package of services including a hospital birth for pregnant woman in Buenos Aires and the promise of obtaining Argentine passports for the parents, which gives them entrance without a visa to most countries around the world. CREDIT: Online ad

As can be quickly verified in an Internet search, there are organizations operating in Argentina that promise Russian women who give birth in this country that they and their husbands can quickly obtain citizenship here.

“Give birth in Argentina. We help you move to Argentina, obtain permanent residence and a passport, which gives you visa-free entry to 170 countries around the world,” announces the RuArgentina website, which offers a package that includes accommodation in Buenos Aires, medical assistance, the help of a translator and aid in applying for documents, among other services for pregnant women.

The founder of RuArgentina is a Russian living in Argentina, Kirill Makoveev, who said in an interview on TV that “there are a variety of reasons why our clients come to Argentina: some want a passport because the Russian passport is toxic now. So we explain that the constitution and immigration laws here allow you to obtain a passport without breaking the law.”

The Russian Embassy in Buenos Aires did not respond to IPS’s request for comments, but the pregnant women have not been defended by the Russian community in Argentina.

“They are not coming to Argentina as immigrants, to work and seek a better future, as many Russians did in different waves of immigration. They are coming in order to use Argentina as a springboard to go to Western European countries or the United States,” Silvana Yarmolyuk, director of the Coordinating Council of Organizations of Russian Compatriots in Argentina, which brings together 23 community associations from all over the country, told IPS. .

Yarmolyuk, who was born in Argentina and is the daughter of a Ukrainian father and a Russian mother, said that the Russians who are coming to Argentina now are people of certain means who are taking advantage of Argentina’s flexible immigration policies.

“Just the ticket from Russia to Argentina costs about 3,000 dollars,” she said. “The danger is that this exacerbates the spread of Russophobia, which hurts all of us.”

A photo of a field with parched grass in the province of Buenos Aires, an agricultural area par excellence in Argentina. The countryside is the source of more than half of the exports of this South American country, which is in dire need of foreign exchange to ease its economic crisis. CREDIT: Argentine Rural Confederations

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 30 2023 (IPS)

Martín Rapetti, a fourth generation farmer in the province of Corrientes in northeastern Argentina, has already lost more than 30 cows due to lack of food and water, as a result of the long drought that is plaguing a large part of the country. “There is no grass; the animals have to sink their teeth into the dry earth,” he says with resignation.

This extreme climatic phenomenon, which according to experts will become increasingly common, is much more than a threat of an uncertain future and already represents concrete damage: it will make Argentina, a global agricultural powerhouse, lose billions of dollars in exports this year, aggravating its economic crisis.

“The accumulation of three years with little rain makes the situation worse and worse. The streams and rivers are running dry and now the groundwater is also drying up,” Rapetti told IPS from the town of Curuzú Cuatía.“We also have to move forward with actions that go beyond the immediacy and that incorporate a climate perspective. In addition, we need political responses that strengthen our capacities, promote innovation and, ultimately, promote sustainable development.” -- Cecilia Nicolini

“The cows are in very poor body condition. And the production of grains, citrus fruits and vegetables is suffering…Of the 300 hectares that we have for growing rice, we were able to plant only 35 due to lack of water,” added Rapetti, who has a medium-sized farm.

The consequences go far beyond rural areas because this South American country, which faces a delicate economic situation with inflation soaring to almost 100 percent per year and 40 percent of the population living in poverty, depends heavily on the countryside to bring in foreign exchange and sustain the value of its devalued currency.

During the first half of 2022, according to the latest official data, 57.6 percent of national exports came from the production of soy and the main grains (corn, wheat, sunflower and barley) and from beef and by-products like leather and dairy products.

The drought will reduce exports in 2023 by nearly eight billion dollars and this will have a heavy direct impact on the state coffers, which will receive more than one billion dollars less in taxes on exports of soy, corn and wheat, the three crops that cover the largest agricultural area in the country.

These figures were released on Jan. 17 by the Rosario Stock Exchange, a reference point in Argentina’s agricultural economy.

This South American country of 46.2 million inhabitants depends to a great extent on the countryside to sustain its economy. Argentina is the third world producer of soy, behind the United States and Brazil, and the second producer of beef, according to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Soy alone, which is the current star of Argentine exports, generated sales of 12.1 billion dollars (27.3 percent of total exports), according to the official statistics agency. This includes soybeans, soybean oil and meal and soy flour.

A plant in a vineyard suffering from the lack of water, in the province of Mendoza in western Argentina. That area of ​​the country, where crops depend on irrigation, is suffering the consequences of low levels in the reservoirs. CREDIT: Coninagro

How to prepare for the future?

Due to climate change, extreme events such as droughts or floods will occur with increasing frequency and intensity, the national secretary for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Innovation, Cecilia Nicolini, told IPS.

“But these problems are not scenarios that we have to get used to or resign ourselves to. We need to adapt to their effects and transform our productive sectors to make them more resilient, while reducing their greenhouse gas emissions,” she added.

Argentina presented its National Plan for Adaptation and Mitigation to Climate Change in November.

The over 400-page document proposes managing agroforestry climate risks (from investments in infrastructure or promoting insurance for small farmers), bolstering water efficiency in industries and strengthening the meteorological monitoring network.

“We also have to move forward with actions that go beyond the immediacy and that incorporate a climate perspective. In addition, we need political responses that strengthen our capacities, promote innovation and, ultimately, promote sustainable development,” the official acknowledged.

Perhaps the most delicate aspect is that Nicolini herself estimated that the country needs 185 billion dollars in financing up to 2030 to implement the plan.

That is four times more than the record loan that the International Monetary Fund granted Argentina in 2018, a debt that since then has strangled economic growth. Nobody knows where this financing would come from, which Argentina demanded from developed countries at the last Conference of the Parties (COP27) on Climate Change, held in November in Egypt.

Cows and calves gather in search of food in the department of Curuzú Cuatiá, in the Argentine province of Corrientes. The drought has dragged on for three years now and in 2022 it was the main cause of forest fires, which affected more than 800,000 hectares in that northeastern province. CREDIT: CR

Financial assistance

On Jan. 20 Economy Minister Sergio Massa met with with the Liaison Board, which brings together the main agricultural business chambers, and promised to study a package of economic relief measures to be announced on Feb. 1.

In any case, he warned about the limits that the government faces in providing answers: “Perhaps there are solutions that are out of our hands. Argentina is not a country with a great capacity for State intervention, for reasons that we already know: indebtedness and difficulties in accessing markets.”

Beyond the difficult current situation, today agricultural producers themselves know that fundamental strategies will be needed to face extreme phenomena that are here to stay.

Mario Raiteri, a medium-sized producer of potatoes, beef, wheat, corn, soy and sunflowers in the town of Mechongué, 460 kilometers south of Buenos Aires, tells IPS that he grew up listening to his grandfather talk about the big floods in the 1940s and withering droughts in the 1950s, but that he had never experienced a phenomenon like the one seen in the last three years.

“My biggest worry is if this is just an occasional occurrence or if there really is starting to be a more frequent repetition of these events,” he said.

“In the second case, we need scientific organizations to give us new technologies designed to help us adapt. Knowledge is going to play a very important role, beyond other necessary issues, such as comprehensive agricultural insurance for family farms, because small producers will suffer the most,” he said.

In Argentina, 54.48 percent of the land area has been affected by water stress, according to the Drought Information System for Southern South America (SISSA), an institution created by governments and organizations to provide information and reduce vulnerability to this type of phenomena.

However, hydrologist Juan Borus, deputy manager of Information Systems of the National Water Institute (INA), said that in the last three years “there is not a single square centimeter of the territory that has not faced scarcity.”

Borus warns IPS that the country is currently plagued by dry rivers and lagoons that have shrunk and disappeared, and that the situation is not likely to improve for the remainder of the southern hemisphere summer and the fall.

The expert also warns about the impact on issues that have received less attention than agricultural production. One is the generation of electrical energy due to lack of water in the reservoirs, in a country that has committed to increasing hydropower generation as part of its climate change mitigation objectives.

Another issue is drinking water.

“Large cities on the banks of rivers should invest more money in pumping and purifying the water, because with lower levels of water in the rivers, the amount of pollutants and sediment is greater. And small towns that take water from drilling wells must deal with the decline of groundwater tables,” Borus said.

The crisis, he said, presents a great opportunity: “It is time for those who live in the humid part of the country to become aware of the need to take care of drinking water.”

Aerial view of the 5000 square meter roof full of solar panels, in one of the pavilions of La Rural, the busiest fair and exhibition center in Buenos Aires. It is the largest private solar park in the capital of Argentina and required an investment of almost one million dollars. CREDIT: Courtesy of La Rural

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Dec 23 2022 (IPS)

With large projects held back by the economic crisis and lack of infrastructure, Argentina seems to be looking at an alternative path towards a more sustainable energy mix involving small renewable energy projects, promoted by environmentally aware industries, businesses and private users.

The initiatives are aimed at covering their own consumption, sometimes with the addition of so-called distributed generation, in which user-generators who have a surplus of electricity can inject it into the national power grid and thus generate a tariff credit.

Distributed generation initiatives have just surpassed 1,000 projects already in operation, according to the latest official data.

At the same time, this month saw the inauguration of the largest private solar energy park in the city of Buenos Aires, an initiative of the Argentine Rural Society (SRA), the traditional business chamber of agricultural producers.

The park was installed in the exhibition center the SRA owns in the capital of this South American country, to supply part of its consumption with an investment of almost one million dollars and more than 1,000 solar panels.

“Small private renewable energy projects and distributed generation will be the ones to increase installed capacity in the coming years, because the electricity transmission and distribution system sets strong limits on large projects,” Mariela Beljansky, a specialist in energy and climate change issues, told IPS.

Beljansky, who was national director of Electricity Generation until early 2022, added: “Otherwise there will be no way to meet the growth targets for renewable sources set by Argentina, as part of its climate change mitigation commitments under the Paris Agreement.”

Argentina presented its National Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Plan, which includes 250 measures to be implemented by 2030, at the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) on climate change held by the United Nations in the Egyptian city of Sharm El Sheikh in November.

The National Secretariat for Climate Change estimated the total value of the plan’s implementation at 185.5 billion dollars, four times more than the debt Argentina incurred in 2018 with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has generated a sharp deterioration of the economy since then.

According to the data included in the plan, the energy sector is the largest generator of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the country, generating 51 percent of emissions.

Although renewable sources (with wind projects in first place and solar in second place) reached a record in October, supplying 17.8 percent of total electricity demand, the energy mix continues to be sustained basically by oil, natural gas and large hydroelectric projects.

Furthermore, the country has not decided to slow down the development of fossil fuels. The main reason is that it has large reserves of shale natural gas in the Vaca Muerta field in the south of the country, which has been attracting the interest of international investors for years. The climate change plan sets the goal of using natural gas as a transition fuel to replace oil as much as possible.

The plan also includes the objectives of developing a variety of renewable energy sources (wind, solar, small hydro, biogas and biomass) and also distributed generation, “directly at the points of consumption” and connected to the public power grid, at the residential and commercial levels.

Large renewable projects experienced strong growth between 2016 and 2019, on the back of an official plan that guaranteed the purchase of electricity at attractive prices for investors, but since then there have been virtually no new initiatives.

This truck functions as a mobile health center, travelling through towns in Patagonia, in southern Argentina. The roof of the vehicle is covered with solar panels that provide electricity to the four mobile consulting rooms and diagnostic imaging equipment. CREDIT: Courtesy of Utorak

Consumption subsidies

“In Argentina’s current situation, where there is practically no financing, and there are restrictions on importing equipment, high inflation and economic uncertainty, it is difficult to think about large renewable energy parks, and small projects become more attractive,” Marcelo Alvarez, a member of the board of the Argentine Renewable Energy Chamber (Cader), told IPS.

Alvarez pointed out that what conspires against small private and distributed generation projects are the subsidies that the Argentine government has been providing for years to energy consumption, including those families with high purchasing power that do not need them.

“Artificially cheap electricity rates and the scarcity of credit discourage the growth of renewables,” Alvarez said.

“The proof of this is that more than half of the distributed generation projects in operation are in the province of Cordoba (in the center of the country), where electricity prices are three times more expensive than in Buenos Aires and there is a special line of credit from the local bank (Bancor, which grants ‘eco-sustainable loans’) for renewable equipment,” he said.

Indeed, according to data from the Energy Secretariat, there are 1,051 user undertakings that generate their own electricity and inject their surplus into the grid and 573 of them are in the province of Cordoba.

Argentine state energy subsidies totaled 11 billion dollars in 2021 and this year, up to October, they already exceeded seven billion dollars, according to data from the Argentine Association of Budget and Public Financial Administration (Asap).

As for sources of financing, there is a line of credit endowed with 160 million dollars from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Banco de Inversión y Comercio Exterior (Bice), financed in part by the Green Climate Fund, which is aimed at renewable sources and energy efficiency projects for small and medium-sized businesses. However, most companies are unaware of its existence.

View of photovoltaic panels in a private neighborhood in Pilar, some 50 kilometers from Buenos Aires. Solar panels have become part of the landscape in the suburbs of Argentina’s capital city. CREDIT: Courtesy of Utorak

Private ventures

On Dec. 15, the Rural Society inaugurated the largest private solar park in Buenos Aires, in the 42,000 square meter covered area where the country’s most important fairs and exhibitions are held. The investment reportedly amounted to almost one million dollars.

“We have 42,000 square meters of roofs in our pavilions. It is a very important flat surface for the placement of solar panels, so we had been thinking about it for several years. We had done a pilot project in 2019, but then everything was delayed by the pandemic, which forced us to close the venue,” Claudio Dowdall, general manager of La Rural, told IPS.

“At this stage we used 5,000 square meters of roofs, on which we placed 1,136 photovoltaic panels, with a total power of 619 kW. This is equivalent to the average consumption of 210 family homes and, for us, it is between 30 and 40 percent of the electricity we use,” he added.

Andrés Badino, founder of Utorak, a company that has been dedicated to renewable energy for families and companies for more than five years, confirms that consultations and demand are growing in the sector.

“People’s interest has been growing because of increased environmental awareness and, also, because of what can be saved on electricity bills for residential users and for educational institutions and healthcare centers as well,” Badino said.

“Argentina has a national industry for the production of solar thermal tanks, but not for the manufacture of panels, inverters or batteries, despite the fact that the country has one of the largest reserves in the world, the main component. But we are confident that international prices will go down and drive demand,” he said.

"Not one woman less, respect our lives” writes a Peruvian woman on the effigy of a woman in a park in front of the courthouse, before a demonstration in Lima over the lack of enforcement of laws against femicides and other forms of violence against women. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Nov 24 2022 (IPS)

Violence against women has failed to decline in the Latin American region after the sharp rise recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, while preventing the causes of such violence remains a major challenge.

This is what representatives of the United Nations, feminist organizations and women’s movements told IPS on the occasion of the commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on Nov. 25."We attack the problem but not its causes. I have been talking for 30 years about the importance of preventing violence against women by fostering major cultural changes so that girls and boys are raised in the knowledge that it is unacceptable in any form." -- Moni Pizani

This date, established in 1999 by the United Nations, was adopted in 1981 at the first Latin American and Caribbean feminist meeting held in Colombia to promote the struggle against violence against women in a region where it continues to be exacerbated by high levels of ‘machismo’ or sexism.

The day was chosen to pay tribute to Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal, three sisters from the Dominican Republic who were political activists and were killed on Nov. 25, 1960 by the repressive forces of the regime of dictator Rafael Trujillo.

The date launches 16 days of activism against gender violence, culminating on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day, because male violence against women and girls is the most widespread violation of human rights worldwide.

“It is not possible to confirm a decrease in gender violence in the region at this post-pandemic moment,” said Venezuelan lawyer Moni Pizani, one of the region’s leading experts on women’s rights. “I could say, from the information I have gathered and empirically, that the level has remained steady after the significant increase registered in the last two years.”

Pizani, who retired from the United Nations, currently supports the UN Women office in Guatemala after a fruitful career advocating for women’s rights. She was twice representative in Ecuador for UN Women and its predecessor Unifem, then worked for East and Southeast Asia and later opened the UN Women Office for Latin America and the Caribbean in Panama City as regional director.

“Before the pandemic we used to talk about three out of 10 women having suffered violence, today we say four out of 10. The other alarming fact is that the impact is throughout the entire life cycle of women, including the elderly,” she told IPS in a conversation in Tegucigalpa, Honduras during a Central American colloquium on the situation of women.

UN Women last year measured the “shadow pandemic” in 13 countries in all regions, a term used to describe violence against women during lockdowns due to COVID.

Seven out of 10 women were found to have experienced violence at some time during the pandemic, one in four felt unsafe at home due to increased family conflict, and seven out of 10 perceived partner abuse to be more frequent.

The study also revealed that four out of 10 women feel less safe in public spaces.

Pizani said the study showed that this violation of women’s human rights occurs in different age groups: 48 percent of those between 18 and 49 years old are affected, 42 percent of those between 50 and 59, and 34 percent of women aged 60 and over.

Venezuelan lawyer Moni Pizani, one of Latin America’s leading experts on gender issues, with a long career at UN Women and its predecessor Unifem, takes part in a Central American colloquium in Tegucigalpa on sustainable recovery with gender equality in the wake of the COVID pandemic. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

According to the same study, unemployed women are the most vulnerable: 52 percent of them experienced violence during the pandemic.

And with regard to mothers: one out of every two women with children also experienced a violation of their rights.

The expert highlighted the effort made by many countries to adopt measures during the pandemic with the expansion of services, telephone hotlines, use of new means of reporting through mobile applications, among others. But she regretted that the efforts fell short.

This year, the region is home to 662 million inhabitants, or eight percent of the world’s population, slightly more than half of whom are girls and women.

The level of violence against women is so severe that the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) cites it as one of the structural factors of gender inequality, together with gaps in employment, the concentration of care work and inequitable representation in public spaces.

Governments neither prevent nor address violence

Peru is an example of similar situations of gender violence in the region.

It was one of the countries with the strictest lockdowns, paralyzing government action against gender violence, which was gradually resumed in the second half of 2020 and which made it possible, for example, to receive complaints in the country’s provincial public prosecutors’ offices.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office Crime Observatory reported 1,081,851 complaints in 2021 – an average of 117 per hour. The frequency of complaints returned to pre-pandemic levels, which in 2020 stood at around 700,000, because women under lockdown found it harder to report cases due to the confinement and the fact that they were cooped up with the perpetrators.

Cynthia Silva, a Peruvian lawyer and director of the non-governmental feminist group Study for the Defense of Women’s Rights-Demus, told IPS that the government has failed to reactivate the different services and that the specialized national justice system needs to be fully implemented to protect victims and punish perpetrators.

Lawyer Cynthia Silva, director of the Peruvian feminist institution Demus, poses for a picture at the headquarters of the feminist organization in Lima. She stresses the need for government action against gender violence to include not only strategies for attending to the victims, but also for prevention in order to eradicate it. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

She stressed the importance of allocating resources both for addressing cases of violence and for prevention. “These are two strategies that should go hand in hand and we see that the State is not doing enough in relation to the latter,” she said.

Silva urged the government to take action in measures aimed at the populace to contribute to rethinking socio-cultural patterns and ‘machista’ habits that discriminate against women.

Based on an experience they are carrying out with girls and adolescents in the district of Carabayllo, in the extreme north of Lima, she said it’s a question of supporting “deconstruction processes” so that egalitarian relations between women and men are fostered from childhood.

On Nov. 26 they will march with various feminist movements and collectives against machista violence so that “the right to a life free of violence against women is guaranteed and so that not a single step backwards is taken with respect to the progress made, particularly in sexual and reproductive rights, which are threatened by conservative groups in Congress.”

Adolescent women and men in Lima, the Peruvian capital, wave a huge banner during the march for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on Nov. 25, 2019, before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that exacerbated such violence in Latin America. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

An equally serious scenario

Argentina is another example of gender violence – including femicides – in Latin America, the region with the highest levels of aggression against women in the world, the result of extremely sexist societies.

This is in contrast to the fact that it is one of the regions with the best protection against such violence in national and even regional legislation, because since 1994 it has had the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women.

The problem is that these laws are seriously flawed in their implementation, especially in the interior of the countries, agree UN Women, regional organizations and national women’s rights groups.

Rosaura Andiñach, an Argentine university professor and head of community processes at the Ecumenical Regional Center for Counseling and Service (CREAS), said it is worrying that in her country there are still high rates of femicide, despite the progress made in terms of legislation.

Between January and October 2022, there were 212 femicides and 181 attempted gender-based homicides in the country of 46 million people, according to the civil society observatory “Ahora que sí nos ven” (Now that they do see us).

She said the government still owes a debt to women in this post-pandemic context, as it fails to guarantee women’s rights by not adequately addressing their complaints.

“We do not want the same thing to happen as with a recent case: Noelia Sosa, 30 years old, lived in Tucumán and reported her partner in a police station for gender violence. They ignored her and she committed suicide that afternoon because she did not know what else to do. We are very concerned because the outlook is still as serious as ever in terms of violence against women,” Andiñach said.

It was precisely in Argentina that the #NiunaMenos (Not one woman less) campaign emerged in 2015, which spread throughout the region as a movement against femicides and the ineffectiveness of the authorities in the enforcement of laws to prevent and punish gender-related murders, because femicides are surrounded by a very high level of impunity in Latin America.

Moni Pizani, from UN Women, stressed that the prevention of gender violence should no longer fall short in the region.

“We attack the problem but not its causes. I have been talking for 30 years about the importance of preventing violence against women by fostering major cultural changes so that girls and boys are raised in the knowledge that it is unacceptable in any form,” she underlined.

This strategy, she remarked, “involves investing in youth and children to ensure that the new generations are free from violence, harassment and discrimination, with respect for a life of dignity for all.”

Excerpt:

Installation of a solar panel on the roof of an isolated rural house in the southern province of Chubut, during the winter in Argentina's Patagonia region. Renewable sources provide energy to isolated communities that previously could only be supplied by diesel engines, which are more expensive, less efficient and generate greenhouse gas emissions. CREDIT: Permer

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 19 2022 (IPS)

When asked about the impact of incorporating solar energy at the school he runs in Atraico, a remote rural area in the Patagonian steppe in southern Argentina, Claudio Amaya Gatica is unequivocal: “Life has changed, not only for the school but for the whole community.”

The Atraico rural school has been one of the beneficiaries of the Renewable Energy in Rural Markets Project (Permer), a government initiative that for more than 20 years has been supplying electricity to rural communities and towns that are far from the national grid."Electricity means independence for people. Especially for women, who usually take care of the goats. With the solar-powered electric fences for goat pastures, women can have more time to devote to themselves or their children." -- Graciela Leguizamón

Only about 20 families live in Atraico, which in the Mapuche indigenous language means “Water behind the stone”, and is located in the municipality of Ingeniero Jacobacci, in the southern province of Río Negro.

The scarcity of water is precisely the main underlying factor of life there, where the villagers raise goats and sheep. Few take the risk of raising cows, which require more and better pastures – not abundant due to the lack of rainfall.

The Atraico school used to have intermittent electricity from a gas generator. Since 2021, when solar panels with batteries began to operate, it has had 24-hour electric power, which also allows it to sustain internet connectivity, benefiting the entire community.

“Of our 15 students, nine are boarders because they can’t go home and come back every day, since they live far from the school,” Amaya Gatica tells IPS from Ingeniero Jacobacci, the municipal capital city, some 35 kilometers from Atraico, where he lives. “Now we can have a refrigerator and washing machine. And the kids can go to the bathroom at night and turn on the light by pressing a switch, which is a new sensation for them.”

“The neighbors come to use the internet. It is nice to see the local residents on horseback sending messages with their cell phones that until recently were sent by radio or by little notes that someone took to the addressees,” he adds.

A small livestock farmer in the municipality of La Cumbre, in the Argentine province of Córdoba, checks the small solar panel on his solar-powered electric cattle fence. Electrification allows better management of domestic animals and pastures. CREDIT: Permer

Guaranteeing a right

The first phase of the Permer program ran from 2000 to 2015. The second, thanks to a 170 million dollar loan from the World Bank, was to run from 2015 to 2020.

As the government acknowledged, implementation of the program lagged between 2016 and 2019, when only 15 percent of the credit was spent. As a result, it was about to collapse in 2020, when the energy ministry renegotiated with the World Bank and obtained an extension until 2022.

Since then, the awarding of tenders for works in different communities has picked up speed, with the two-pronged objective of improving the quality of life of the dispersed rural population and reducing environmental impacts with the promotion of renewable energies.

According to data from the energy ministry, investments for 163 million dollars have already been made, are in progress or are in the bidding stage. Between the renewable energy generating equipment already installed and the projects under implementation, Permer has reached 41,510 homes and 681 schools, benefiting a total of 345,712 people, according to official figures.

“The program serves a part of the population that lives in remote areas of Argentina and not only lacks electricity from the grid, but also has other needs. The arrival of electric power opens up another panorama for these populations,” Permer’s general coordinator, Luciano Gilardón, told IPS.

The official said that due to the size of Argentina, which with a territory of 2,780,000 square kilometers is the eighth largest country in the world, it is not economically feasible for the national power grid to reach the smallest and most remote communities, so on-site isolated generation is the only possible solution.

“Traditionally, small diesel-fueled engines were installed, which performed poorly. Since 2000, renewable energies started to become cheaper and then they became viable not only for more efficient generation, but also to contribute to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” adds Gilardón in Buenos Aires.

A family poses in front of their home equipped with a solar panel in Potrero de Uriburu, an isolated rural area in the northwestern Argentine province of Salta. The Renewable Energy in Rural Markets Project provides electricity to homes, schools and public offices in remote areas not reached by the national grid. CREDIT: Permer

Energy that brings independence

In addition to homes and schools, Permer beneficiaries include remote public institutions such as primary health care centers, border posts and shelters in national parks.

The program has also been used for agriculture and livestock by small farming and indigenous communities, in the form of solar pumps to extract water from wells and solar-powered electric fence energizers for pastures.

There are 1,500 solar-powered electric cattle pastures in operation and this month the energy ministry awarded a company the supply and installation of another 2,633, in 11 provinces. Fencing the pastures is intended to improve and increase grazing land, reduce losses, protect crops and protect livestock from poaching.

The National Institute of Agricultural Technology (Inta), a public research institution active in rural areas throughout the country, participates in the identification of beneficiaries, the distribution of equipment for productive uses and training in its use.

Graciela Leguizamón, an agricultural engineer and Inta researcher in the province of Santiago del Estero, explains that in many areas of this province in the northern region of Chaco it is very difficult to think of massive public policies for access to electricity and drinking water, since there are rural families whose nearest neighbor is up to four kilometers away.

“Life is rough in those places. Sometimes people travel 15 or 20 kilometers to charge their cell phone batteries. Electricity makes life more friendly, allows children and young people to study, and makes people want to stay in the countryside,” Leguizamón tells IPS from Quimilí, a town in that province.

“Electricity means independence for people. Especially for women, who usually take care of the goats. With the solar-powered electric fences for goat pastures, women can have more time to devote to themselves or their children,” she adds.

Electricity for indigenous peoples

The largest project that Permer has undertaken is in the Luracatao valley, located in the Puna ecoregion in the northwest of Argentina, at an altitude of 2,700 meters above sea level. Some 350 indigenous families of the Diaguita and Calchaquí peoples live there, dispersed in nine communities that use candles or kerosene lanterns at night.

A solar park is under construction in the valley that will have an installed capacity of 1.25 MW, with batteries to store the electricity, plus the infrastructure for distributing the electric power because the communities are spread out along 42 kilometers. There are also plans to install a diesel engine for when weather conditions do not permit the generation of solar energy.

The budget, according to information from the government of the province of Salta, is 6.5 million dollars.

“It is a project that, because of its cost, is impossible for a municipality to undertake, and the national and Salta provincial governments have been promising this since the 1980s,” says Mauricio Abán, the mayor of Seclantás, a municipality in the Luracatao valley.

“In recent years, different possibilities for generating electricity with renewable sources were studied, including hydroelectric, thanks to a river in the valley. But in the end it was decided that the best option was solar, because the radiation is very good all year round,” he tells IPS from his home town.

“Today we see the columns and cables being installed and that a project that seemed like it would never arrive is starting to become reality,” he adds.

Women gather at the Punto Violeta, a center where different government agencies and social organisations seek to address the gender-based violence suffered by women in the Padre Mugica neighborhood, or Villa 31, a shantytown in Argentina's capital city. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 4 2022 (IPS)

The Padre Carlos Mugica neighborhood looks like another city within the Argentine capital, which most people usually see from up above as they drive past on the freeway but have never visited. It is a shantytown in the heart of Buenos Aires, of enormous vitality and where women are organizing to confront the various forms of violence that affect them.

“I have a history of gender violence. And what I found here is that many other women have experienced similar situations in their lives,” says Graciela, seated at the table of the weekly Women’s Meeting, in a small locale in the most modern sector of the neighborhood, called Punto Violeta, which has become a reference point for victims of violence."We centralize the care at the Punto Violeta because, although the violence here is no different from that in other parts of the city, many women find it difficult to leave the neighborhood because they don't know how." -- Carolina Ferro

Traditionally known in Buenos Aires as Villa 31 and home to more than 40,000 inhabitants, the neighborhood’s name honors a Catholic priest and activist who worked with poor families, who was killed during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

The slum is located on more than 70 hectares of publicly owned railway land just a few minutes from the center of the capital and separated by the train tracks from Recoleta, one of the city’s most upscale neighborhoods. Families started to occupy the area 90 years ago and the shantytown grew as a result of the successive crises that hit the Argentine economy and with the influx of poor immigrants from Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru.

Different governments have tried to eradicate the slum throughout its history, but in recent years the official view of the neighborhood has changed. Today Villa 31 is halfway through a slow and laborious process of urbanization and integration into Buenos Aires that the city government launched in 2015.

Thus, it has become a strange place, which mixes hope for a better future with the social woes of poverty and overcrowding.

There are wide streets with public transport and modern concrete housing blocks where once there was only a total absence of the state. But there are also still many narrow, dark passageways, where precarious brick and sheet metal houses up to four stories high seem on the verge of crumbling on top of each other.

View of one of the passageways in the Padre Mugica neighborhood, a slum located in the heart of Buenos Aires. The process of regularizing the informal settlement and integrating it with the city began in 2015, but it is only halfway done and narrow passageways lined with precarious housing coexist with modern roads and buildings. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The struggle for a better life

Graciela, who became a single mother at 18 and now has six children she has had to raise on her own, says she lived in the western province of Santa Fe and decided to move to Buenos Aires in search of a better life, after an accident at work in which she lost a hand. “In order to get a disability pension, I had to be here,” she explains. That’s how she ended up in Villa 31.

She says that this year her ex-partner tried to kill her, cutting her neck several times with a knife, so today she has a panic button given to her by the police.

She shares the things that happen to her at the Women’s Meeting every Wednesday, a space where collective solutions are sought for complicated lives, marked by economic difficulties, overcrowded housing, interrupted studies, lack of opportunities, families with conflicts and a permanent struggle to get ahead.

“It is a weekly meeting where we invite all the women of the neighborhood and we work on emotional strength as a preventive strategy against violence. Sometimes women start to feel that what they experience at home is normal,” says Carolina Ferro, a psychologist of the Women’s Encounter Program of the Undersecretariat of Public Safety and Order of the Buenos Aires Ministry of Justice and Security.

Ferro explains that the goal is to bolster the self-esteem of the women victims of violence. “Once they are empowered, they can go out to work to become economically independent or go back to school. We help them to be themselves,” she says during the last meeting in September, in which IPS was allowed to participate.

“This is part of a comprehensive care project. We centralize the care at the Punto Violeta because, although the violence here is no different from that in other parts of the city, many women find it difficult to leave the neighborhood because they don’t know how,” she adds.

Graciela, a mother of six children whom she has had to raise on her own, is one of the participants in the Punto Violeta in Padre Mugica, where women come together to find solutions to the violence they have experienced and to empower themselves to improve their lives, those of their families and the community. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

When the psychologist asks the women what has been the greatest achievement in their lives, excited responses emerge. One says, “Raising my children on my own”; another says, “Going back to school as an adult, and graduating”; and another says, “Having stopped working as a house cleaner to open my own little salon where I do therapeutic massage.”

“This is the first time in my life that I have spoken to a psychologist,” says one of the participants in the meeting, who is anguished because her son, whom she dreamed would become a university graduate and professional, dropped out of school. The group coordinator and her fellow participants insist on the need not to place expectations on another person, whose life cannot be controlled, in order to avoid frustration.

Unceasing violence

In 2021, in this South American country of 45 million people, 251 women were killed by gender violence, an average of one murder every 35 hours, according to the National Registry of Femicides, kept by the Supreme Court of Justice since 2015. In 88 percent of the cases, the victim knew her aggressor, and in 39 percent she lived with him. In 62 percent of the cases she was killed by her partner or ex-partner.

The Supreme Court has been conducting the survey since 2015 and the figures have not varied much, with approximately 20 percent of femicides in the city of Buenos Aires committed in shantytowns and slums. In any case, during 2020, the most critical year of the COVID-19 pandemic, calls to emergency numbers increased fivefold.

Aerial view of the Padre Mugica neighborhood, or Villa 31, as many still call it, with downtown Buenos Aires in the background. The 90-year-old informal settlement now straddles a freeway and has more than 40,000 inhabitants, just minutes from the heart of the Argentine capital. CREDIT: City of Buenos Aires

It was precisely during the pandemic that the Punto Violeta was born, as a government response to a longstanding concrete demand in the neighborhood for a women’s center.

“When the pandemic began and mobility restrictions were imposed, it was a very difficult time in the neighborhood, when some local women told us that we should not forget the women victims of violence, who had been locked in their homes with their aggressors,” Bárbara Bonelli, deputy ombudsperson in the Buenos Aires city government and a driving force behind the creation of the center, told IPS.

Punto Violeta is the name given in Argentina and other countries to spaces designed to promote the defense of the rights of women and sexual minorities, in which public agencies work together with social organizations.

The program in Mugica involves several public agencies, which take turns on different days of the week, with the mission of providing a comprehensive approach to the problem of violence.

At the center victims can file a criminal complaint of gender violence with representatives of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, obtain a protection measure or gain access to psychological care or a social worker.

“Punto Violeta was created to respond to a demand that existed in the neighborhood. I would say that the problem of violence against women is no different in poor neighborhoods, but it does need to be addressed at a local level,” says Bonelli.

“Since it is very difficult for them to leave the neighborhood, the state did not reach these women. We hope that the Punto Violeta will contribute to the effective insertion of women from the neighborhood in terms of employment, education, finance, economic and social issues,” she adds.

A view of two towers in Vaca Muerta, the field whose discovery gave Argentina huge potential in shale gas and oil. Since 2011, governments have dreamed of fully exploiting it, but have been unable to do so, so the country spends billions of dollars annually on imports of gas. CREDIT: Energy Secretariat

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 29 2022 (IPS)

Argentina, which has one of the largest unconventional hydrocarbon deposits in the world, has been forced to import gas for 6.6 billion dollars so far this year.

The main reason for this paradox -which aggravated the instability of the economy of this South American country- is the lack of transportation infrastructure.

In a public ceremony on Aug. 10, President Alberto Fernández signed the delayed contracts for the construction, for more than two billion dollars to be financed by the State, of a modern gas pipeline aimed at bridging that gap.

The objective is to bring a large part of the natural gas produced in Vaca Muerta to the capital, Buenos Aires, home to nearly a third of the 47 million inhabitants of this Southern Cone country.

Vaca Muerta is a geological formation with an abundance of shale gas and oil, located in the southern region of Patagonia, more than 1,000 kilometers from Buenos Aires.

The name Vaca Muerta has been on the lips of recent Argentine presidents as a symbol of the better future that awaits a country whose economy suffers from a chronic lack of foreign exchange and a weakened local currency, resulting in a poverty rate of around 40 percent of the population.

This has been the case since 2011, when the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that Vaca Muerta makes Argentina the country with the second largest shale gas reserves, behind China, and the fourth largest oil reserves.

Vaca Muerta has reserves of 308 trillion cubic feet of gas and 16.2 billion barrels of oil, according to EIA data, confirmed by Argentina’s state-owned oil company YPF.

“With Vaca Muerta, Argentina has the potential not only to achieve energy self-sufficiency but also to export. We are missing a huge opportunity,” said Salvador Gil, director of the Energy Engineering program at the public National University of San Martín, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Gil told IPS that Argentina could play an important role, given the crisis of rising energy prices driven up by the war in Ukraine, which threatens to drag on.

But to do so, it must solve not only its transportation problems, but also the imbalances in the economy, which for years have hindered the influx of large investments in the country.

“Today, what the world needs is energy security and Argentina has gas, which has been identified as the main fuel needed for the transition period towards clean energies, in the context of the fight against climate change,” the expert said.

Argentine President Alberto Fernández, flanked by Economy Minister Sergio Massa (left), and the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof, signed a contract for the construction of the gas pipeline that will expand the capacity to transport natural gas produced in the Vaca Muerta field to the capital. It is considered a key project for the Argentine economy. CREDIT: Casa Rosada

More foreign dependence

However, since 2011, when the EIA made public its first data on Vaca Muerta’s potential, which led politicians and experts to start dreaming that Argentina would in a few years become a kind of Saudi Arabia of South America, the country is in fact more and more dependent from the energy point of view.

A study of the period 2011-2021 released this year by a private think tank states that “the decade was characterized by an increase in Argentina’s external dependence on hydrocarbons: gas imports increased by 33.6 percent over the decade while diesel imports grew by 46 percent and gasoline expanded 996 percent.”

The document, published by the General Mosconi Energy Institute, points out that Argentina, which until the end of the 20th century enjoyed self-sufficiency in gas and oil, began to experience a considerable decrease in production in 2004.

Two years later, gas began to be imported by pipeline from Bolivia and in 2008 liquefied natural gas (LNG), brought by ship mainly from the United States and Qatar, started to be imported.

“Since then, the proportion of imported gas out of the total consumed in the country has grown. In 2009 it represented only six percent, rising to 22 percent in 2014. In 2021 it represented 17 percent of the total,” the report states.

Still far below its real potential, Vaca Muerta’s production has been growing. In June it contributed 56 percent of the 139 million cubic meters per day of natural gas produced in Argentina, according to official data.

Gas is the main fuel in the country’s energy mix, accounting for about 55 percent of the total.

With regard to oil, Vaca Muerta contributed 239,000 of the 583,000 barrels per day of national production in June.

Today, gas from Patagonia in the south is transported to Buenos Aires and other large towns and cities through three gas pipelines built in the 1980s, which do not live up to demand.

For this reason, the gas pipeline whose contract was signed this month has been described by both the political leadership and the academic world as the most urgently needed piece of infrastructure in Argentina at the moment.

Its cost was set at 1.49 billion dollars at the end of 2021, but it will probably exceed two billion dollars, due to the devaluation and inflation that are crippling the Argentine economy.

According to the government, the pipeline will be operational by June next year, at the beginning of the next southern hemisphere winter.

View of the Costanera thermal power plant, which produces electricity in Buenos Aires with natural gas. Thermal generation predominates in Argentina’s electricity mix, making up almost 60 percent of the total in 2021. The gas shortage recorded this southern hemisphere winter made it necessary to use more liquid fuels to supply the power plants. CREDIt: Enel

In search of investment

“Of course the pipeline is important, but it will not solve all of Argentina’s energy problems,” said Daniel Bouille, a researcher with a PhD in energy economics.

The expert reminded IPS that an important factor is that shale oil and gas is extracted using the hydraulic fracturing technique or fracking, which “is more costly than conventional techniques.”

“To develop Vaca Muerta´s great potential, investments of between 60 and 70 billion dollars are needed,” he explained.

Bouille said that today the conditions do not exist for these investments to take place, in a country whose economy has not been growing since 2010 and where there are exchange controls and limits on the export of foreign exchange, none of which foments confidence among international capital.

In order to combat this situation, Economy Minister Sergio Massa announced that on Sept. 9 he will visit oil giants such as Chevron, Exxon, Shell and Total at their headquarters in the U.S. city of Houston, Texas to interest them in the possibility of investing in Vaca Muerta.

Argentina does not seem to be coming up with alternatives. “For 20 years the country’s conventional oil and gas production has been steadily decreasing, because all the basins have been depleted,” said Nicolás Gadano, an economist specializing in energy at the private Di Tella University.

“It is precisely the shale hydrocarbons from Vaca Muerta that in the last five years have offset the situation to slow the fall in total production,” he added in an interview with IPS.

Gadano believes that further development of Vaca Muerta’s potential will be positive for Argentina even from an environmental point of view.

“This year in Argentina a lot of oil was used for electricity production due to the lack of gas. But when the pipeline begins to operate, liquid fuels will be replaced by gas, which is a cleaner fuel,” he said.

There are also less visible but critical voices regarding the focus on Vaca Muerta as the path that Argentina should follow in terms of energy.

“Fracking, in addition to its negative environmental and social impacts, is very expensive,” said Martín Alvarez, a researcher at Observatorio Petrolero Sur, a non-governmental organization that focuses on the environmental and social aspects of energy issues.

He noted that “Vaca Muerta hydrocarbons had no possibilities of being exported until the current global energy crisis. It wasn’t until this year’s international price increase that a market for them emerged.”

“Argentina has forgotten about renewable energies and is committed to fossil fuels, which is a step backwards and goes against international climate agreements. Seeking the development of Vaca Muerta has been the only energy policy of this country in the last 10 years,” he complained.

View of a demonstration by social organizations in a Buenos Aires square in July. The scene occurs almost every day in the capital of Argentina, a country where poverty has held steady at around 40 percent of the population since before the COVID-19 pandemic. The possibility of a social uprising is one of the fears in the face of the deepening socioeconomic crisis. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 27 2022 (IPS)

Darío is a locksmith in Flores, a traditional middle-class neighborhood in the Argentine capital, who will have to stop working in the next few days. “Suppliers have suspended the delivery of locks, due to a lack of merchandise or because of prices,” he laments. His case is an illustration of an economy gone mad in a country that once again finds itself on the brink of the abyss.

The problems that have been dragging on in this South American country, where the vast majority of the population has become poorer over the last four years and social unrest is on the rise, exploded this month with an exchange and financial crisis that created enormous uncertainty about what lies ahead.

The Central Bank ran out of dollars, and imports, which in large part are a source of inputs for domestic production, were restricted to the maximum. The result is fear, speculation, increased social unrest and out-of-control inflation, which is causing price references to be lost and some companies and businesses are hedging their bets with preventive increases, or they even decide not to sell.

Today, in the streets and in the media, the questions raised are whether the country is on the eve of a social outbreak and whether President Alberto Fernández, so politically isolated that he is questioned by his own government coalition, will reach the end of his term in December 2023.

At that time, Argentina will be celebrating 40 years of democracy, marked by a succession of economic crises that have left an aftermath of growing inequality and have caused distrust to spread easily in society at the first signs that things are not going well.

The crisis deepened at the beginning of the month, when the Jul. 2 resignation of then Economy Minister Martín Guzmán triggered a 50 percent drop in the parallel exchange rate — known locally as the dollar blue — the only one that can be freely acquired in a country with exchange controls, and this, in turn, further fuelled inflation, which in 2021 stood at 50 percent and this year is already expected to end above 90 percent.

“There has been a series of imbalances in Argentina’s macroeconomy for years, which means that today the government does not have the tools to deal with exchange rate and financial pressures,” Sergio Chouza, an economist who teaches at the public University of Buenos Aires (UBA), told IPS.

“In this country the value of the dollar dominates expectations about prices and as a result it is increasingly difficult to avoid a ‘spiral’ of inflation. At the same time, government bonds have collapsed and are already yielding less than those of Ukraine,” he adds.

Chouza says that the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the major contributing factors in triggering a situation that seems to have gotten out of control.

“There was an expansion of public spending, as in most of the world. But the problem is that while most countries financed it with credit, Argentina could not do so because it was already over-indebted,” the expert explains.

Homeless people who survive by picking through garbage in Buenos Aires sleep on the corner of a central street in Argentina’s capital. In 2021 the country experienced an economic recovery after the first year of the pandemic, but a rise in inflation in 2022 has aggravated the crisis once again. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Social protests

The square in front of the Palacio de Tribunales, in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires, is overflowing with people. The youngest protesters hold banners from social movements from poor outlying neighborhoods, but there are also entire families with small children in their arms. Traffic in the surrounding area is completely cut off as the columns of marchers continue to pour in.

It is a Thursday in July, but this is an image that can be seen practically every day in the Argentine capital, where the most vulnerable social sectors are staging a series of protests because, in the midst of the crisis, the government has suspended the expansion of the Potenciar Trabajo program.

This is the name of the National Program for Socio-productive Inclusion and Local Development, which offers a stipend from the government in exchange for four hours of work in social enterprises, such as soup kitchens or urban waste recyclers’ cooperatives.

“In our neighborhoods things have been very hard for many years, but now it’s getting worse because we can no longer afford to put food on the table,” Fernando, who preferred not to give his last name, told IPS. He is a young man from Laferrere, one of the poorest localities on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, who was a waiter in a bar before becoming unemployed in 2021. Today he does occasional construction work.

Santiago Poy, a researcher at the Observatory of Social Debt at the private Argentine Catholic University (UCA) tells IPS that, with the combination of currency devaluation and inflation since 2018, wages have lost around 20 percent of their purchasing power.

“Poverty stood at around 25 percent in 2017, climbed to 40 percent in 2019 and remained steady after that. Today there is a feeling of widespread impoverishment, despite the fact that the unemployment rate is only seven percent, because 28 percent of workers are poor,” says Poy, describing the situation in this Southern Cone country of 47.3 million people.

After the height of the pandemic in 2020, social indicators improved in 2021 but are worsening again this year and the vast social assistance network does not seem to be sufficient to curb the decline.

“Social aid is not going to solve things in Argentina, because the macroeconomy is a permanent factory of poverty,” says Poy.

One of the operations carried out last weekend by Economy Ministry personnel in supermarkets in Buenos Aires, in order to control price hikes on basic products and “dismantle speculative maneuvers,” as reported. CREDIT: Economy Ministry

The price race

“I am ashamed to set some prices at which I have to sell such basic things as bread, flour or sugar,” Fernando Savore, president of the Federation of Grocery Stores of the province of Buenos Aires, which groups 26,000 businesses in the country’s most populous region, tells IPS.

Savore says that since the beginning of the year the price hikes by suppliers have been constant, but that they skyrocketed in the first week of July, after the economy minister resigned.

“We have seen increases of more than 10 percent in food and more than 20 percent in cleaning products. I don’t think they are justified, but every time the dollar goes up, prices go up,” says Savore, who adds that grocers are hesitant to sell some products because of uncertainty about the costs of restocking them.

And in a context of overall jitters, the government unofficially leaks rumors about economic measures, which do not then materialize but fuel the sense of uncertainty.

President Fernández said that the lack of dollars would be solved if agricultural producers sold a good part of their soybean harvest, which they are currently withholding, worth 20 billion dollars.

They are obliged to export at the official exchange rate, whose gap with the parallel dollar has reached a record level of more than 150 percent, and they are apparently waiting for a devaluation.

On Jul. 25, the new economy minister, Silvina Batakis, met in Washington with the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, to assure her that this country will comply with the agreement signed with the multilateral lender this year, which includes goals to reduce the fiscal deficit and increase the Central Bank’s reserves.

But in Argentina, few people dare to predict where the crisis is heading, and how quickly it will evolve.

View of the solar park in the municipality of Escobar, located an hour's drive from Buenos Aires. Inaugurated this month, it is the first municipally financed and managed solar energy project, at a time when private investment has withdrawn from large clean energy projects in Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
ESCOBAR, Argentina, Jul 18 2022 (IPS)

The multitude of solar panels stands out along a dirt road in an unpopulated area. Although located just an hour’s drive from Buenos Aires, the new solar park in the municipality of Escobar is in a place of silence and solitude, symbolic of the difficulties faced by renewable energies in making inroads in Argentina.

The Escobar plant, inaugurated this month, is the first solar energy park with municipal investment and management, at a time when private initiative has practically withdrawn from clean energy projects in this South American country of 47 million people, which has been in the grip of a deep economic and financial crisis for years.

“There are 3,700 photovoltaic solar panels that produce electricity to be sold to one of the electric cooperatives that distributes power in the area. With this plant, we seek to position ourselves as a sustainable municipality and access financing for new projects,” Victoria Bandín, director of Innovation in the Municipality of Escobar, told IPS during a tour of the grounds of the six-hectare park.

Located 50 kilometers from the Argentine capital, to which it is connected by a freeway, Escobar is a municipality on the northern edge of Greater Buenos Aires, a gigantic metropolitan area of 15 million inhabitants where the country’s greatest wealth and poverty live side by side.

Escobar’s extensive green areas have attracted thousands of families in recent years seeking to get away from the cement and noise of Buenos Aires, which has fuelled the construction of dozens of upscale high-security private housing developments.

Escobar is also home to a large community of Bolivian immigrants, who play a key role in the production of fruits and vegetables. In fact, the fresh food market that supplies the stores of several municipalities in the area bears the name “Bolivian Community”.

Next to the market, which is very close to the solar park, the white, inflated tarp of a biodigester, in which the market’s organic waste is processed, stands out.

Eliseo Acchura is about to send spoiled food discarded by stallholders to the biodigester at Escobar’s fruit and vegetable market. The biodigester, operating since last year, produces biogas that is then converted into electricity used in the market. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“I pick up almost a ton of fruit and vegetables per day that the stallholders discard, and after 40 to 60 days of decomposition in the biodigester, we have biogas,” Eliseo Acchura, who works on the project inaugurated last year with support from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told IPS.

The biogas is used to generate electricity to supply part of the market.

“We have rural areas and we seek to preserve ourselves as a green place on the edge of the great gray blob that is the greater metropolitan area,” Guillermo Bochatón, coordinator of the Sustainable Escobar program, which is carrying out several environmental initiatives, told IPS.

The rise and fall of renewables

Clean energies experienced a boom in Argentina starting in 2016, thanks to the Renovar Program, which managed to attract domestic and foreign private investors.

Through this program, the national government guaranteed the purchase of electricity for 20 years at a fixed rate in dollars and created a guaranty fund with the participation of international credit institutions to guarantee payment.

The share of renewable sources in the total electricity mix, almost non-existent in 2015, grew significantly since 2016, reaching a record high of 13 percent on average in 2021.

Today, Argentina’s electricity system has an installed capacity of almost 43,000 MW, of which 5,175 MW are renewable. The main source of generation is thermal (powered by natural gas and, to a lesser extent, oil) making up 59 percent of the total, followed by large hydroelectric projects, which make up 25 percent (only hydroelectric projects of less than 50 MW are considered renewable).

Among renewables, the largest share last year came from wind (74 percent), followed by solar (13 percent), small hydro (7 percent) and bioenergies, according to official data

Of the 189 renewable energy projects in operation, 133 were commissioned over the last four years.

The biodigester at Escobar’s wholesale fruit market was inaugurated last year and is part of the environmentally friendly initiatives launched in this municipality near the Argentine capital. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Clean energies today face two major problems in this country, according to Marcelo Alvarez, a member of the board of directors of the Argentine Chamber of Renewable Energies (CADER).

One has to do with infrastructure due to the saturation of the electricity transmission networks that deliver electric power to large cities. Another is the lack of financing, as a result of the macroeconomic conditions in the country.

“Even private ventures in distributed generation today are practically reserved only for environmental activists, because the lack of financing and extremely low electricity rates make them unprofitable,” Alvarez explained.

He said that the way things are going, the country is not likely to meet the goal set by law in 2015, for 20 percent of the national electricity mix to come from domestic sources by 2025.

“From a technical point of view, Argentina’s potential for renewable energies is enormous, because it has the necessary natural resources. And economically too, because in the medium term the costs of electricity production will fall,” Gabriel Blanco, a specialist in renewable energies from the National University of the Center of the Province of Buenos Aires (UNICEN), told Ecoamericas.

“The main obstacle is that there is no political will, because the decision is to bet on the energy business of fossil fuels, large hydroelectric and nuclear power plants,” he added.

The Escobar solar park has an installed capacity of 2.3 MW and required an investment of some two million dollars, which will be recovered with the sale of electricity within seven years, said the mayor of Escobar, Ariel Sujarchuk. “Between 23 and 53 more years of useful life of pure profit will be left after that,” he added.

The inauguration was also attended by Environment Minister Juan Cabandié, who pledged more than 1.7 million dollars in government funds for the expansion of the solar park, which has a large piece of land available for the installation of more panels.

In his speech in Escobar, Cabandié criticized industrialized countries for failing to comply with the financing needed to transform the economies of developing countries, as pledged under the Paris Agreement on climate change, adopted in the French capital in 2015.

The minister said that “the sector responsible for damaging the planet is in the Northern, not the Southern, hemisphere,” and argued that it is the countries of the North that must assume “the responsibility of financing the transition to sustainability of the countries of the South.”

Tomasa Chávez, bundled up against the cold of the southern hemisphere winter, works at the Central Market in Buenos Aires, where she was hired in 2021 to separate edible waste that can be recovered. Until then, she went there daily on her own for 30 years to look for food and other recyclable materials among the waste that has now been given new value. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 6 2022 (IPS)

For 30 years, Tomasa Chávez visited the Central Market of Buenos Aires and rummaged through the tons of fruits and vegetables that the stallholders discarded, in search of food. Today she continues to do so, but there is a difference: since 2021 she has been one of the workers hired to recover food as part of a formal program launched by the Central Market.

“Before, I used to come almost every day and collect whatever was edible and whatever could be sold in my neighborhood. Food, cardboard, wood… Now I still come to separate edible food, but I work from 7:00 to 15:00 and I get paid some money,” the short, good-natured woman told IPS.

The Central Market of the Argentine capital is a universe that seems vast and unfathomable to those who venture into it for the first time.

Covering 550 hectares in the municipality of La Matanza, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, it is full of life; to describe it merely as a central market that supplies fruits and vegetables to a metropolis of 15 million inhabitants would be an oversimplification.

In the market there are large companies and small businesses, streets, avenues, warehouses, buildings and even areas taken over by homeless people and a rehabilitation center for people with substance abuse problems. In some places people are crowded among crates of fruit and the noise is overwhelming, but there are also large empty areas where everything is quiet.

Nearly 1,000 trucks enter the Central Market every day to pick up fresh food that is sold in the stores of the city and Greater Buenos Aires. Every month, 106,000 tons of fruits and vegetables are sold, according to official data.

There is also a retail market with food of all kinds, attended by thousands of people from all over the city, in search of better prices than in their neighborhoods, in a context of inflation that does not stop growing – it already exceeds 60 percent annually – and which is destroying the buying power of the middle class and the poor.

View of one of the 12 bays where the fruits and vegetables that supply the 15 million inhabitants of the Greater Buenos Aires region are sold wholesale. The activity begins at 2:00 a.m. and every day some 1,000 trucks enter the market and some 10,000 people work there. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

As a reflection of the social situation in Argentina, where even before the COVID-19 pandemic the poverty rate exceeded 40 percent, a common image of the Market has been that of hundreds of people like Chávez rummaging through the waste, looking for something to eat or to sell.

But since August 2021, much of that energy has been poured into the Waste Reduction and Recovery Program, which is based on two main ideas: to use food fit for consumption for social assistance and the rest for the production of compost or organic fertilizer to promote agroecology.

“There was a social and environmental problem that needed to be addressed. Today we have fewer losses, we provide social assistance and create jobs,” Marisol Troya, quality and transparency manager at the Central Market, told IPS.

Coping with the crisis

The 12 gigantic bays where fruits and vegetables are sold wholesale are the heart of the Central Market, which employs 800 people and where a total of 10,000 people work every day.

At 2:00 a.m. the activity begins every day in the market with frenetic movement of crates containing local products from all over Argentina and neighboring countries, which are a festival of colors. Each bay has 55 stalls.

Three people look for food in a container of discarded products at the Central Market of Buenos Aires, where more than 100,000 tons of fruits and vegetables are sold every month to supply retail stores in the Argentine capital and its suburbs. With the recovery program, the Market seeks to provide environmental and social solutions. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“The search for food among the Market’s waste was spurred by the economic crisis and the pandemic,” said Marcelo Pascal, a consultant to the management. “We realized very quickly that there was a lot of merchandise in good condition that was discarded for commercial reasons but could be recuperated.

“There were even small stands that used vegetables found in the garbage. A lot of edible products were recovered, but the process was disorderly, so an effort was made to organize it,” he told IPS.

From August 2021 to June 2022, 1,891 tons of food were recovered for social aid, while 3,276 tons have been used to make compost, according to official figures from the Central Market, which is run by a board of directors made up of representatives of the central, provincial and city governments.

“We have reduced by 48 percent the amount of garbage that the Market was sending to landfills for final disposal, which was 50 tons a day,” agronomist Fabián Rainoldi, head of the Waste Reduction Program, told IPS.

Fabián Rainoldi, head of the Waste Reduction and Recovery Program of the Central Market of Buenos Aires, stands in front of one of the mountains of organic waste that are used to produce compost, which serves as fertilizer for agroecological enterprises. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Orderly recovery of edible products

Justo Gregorio Ayala is working in an esplanade next to one of the wholesale bays. In front of him he has a crate of bruised tomatoes, impossible to sell at a store, but many of which are ripe and edible. His task is to separate the edible ones from the waste.

“I live here in the Market, in the Hogar de Cristo San Cayetano, and six months ago I got this job,” Ayala said, referring to the rehab center for addicts that opened in 2020 inside the Market itself.

“There were always a lot of products to recover in the Market, but now we do it better,” added Ayala, who is one of the workers hired for the Program.

He clarified, however, that the scenario varies depending on the temperature. “In summertime, because of the heat, the fruits and vegetables last much less time and the stallholders throw away more products. Now in winter we don’t find so much.”

The workers work in eight of the market’s 12 bays. There are a total of 24 workers, divided into groups of three, who separate the merchandise that the stallholders are asked to leave in the center of the bay.

The recovered goods are loaded onto trucks that are taken to a huge warehouse in the Community Action section of the Market, where they are prepared for use in social aid projects.

Justo Gregorio Ayala is one of the 24 workers who select edible fruits and vegetables discarded by vendors at the Buenos Aires Central Market. Since August last year, almost 19,000 tons of food fit for human consumption have been recovered and have gone to soup kitchens and other kinds of social assistance. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“We deliver food to 700 soup kitchens, according to a weekly schedule: about 130 per day,” said Martin Romero, head of the Community Action section, where 22 workers perform their duties, as the first vehicles begin to arrive to pick up their cargo.

“We also put together eight-kilo bags, with whatever we have available, which we deliver to 130 families,” he added to IPS.

What is not fit for human consumption ends up in the composting yard, a plot of land covering almost three hectares, where the process of decomposition of organic matter takes about four months.

“The organic waste is mixed with wood chips made from the crates, which absorb water and reduce the leachate that contaminates the soil. The organic compost is donated to agroecological gardens which use it for fertilization and the recovery of degraded soils,” explained Rainoldi.

The goal is a Central Market that makes use of everything and does not send waste to the dump. It’s a long road that has just begun.

Florencia Guimaraes, a transgender woman who two years ago got a job for the first time in her life, in the public sector, takes part in a demonstration in defense of the rights of the LGTBI collective. Lohana Berkins, whose photo she carries on the banner, was the founder of the Association of the Struggle for the Transvestite-Transsexual Identity, who died in 2016. CREDIT: Courtesy of Florencia Guimares

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 23 2022 (IPS)

“At the age of 35, with a document that says who I really am, I went back to school and finished my studies, which I had left at 14 because I could no longer bear the bullying and mistreatment,” said Florencia Guimaraes, a transgender woman whose life was changed by Argentina’s Gender Identity Law.

The new law passed by Congress in May 2012 was a pioneer in the world, since it allows people to change their gender, name and photo on their identity document, without the need for medical tests, surgeries or hormone treatments.

One of the 12,665 people who did so was Florencia, who today is 42 years old. She was born a boy, but since childhood she felt she was a girl, and for this reason she says that she faced barriers to access education and the labor market, which drove her into sex work for years in order to survive.

“There is nothing special about my story. Exclusion was a direct springboard to prostitution, which most of us started to practice at a very young age. It has to do with the lack of opportunities,” she told IPS."The fact that transgender people have no alternative to sex work is slowly changing since the passage of the law, which gave visibility to a group that was discriminated against and hidden, but it is still very recent." -- Esteban Paulón

“The law and our identity documents were tools that empowered us. It’s true that before it was not written down anywhere that we could not study, but we were seen as ‘sick’ and there were mechanisms that expelled us from the educational system,” she added.

Official figures indicate that 62 percent of the 12,665 people who changed their national identity card (DNI) in the last 10 years chose to be female and 35 percent chose to be male. They thus began the slow road to the recovery of their rights in this South American country of 47 million people.

In addition, there are almost three percent (354 people) who recently opted to mark with an “X” the box on their document corresponding to their sex, thanks to a decree signed in July 2021 by President Alberto Fernández recognizing the “non-binary” gender.

Diego Watkins, a 28-year-old trans man who has been the visible face of the Association of Transvestites, Transsexuals and Transgenders of Argentina (ATTTA), says this recognition marked a “before” and “after”.

“I was a person with no identity, no future, no life plan. If I said I had a toothache, they sent me to the psychologist. Knowing and being known who I am gave meaning to my life,” he told IPS.

As a symptom of its current strength, the group has appropriated the term transvestite, traditionally used in Argentina as an insult or in a derogatory fashion. Today, being a transvestite is a political identity and the word is used, precisely, as a banner to vindicate the right to be trans, say members of the community.

Solange Fabián is a transgender woman and member of the board of directors of the Hotel Gondolín, which houses more than 40 transvestites, many of them sex workers, in Buenos Aires. At the top of the window you can see the aftermath of a fire that occurred this month and according to the residents of Gondolin was intentional and was a hate attack. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The slow road to change

Florencia Guimaraes, who graduated in Gender and Politics at the National University of General Sarmiento, has headed for the last two years the Access to Rights Program for Transvestites, Transsexuals and/or Transgendered Persons at the Magistrates Council of the City of Buenos Aires, the body that administers the Judiciary of the Argentine capital.

“It’s the first time in my life that I’ve gotten a job and this, of course, would not have been possible without the law,” she said.

She is also president of the Casa de Lohana y Diana, a self-managed center for the transvestite community in Laferrere, one of the most populous and poorest suburbs of Buenos Aires.

“We offer training workshops with job opportunities, since most of them, despite the law, are still excluded and survive by means of prostitution,” says Florencia.

According to a 2019 study published by the Public Defense of Buenos Aires, entitled The Butterfly Revolution, only nine percent of the trans population is inserted in the formal labor market and the vast majority have never even gotten a job interview.

LGTBI rights organizations agree that the total transgender population in the country is between 10 and 15 percent higher than the 12,665 people registered.

Women from the Casa de Lohana y Diana, a self-managed support space for transgender women that operates in Laferrere, one of the poorest localities in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. In the Casa, courses with job opportunities are offered, with the aim of enabling women to leave sex work. CREDIT: Courtesy of Florencia Guimaraes

“The fact that transgender people have no alternative to sex work is slowly changing since the passage of the law, which gave visibility to a group that was discriminated against and hidden, but it is still very recent,” activist Esteban Paulón, who heads the Institute for LGTB+ Public Policy, a civil society organisation, told IPS from the city of Rosario.

Paulón was undersecretary of Sexual Diversity Policies in the northwestern province of Santa Fe, of which Rosario is the main city. He led a vulnerability survey there in 2019, which reached almost a third of the 1,200 trans people in that province.

The study found that only 46 percent finished high school and only five percent completed tertiary or university studies.

And the results were especially revealing in terms of emotional distress related to gender identity: 75 percent said they had self-harmed with varying frequency and engaged in problematic alcohol consumption; 77 percent had consumed other substances; and 79 percent had eating disorders.

Perhaps the harshest statistic is that, according to estimates by LGTB organizations, the average lifespan is between 35 and 41 years.

Paulón said that of the 1,200 trans people living in Santa Fe, only 30 are over 50 years old.

And he explained: “The chain of exclusion has made it impossible for transvestites to take care of their health. Many go to the hospital for the first time with an advanced infection caused by AIDS, a disease that today can be managed with medication.”

Valeria Licciardi, a trans woman who became well-known through her participation in the Big Brother reality TV show and now owns a brand of panties designed especially for transvestites, believes that the law is a starting point for social change.

“We were given our place as citizens and our right to identity, to be who we want to be, was recognized,” she told IPS.

But she warned about an undesired effect of the law: “The more we advance in rights, the more hatred and discrimination against us from one sector also grows.”

She cited the example of an arson attack that was reported this month at the so-called Hotel Gondolin, a shelter for the transvestite community that operates in a squat in the Villa Crespo neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

“It was in the early hours of the morning. The police told us that, according to the security camera footage, two men started the fire from the street,” Solange Fabián, a member of the Hotel Gondolín’s board of directors, told IPS.

Diego Watkins, a transgender man, received one of the first documents with a new identity in 2012, when the Gender Identity Law came into force in Argentina. A long-time activist of the Association of Transvestites, Transsexuals and Transgenders of Argentina, he is seen in this photo taking part in an assembly. CREDIT: Courtesy of Diego Watkins

Overcoming barriers

Seeking to improve labor inclusion, a presidential decree issued in 2020 established that one percent of jobs in the national public administration must be filled by trans people, and a registry of applicants was created.

“We are making progress in implementation and there are already 300 trans people working, which we estimate to be 0.2 percent of the total number of public sector positions,” Greta Peña, undersecretary for Diversity Policies at the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity, told IPS.

“We also have 6,007 people listed in the registry, which indicates that there is a great desire among the trans community to go out and work,” she added.

This year, the Undersecretariat launched a one-time economic assistance plan for trans people over 50 years of age, consisting of six minimum wages, since this is the group facing the greatest difficulties in entering the labor market.

“Although no regulation resolves structural violence by itself, the gender identity law has been a milestone in the democratic history of this country, which has not only had an impact on trans people but on the entire population,” Peña said.

A group of Farmacoop workers stand in the courtyard of their plant in Buenos Aires. Members of the Argentine cooperative proudly say that theirs is the first laboratory in the world to be recovered by its workers. CREDIT: Courtesy of Pedro Pérez/Tiempo Argentino.

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, May 24 2022 (IPS)

“All we ever wanted was to keep working. And although we have not gotten to where we would like to be, we know that we can,” says Edith Pereira, a short energetic woman, as she walks through the corridors of Farmacoop, in the south of the Argentine capital. She proudly says it is “the first pharmaceutical laboratory in the world recovered by its workers.”

Pereira began to work in what used to be the Roux Ocefa laboratory in Buenos Aires in 1983. At its height it had more than 400 employees working two nine-hour shifts, as she recalls in a conversation with IPS.

But in 2016 the laboratory fell into a crisis that first manifested itself in delays in the payment of wages and a short time later led to the owners removing the machinery, and emptying and abandoning the company.

The workers faced up to the disaster with a struggle that included taking over the plant for several months and culminated in 2019 with the creation of Farmacoop, a cooperative of more than 100 members, which today is getting the laboratory back on its feet.

In fact, during the worst period of the pandemic, Farmacoop developed rapid antigen tests to detect COVID-19, in partnership with scientists from the government’s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Conicet), the leading organization in the sector.

Farmacoop is part of a powerful movement in Argentina, as recognized by the government, which earlier this month launched the first National Registry of Recovered Companies (ReNacER), with the aim of gaining detailed knowledge of a sector that, according to official estimates, comprises more than 400 companies and some 18,000 jobs.

The presentation of the new Registry took place at an oil cooperative that processes soybeans and sunflower seeds on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, built on what was left of a company that filed for bankruptcy in 2016 and laid off its 126 workers without severance pay.

Edith Pereira (seated) and Blácida Benitez, two of the members of Farmacoop, a laboratory recovered by its workers in Buenos Aires, are seen here in the production area. This is the former Roux Ocefa laboratory, which went bankrupt in the capital of Argentina and was left owing a large amount of back wages to its workers. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The event was led by President Alberto Fernández, who said that he intends to “convince Argentina that the popular economy exists, that it is here to stay, that it is valuable and that it must be given the tools to continue growing.”

Fernández said on that occasion that the movement of worker-recuperated companies was born in the country in 2001, as a result of the brutal economic and social crisis that toppled the presidency of Fernando de la Rúa.

“One out of four Argentines was out of work, poverty had reached 60 percent and one of the difficulties was that companies were collapsing, the owners disappeared and the people working in those companies wanted to continue producing,” he said.

“That’s when the cooperatives began to emerge, so that those who were becoming unemployed could get together and continue working, sometimes in the companies abandoned by their owners, sometimes on the street,” the president added.

Two technicians package products at the Farmacoop laboratory, a cooperative with which some of the workers of the former bankrupt company undertook its recovery through self-management, a formula that is growing in Argentina in the face of company closures during successive economic crises. CREDIT: Courtesy of Farmacoop

A complex social reality

More than 20 years later, this South American country of 45 million people finds itself once again in a social situation as severe or even more so than back then.

The new century began with a decade of growth, but today Argentines have experienced more than 10 years of economic stagnation, which has left its mark.

Poverty, according to official data, stands at 37 percent of the population, in a context of 60 percent annual inflation, which is steadily undermining people’s incomes and hitting the most vulnerable especially hard.

The latest statistics from the Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security indicate that 12.43 million people are formally employed, which in real terms – due to the increase of the population – is less than the 12.37 million jobs that were formally registered in January 2018.

“I would say that in Argentina we have been seeing the destruction of employment and industry for 40 years, regardless of the orientation of the governments. That is why we understand that worker-recovered companies, as a mechanism for defending jobs, will continue to exist,” says Bruno Di Mauro, the president of the Farmacoop cooperative.

“It is a form of resistance in the face of the condemnation of exclusion from the labor system that we workers suffer,” he adds to IPS.

“He who abandons gets no prize” reads the banner with which part of the members of the Farmacoop cooperative were demonstrating in the Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires, during the long labor dispute with the former owners who drove the pharmaceutical company into bankruptcy. The workers managed to recover it in 2019. CREDIT: Courtesy of Bruno Di Mauro/Farmacoop.

Today Farmacoop has three active production lines, including Aqualane brand moisturizing cream, used for decades by Argentines for sunburn. The cooperative is currently in the cumbersome process of seeking authorizations from the health authority for other products.

“When I look back, I think that we decided to form the cooperative and recover the company without really understanding what we were getting into. It was a very difficult process, in which we had colleagues who fell into depression, who saw pre-existing illnesses worsen and who died,” Di Mauro says.

“But we learned that we workers can take charge of any company, no matter how difficult the challenge. We are not incapable just because we are part of the working class,” he adds.

Farmacoop’s workers currently receive a “social wage” paid by the State, which also provided subsidies for the purchase of machinery.

The plant, now under self-management, is a gigantic old 8,000-square-meter building with meeting rooms, laboratories and warehouse areas where about 40 people work today, but which was the workplace of several hundred workers in its heyday.

It is located between the neighborhoods of Villa Lugano and Mataderos, in an area of factories and low-income housing mixed with old housing projects, where the rigors of the successive economic crises can be felt on almost every street, with waste pickers trying to eke out a living.

Edith Pereira shows the Aqualane brand moisturizing cream, well known in Argentina, that today is produced by the workers of the Farmacoop cooperative, which has two industrial plants in Buenos Aires, recovered and managed by the workers. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“When we entered the plant in 2019, everything was destroyed. There were only cardboard and paper that we sold to earn our first pesos,” says Blácida Martínez.

She used to work in the reception and security section of the company and has found a spot in the cooperative for her 24-year-old son, who is about to graduate as a laboratory technician and works in product quality control.

A new law is needed

Silvia Ayala is the president of the Mielcitas Argentinas cooperative, which brings together 88 workers, mostly women, who run a candy and sweets factory on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where they lost their jobs in mid-2019.

“Today we are grateful that thanks to the cooperative we can put food on our families’ tables,” she says. “There was no other option but to resist, because reinserting ourselves in the labor market is very difficult. Every time a job is offered in Argentina, you see lines of hundreds of people.”

Ayala is also one of the leaders of the National Movement of Recovered Companies, active throughout the country, which is promoting a bill in Congress to regulate employee-run companies, presented in April by the governing Frente de Todos.

“A law would be very important, because when owners abandon their companies we need the recovery to be fast, and we need the collaboration of the State; this is a reality that is here to stay,” says Ayala.

Argentine President Alberto Fernández stands with workers of the Cooperativa Aceitera La Matanza on May 5, when the government presented the Registry of Recovered Companies, which aims to formalize worker-run companies. CREDIT: Casa Rosada

The Ministry of Social Development states that the creation of the Registry is aimed at designing specific public policies and tools to strengthen the production and commercialization of the sector, as well as to formalize workers.

The government defines “recovered” companies as those economic, productive or service units that were originally privately managed and are currently run collectively by their former employees.

Although the presentation was made this month, the Registry began operating in March and has already listed 103 recovered companies, of which 64 belong to the production sector and 35 to the services sector.

The first data provide an indication of the diversity of the companies in terms of size, with the smallest having six workers and the largest 177.

During one of the hearings in Buenos Aires, the court trying a 1924 indigenous massacre in the Chaco heard the testimony of historian Nicolás Iñigo Carrera, from the University of Buenos Aires, who has been studying indigenous history in Argentina for decades. The expert witness described in detail the conditions in the Napalpí indigenous “reducción” or camp where the massacre took place. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, May 13 2022 (IPS)

It’s a strange trial, with no defendants. The purpose is not to hand down a conviction, but to bring visibility to an atrocious event that occurred almost a hundred years ago in northern Argentina and was concealed by the State for decades with singular success: the massacre by security forces of hundreds of indigenous people who were protesting labor mistreatment and discrimination.

“We are seeking to heal the wounds and vindicate the memory of the (indigenous) peoples,” explained federal judge Zunilda Niremperger, as she opened the first hearing in Buenos Aires on May 10 in the trial for the truth of the so-called Napalpí Massacre, in which an undetermined number of indigenous people were shot to death on the morning of Jul. 19, 1924.

The trial began on Apr. 19 in the northern province of Chaco, one of the country’s poorest, near the border with Paraguay. But it was moved momentarily to the capital, home to approximately one third of the 45 million inhabitants of this South American country, to give it greater visibility.

In a highly symbolic decision, the venue chosen in Buenos Aires was the Space for Memory and Human Rights, created in the former Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), where the most notorious clandestine torture and extermination center operated during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, which kidnapped and murdered as many as 30,000 people for political reasons."What we hope is that the sentence will bring out the truth about an event that needs to be understood so that racism and xenophobia do not take hold in Argentina. People need to know about all the blood that has flowed because of contempt for indigenous people." -- Duilio Ramírez

The hearings in Buenos Aires ended Thursday May 12, and the court will reconvene in Resistencia, the capital of Chaco, on May 19, when the prosecutor’s office and the plaintiffs are to present their arguments before the sentence is handed down at an unspecified date.

“This trial is aimed at bringing out the truth that we need, and that I come to support, in the place where they brought my daughter when they kidnapped her. This shows that genocides are repeated in history,” Vera Vigevani de Jarach, seated in the front row of the courtroom, her head covered by the white scarf that identifies the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo human rights group, told IPS.

Vera, 94, is Jewish and emigrated with her family to Argentina when she was 11 years old from Italy, due to the racial persecution unleashed by fascist leader Benito Mussolini in 1939. In 1976 her only daughter, Franca Jarach, then 18 years old, was forcibly disappeared.

“Truth trials” are not a novelty in Argentina. The term was used to refer to investigations of the crimes committed by the dictatorship, carried out after 1999, when amnesty laws passed after the conviction of the military regime’s top leaders blocked the prosecution of the rest of the perpetrators.

A petition filed by a member of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (made up of mothers of victims of forced disappearance) before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) led later to an agreement with the Argentine State, which recognized the woman’s right to have the judiciary investigate the fate of her disappeared daughter, even though the amnesty laws made it impossible to punish those responsible.

Eventually, the amnesty laws were repealed, the trials resumed, and defendants were convicted and sent to prison.

Indigenous communities and human rights organizations held an Apr. 19, 2022 demonstration in Resistencia, capital of the Argentine province of Chaco, at the beginning of the trial for the truth about the Napalpí massacre. CREDIT: Chaco Secretariat of Human Rights and Gender

Historic reparations

“My grandmother was a survivor of the massacre and I grew up listening to the stories of labor exploitation in Napalpí and about what happened that day. For us this trial is a historic reparation,” Miguel Iya Gómez, a bilingual multicultural teacher who today presides over the Chaco Aboriginal Institute, a provincial agency whose mission is to improve the living conditions of native communities, told IPS.

The trial is built on the basis of official documents and journalistic coverage of the time and the videotaped testimonies of survivors of the massacre and their descendants, and of researchers of indigenous history in the Chaco.

The Argentine province of Chaco forms part of the ecoregion from which it takes its name: a vast, hot, dry, sparsely forested plain that was largely unsettled during the Spanish Conquest. Only at the end of the 19th century did the modern Argentine State launch military campaigns to subdue the indigenous people in the Chaco and impose its authority there.

Once the Chaco was conquered, many indigenous families were forced to settle in camps called “reducciones”, where they had to carry out agricultural work.

“The ‘reducciones’ operated in the Chaco between 1911 and 1956 and were concentration camps for indigenous people, who were disciplined through work,” said sociologist Marcelo Musante, a member of the Network of Researchers on Genocide and Indigenous Policies in Argentina, which brings together academics from different disciplines, at the hearing.

“When indigenous people entered the ‘reducción’, they were given clothes and farming tools, and this generated a debt that put them under great pressure. And they were not allowed to make purchases outside the stores of the ‘reducción’,” he explained.

David García, a member of the Napalpí Foundation, created in 2006 to gather information about and bring visibility to the 1924 massacre, took part in the trial in Buenos Aires. His organization was one of the driving forces behind the historic trial in Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Invaded by cotton

Historian Nicolás Iñigo Carrera said it was common for indigenous people in the Chaco to go to work temporarily in sugar mills in the neighboring provinces of Salta and Jujuy, but the scenario changed in the 1920s, when the Argentine government introduced cotton in the Chaco, to tap into the textile industry’s growing global demand.

“Then the criollo (white) settlers, who often had no laborers, demanded the guaranteed availability of indigenous labor to harvest the cotton crop, and in 1924 the government prohibited indigenous people, who refused to work on the cotton plantations, from leaving the Chaco, declaring any who left subversives,” Carrera said.

Anthropologist Lena Dávila Da Rosa said the Jul. 19, 1924 protest involved between 800 and 1000 indigenous people from Napalpí, and some 130 police officers who opened fired on them, with the support of an airplane that dropped candy so the children would go out to look for it and thus reveal the location of the protesters they were tracking down.

“It’s impossible to know exactly how many indigenous people were killed, but there were several hundred victims,” Alejandro Jasinski, a researcher with the Truth and Justice Program of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, told IPS.

“The official report mentioned four people killed in confrontations among themselves, and there was a judicial investigation that was quickly closed. All that was left were the buried memories of the communities,” he added.

The memories were revived and made public in recent years thanks in large part to the efforts of Juan Chico, an indigenous writer and researcher from the Chaco who died of COVID-19 in 2021.

“Juan started collecting oral accounts almost 20 years ago,” David García, a translator and interpreter of the language of the Qom, one of the main indigenous nations of the Chaco, told IPS. “I worked alongside him to bring the indigenous genocide to light, and in 2006 we founded an NGO that today is the Napalpí Foundation. It was a long struggle to reach this trial.”

Vera Vigevani de Jarach, a member of the human rights group Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, attended the hearing in Buenos Aires for the Napalpí indigenous massacre, held in the most notorious clandestine detention and torture center used by the 1976-1983 military dictatorship in Argentina. CREDIT: National Secretariat of Human Rights

Indigenous people in the Chaco today

Of the population of Chaco province, 3.9 percent, or 41,304 people, identified as indigenous in the last national census conducted in Argentina in 2010, which is higher than the national average of 2.4 percent.

Census data reflects the harsh living conditions of indigenous people in the Chaco and the disadvantages they face in relation to the rest of the population. More than 80 percent live in deficient housing while more than 25 percent live in critically overcrowded conditions, with more than three people per room. In addition, more than half of the households cook with firewood or charcoal.

Today, the site of the Napalpí massacre is called Colonia Aborigen Chaco and is a 20,000-hectare plot of land owned by the indigenous community where, according to official data, some 1,300 indigenous people live, from the Qom and Moqoit communities, the most numerous native groups in the Chaco along with the Wichi.

In 2019, mass graves were found there by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a prestigious organization that emerged in 1984 to identify remains of victims of the military dictatorship and that has worked all over the world.

“What we hope is that the sentence will bring out the truth about an event that needs to be understood so that racism and xenophobia do not take hold in Argentina,” Duilio Ramírez, a lawyer with the Chaco government’s Human Rights Secretariat, which is acting as plaintiff, told IPS. “People need to know about all the blood that has flowed because of contempt for indigenous people.”

“We hope that with the ruling, the Argentine State will take responsibility for what happened and that this will translate into public policies of reparations for the indigenous communities,” he said.

Elizabeth Cuenca, Jesusa Flores, Flora Huamán and Ángela Oviedo (from left to right) stand in the agroecological garden they tend with 10 other women in Rodrigo Bueno, a poor neighborhood in Buenos Aires. In the background loom the high-rises of Puerto Madero, the most modern and sought-after neighborhood in the Argentine capital. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 21 2022 (IPS)

The space consists of just 300 square meters full of green where there is an agro-ecological vegetable garden and nursery, which are the work and dream of 14 women. Behind it can be seen the imposing silhouettes of the high rises that are a symbol of the most modern and sought-after part of Argentina’s capital city.

But the Vivera Orgánica (Organic Nursery) forms part of another reality: it is located in a low-income neighborhood which has been transformed in recent years thanks to the work of local residents and to government support.

“We started with the idea of growing some fresh vegetables for our families. And today we are a cooperative that opens its doors to the neighborhood and also sells to people who come from all over the city, and to companies,” Peruvian immigrant Elizabeth Cuenca, who came to Buenos Aires from her country in 2010 and settled in this neighborhood on the banks of the La Plata River, tells IPS.

The Barrio Rodrigo Bueno emerged as a shantytown in the 1980s on flood-prone land in the south of Buenos Aires.

It is just a few blocks from Puerto Madero, an area occupied for decades by abandoned port warehouses, which since the 1990s has been renovated and gentrified, experiencing a real estate boom that has made it the most sought-after by the wealthy in Buenos Aires.

The contrast between the exposed brick houses of Rodrigo Bueno, separated by narrow, often muddy corridors, and the slick glassy 40- or 50-story skyscrapers built between the wide streets of Puerto Madero became a powerful image of inequality in Greater Buenos Aires, a megacity of nearly 15 million inhabitants.

However, today things are completely different in Rodrigo Bueno, named after a popular singer who suffered a tragic death in 2000.

It is one of the four shantytowns in the city (out of a total of about 40, according to official figures) that are in the process of urbanization – or “socio-urban integration”, as the Buenos Aires city government describes the process.

Since 2017, streets have been widened and paved, infrastructure for public service delivery was brought in, and 46 buildings with 612 new apartments were built, which now house nearly half of the neighborhood’s roughly 1,500 families.

Many of the old precarious houses were demolished while others still stand alongside the brand-new apartments, awarded to their new owners with 30-year loans.

“When the urbanization process began to be discussed, we started having skills and trades workshops and there was one on gardening, which was attended by many women who, although we lived in the same neighborhood, did not know each other,” says Cuenca.

“That’s how we learned, we organized ourselves and were able to get a space for the Vivera, which we inaugurated in December 2019. Today we sell vegetables and especially seedlings for people who want to start their own vegetable gardens at home. We don’t earn wages, but we generate an income,” she adds.

The paving of streets is progressing in the Rodrigo Bueno neighborhood, which first emerged as a shantytown on the banks of the La Plata River, where previously almost all the houses were accessed through narrow corridors, most of them made of exposed bricks and many of them built by the families themselves. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Bringing home gardens to life – and more

In just over two years, the women of the Vivera Orgánica have achieved some milestones, such as the sale of 7,000 seedlings of different vegetables to the Toyota automobile company, which gave them as gifts to its employees.

They have also sold agroecological vegetables to the swank Hilton Hotel in Buenos Aires, which is located in Puerto Madero, and have set up vegetable gardens on land owned by Enel, one of the largest electricity distributors.

But they have also earned respect from the public. “The incredible thing is that the pandemic was a great help for us, because many people who couldn’t leave their homes started to become interested in eating healthier or growing their own food. We received a lot of orders,” says Jesusa Flores, a Bolivian immigrant who is one of the founders of the Vivera.

She was working as a cleaner and caring for the elderly in family homes, when she lost her jobs due to the restrictions on movement aimed at curbing the COVID pandemic.

“La Vivera has been very important for me, because it is near our homes and we can always come here,” says Flores.

The nursery receives no government subsidies and the 14 women earn little money from it, so almost all of them have other jobs. But they are all confident that they have the potential to grow and that the nursery will become their only job in the future.

“During the worst period of the pandemic, we put together 15 boxes a day with 12 seedlings to sell, but we received 60 orders a day. We couldn’t keep up with demand,” says Angela Oviedo from Peru, who is also a member of the group.

Several women prepare the products of the Vivera Orgánica, next to part of a mural painted on the door of the container that serves as the office of their small business in a low-income neighborhood in the Argentine capital. CREDIT: Ministry of Human Development and Habitat of the City of Buenos Aires

The hurdles thrown up by informal employment

The Buenos Aires city government provides technical support for the Vivera Orgánica as part of the neighborhood’s socio-urban integration process.

Low-income sectors in Argentina have been hard-hit since the process of devaluation of the peso began four years ago, accompanied by high inflation, leading to a steep plunge in purchasing power, especially for workers in the informal economy.

In 2020 the crisis was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the economy to shrink by 10 percent. And while almost all of the losses were recovered in 2021, the alarming fact is that most of the jobs that have been created since then are informal.

According to data from the Argentine Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security, in January this year there were 6,034,637 registered workers in the private sector, down from 6,273,972 in January 2018, before the start of the recession.

The Buenos Aires city government’s Ministry of Human Development and Habitat estimates that there are some 500,000 workers in the informal economy in the capital, who have been the hardest hit by inflation, which reached 6.7 percent last March, the highest rate for a single month in Argentina in the last 20 years.

Many analysts warn that poverty, which in the second half of last year fell from 40.6 percent to 37.3 percent according to the National Institute of Statistics and Census, will grow again in 2022.

A picture of some of the buildings constructed by the Buenos Aires city government in the Rodrigo Bueno neighborhood. A total of 612 new apartments have already been delivered, through 30-year loans, to the families that lived closest to the river and were most exposed to pollution in this poor neighborhood in the Argentine capital. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Assistance in joining the formal sector

“In poor neighborhoods there are many businesses, but the problem is that because of the situation in the informal economy, they face enormous hurdles in order to grow and to be able to connect with the formal market,” explains Belén Barreto, undersecretary for the Development of Human Potential in the government of Buenos Aires.

“One issue has to do with productivity: in general, the entrepreneurs work in their own homes and are not able to scale up significantly. That is why we support the Vivera with technical assistance, so the project can reach production levels enabling it to sell in the city’s formal value chains,” she adds in an interview with IPS.

Barreto says that another obstacle has to do with marketing: entrepreneurs find it difficult to sell their products outside the environment in which they live, despite the growth of on-line sales.

“That is why our focus is on linking these small businesses with companies so that they can become their suppliers in order to earn a more sustainable income and scale up their production through a new market. Last Christmas we held business roundtables and managed to get more companies to buy gifts from the social and popular economy, for a total of 17 million pesos (about 150,000 dollars),” she adds.

Finally, to address the problem of access to credit for informal workers, in 2021 the Buenos Aires city government created the Social Development Fund (Fondes), a public-private fund for the social and popular economy.

The steady growth of the informal economy also prompted the local government to create last year the Registry of Productive Units of the Popular and Social Economy, which allows access to tax benefits and has so far registered some 3,000 self-managed units.

The transformation of the neighborhood has also brought greater opportunities for local residents, who are often victims of discrimination and prejudice.

Cuenca, for example, explains that “we didn’t used to have an address to give when we were looking for a job, and it was very unlikely that we would get called back.”

She sees the Vivera Orgánica as another tool for a more dignified life: “This project is part of the neighborhood and part of us; we now feel that we have different prospects.”

Aerial view of the biogas plant located in the industrial park of Zárate, a municipality in eastern Argentina, featuring three large biodigesters. CREDIT: Courtesy of BGA Energía Sustentable

By Daniel Gutman
ZÁRATE, Argentina , Mar 31 2022 (IPS)

Three giant concrete cylinders with inflated membrane roofs are a strange sight in the industrial park of Zárate, a world of factories 90 kilometers from Buenos Aires that heavy trucks drive in and out of all day long. They are the heart of a plant that is about to start producing energy from agro-industrial waste, for the first time in Argentina.

“This is the first plant that will generate biogas with waste from the food industry. For example, fats from dairy companies or leftovers from meat processing plants where beef, chicken and pork are processed,” Ezequiel Weibel, one of the partners in the company that designed and executed the project, tells IPS.

“Until now, in this country we were used to biogas production using livestock effluents or crop residues, but not other kinds of organic waste,” adds Weibel, as he walks around the site and points to the sector where dozens of gigantic bags of pig blood meal are stockpiled.

Weibel is a young agricultural engineer who in 2011 created the company BGA Energía Sustentable together with his fellow student Martín Pinos, with the support of IncUBAgro.

IncUBAgro is a program of the School of Agronomy at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), which encourages innovative projects aimed at solving agricultural, environmental and productive problems.

The plant’s three biodigesters have a capacity of 12,000 cubic meters and are set up to receive some 146 wet and 35 dry tons of waste per day from the eastern province of Buenos Aires. In the huge tanks the waste will be stored without oxygen so that the bacteria can do their work.

The organic matter will undergo an accelerated decomposition process, which will convert it into biogas, composed of 60 percent methane and 40 percent carbon dioxide.

The biogas, in turn, will be fed to a generator that will produce electricity and inject it into the national power grid, which will distribute it throughout the country. The plant, which has an installed capacity of 1.5 megawatts (MW), is already completed and is only awaiting the clearing of the final red tape to start operating.

The plant is located at the end of a short dirt road about 10 kilometers from the highway to Buenos Aires, within the Zárate district, on the banks of the Paraná River, on an area of one and a half hectares.

Ezequiel Weibel (l) and Ezequiel Tamburrini stand with two of the three biodigesters in the background in Zárate, 90 kilometers from the capital of Argentina, which will convert waste from the agri-food industry into biogas. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

A better solution for organic waste management

“This is a family business that was founded by my father,” Agustín Patricio, one of the shareholders of Eittor, the company that owns the plant, tells IPS. “We have been treating industrial waste for more than 20 years. The organic waste was mainly used to generate compost, to be used as fertilizer…even though we knew it could be used to produce energy.”

Through international trade fairs, for several years the company had been following solutions for recycling and reusing waste for energy production developed in countries such as Italy and Germany.

“We are increasingly aware of the scarcity of energy and the pollution caused by its generation and use, and we believe that the idea of producing biogas with organic waste is a better solution,” Patricio adds.

The opportunity to carry out the project came when public policies in favor of the energy transition were adopted in Argentina – long dependent on natural gas and oil production – much later than in other countries in the region.

In September 2015 Congress gave an important signal in favor of clean energies by passing a law to promote renewable sources of electricity.

The new law set the goal for 20 percent of Argentina’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2025. It also established that renewables would have dispatch priority, so they are the first to be injected into the grid when different sources are available.

As a result, on days of lower demand, the proportion of renewables is higher. According to official figures, the historical peak occurred on Sept. 26, 2021, when 28.84 percent of electricity consumption was covered by renewables.

This electricity generator will be powered by the biogas produced from agro-industrial waste. The Eittor company’s plant, located in the municipality of Zárate, will be connected to the Argentine national power grid. Renewable sources provided 13 percent of the electricity consumed in Argentina in 2021. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Renovar’s spring

With the momentum from the new law, the government launched – between 2016 and 2018 – the Renovar Program, which held three tenders for the construction of renewable energy projects.

The big incentive for private investors was that the purchase of electricity was guaranteed for a 20-year term at a fixed rate in dollars and a fund was set up to ensure payment, with guarantees from the World Bank, the Argentine Investment and Foreign Trade Bank and other international and national credit agencies.

Thus, renewable energies, which provided an insignificant proportion of Argentina’s electricity until 2015, experienced explosive growth from 2016, to the point that in 2021 they covered 13 percent of total demand, according to official data from the energy ministry.

Today, the country has 187 operational renewable energy projects with a total installed capacity of 5182 MW. Most involve wind power (74 percent), followed by solar power (13 percent), small hydroelectric projects up to 50 MW (seven percent), and bioenergies (six percent), such as the Zárate plant, which was one of the successful bidders in the last of the Renovar Program’s three tenders.

The Argentine electricity system has a total capacity of almost 43,000 MW and continues to be supported mainly by natural gas and oil-fired thermal power plants and large hydroelectric power plants.

However, the brief clean energy spring in Argentina is over: there are currently no new renewable energy projects.

Moreover, 33 projects awarded under the program that had not started due to lack of financing were cancelled this year.

“The Renovar Program was successful from its launch until 2018, when Argentina was hit by a serious financial crisis, foreign credit dried up and the government turned to the International Monetary Fund,” Gerardo Rabinovich, vice president of the Instituto Argentina de Energía General Mosconi, a private research center, tells IPS.

Ezequiel Weibel stands inside one of the biodigesters of the biogas plant that his company, BGA Energía Sustentable, built in Zárate in northeastern Argentina to use agro-industrial waste. The young engineer developed his renewable energy enterprise with the support of the innovative projects incubator of the Faculty of Agronomy at the University of Buenos Aires. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“This meant that the projects, even some of the ones already awarded, were no longer financially feasible. Foreign investors left and there is no capital market in Argentina to finance these capital-intensive projects,” says Rabinovich.

The expert points out that an additional problem is the saturation of the electric transportation system, which is especially important in a large nation like Argentina, where big urban areas are concentrated in the center of the country.

The Eittor plant is thus unlikely to be replicated for a long time in this Southern Cone country, which is the third largest economy in the region after Brazil and Mexico.

“This is a double solution, because energy is generated at the same time the environmental problem of waste disposal is solved,” Ezequiel Tamburrini, head of the biogas plant, tells IPS.

“I would say that in Argentina there is no collective awareness of the environmental problem of waste generation, and most people do not know that energy can be generated with waste. That is why we have to bring visibility to this type of initiative in the country,” he argues.

Part of the team of young entrepreneurs of the Maleza Cosmética Natural cooperative pose for photos at their laboratory in the Villa Lugano neighborhood in southern Buenos Aires, Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 2 2022 (IPS)

“We started making shampoos and soaps in the kitchen of a friend’s house in 2017. We were five or six girls without jobs, looking for a collective solution, and today we are here,” says Letsy Villca, standing between the white walls of the spacious laboratory of Maleza Cosmética Natural, a cooperative that brings together 44 women in their early twenties in the Argentine capital.

Maleza has come a long way in a short time and currently produces 400 bottles of shampoo and 600 bars of soap a week, as well as facial creams and makeup remover, among other products. They are sold across Argentina through the cooperative’s own digital platform and other marketing channels.

The cooperative is a powerful example of the so-called popular economy, through which millions of people unable to access a formal job or a bank loan fight against the lack of opportunities, in the midst of the overwhelming economic crisis in this South American country, where more than 40 percent of the population of nearly 46 million people lives in poverty.

The National Registry of Workers in the Popular Economy (Renatep) lists 2,830,520 people who earn their living from street vending, waste recycling, construction, cleaning, or working in soup kitchens.

A glance at Renatep provides a reflection of which social groups face the greatest disadvantages in the labor market, as there is a majority of women (57 percent) and young people between 18 and 35 years of age (62 percent).

The picture is completed when the numbers are compared with those of registered private sector wage-earners, where both women and young people are in the minority – 33 and 39 percent, respectively.

As part of its social assistance program focused on supporting the popular economy, the Ministry of Social Development granted Maleza a subsidy that enabled it to purchase the glass tubes, thermometers, oil extractors, steel tables and office equipment that today furnish what was once the dismantled warehouse of an old factory.

The young women rented the 213-square-meter premises in January 2021.

By moving out of the kitchen of a house and into a spacious, well-conditioned place of their own, they were able to increase production by 500 percent due to better working conditions and the possibility of stockpiling raw materials.

It took the young women themselves three months to renovate the property, which now has a meeting room, offices, bathrooms, dressing rooms and a large laboratory.

Letsy Villca (left) and Brisa Medina show some of the products made by Maleza. The members of the cooperative work four hours a day for an income equivalent to half the minimum monthly wage, paid by an employment incentive program of the Ministry of Social Development, whose amount will change as their business begins to make a profit. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Changing the future

“’Maleza’ or weed is a plant that is pulled out of the ground and grows back again. A plant that is rejected, but resists, because it is strong and always grows back. That’s why we chose the name,” Brisa Medina, 22, explains to IPS.

The project goes beyond production: the cooperative’s laboratory is also a space for social and community meetings to fight for rights and generate collective awareness.

Maleza’s facility is located on the southside of the city of Buenos Aires, in Villa Lugano, a neighborhood of factories and low-income housing, far from the most sought-after areas of the Argentine capital.

The members of the cooperative – mainly women but also two men – live some 25 blocks (about 2.3 kilometers) from the plant, in Villa 20, one of the city’s largest shantytowns, home to more than 30,000 people.

Most of those who live in Villa 20 are Bolivian and Paraguayan immigrants who work as textile workers for clothing manufacturers in precarious workshops set up in their own homes.

The trade is passed down from generation to generation, as are the harsh working conditions, in exchange for remuneration that is fixed unilaterally by the buyers, without the right to negotiate.

“We wanted to do something else: to have a project that was our own, that we liked, with a decent place to work, that would allow us to study and where we could use our knowledge, because many of us were classmates at a chemical technical school, but it is almost impossible to find a job,” Letsy, 22, tells IPS.

To their technical know-how, acquired through different courses after high school, the young women at Maleza added the ancestral knowledge handed down by their families, to manufacture cosmetics that are free of polluting chemicals and are produced in an environmentally friendly way.

“Since I was a child, I used to watch my mother prepare and sell medicinal herbs and natural products. That’s when I started to learn,” says Ruth Ortiz, who is 23 years old and has a four-year-old daughter.

Ruth adds that the goal was to make a product with which they could dream big in terms of sales, as many in the Villa earn some extra income by baking bread or cooking meals, but sell their goods only to neighbors.

“As soon as we felt ready, we started selling at street fairs and gradually improved our products and packaging,” she says.

The image is from a year ago, when the young cooperative members renovated the warehouse of an old factory to turn it into a cosmetics laboratory. CREDIT: Courtesy of Maleza Cosmética Natural

For many of them the cooperative was more of a necessity than a choice, she acknowledges: “It is very difficult for anyone to get a job, but it is harder for people from the Villa. When you say where you live, they don’t want to hire you.”

Ruth is the only member of the cooperative who is a mother. She started working when her daughter was an eight-month-old baby. She often takes her to the laboratory and they all take turns caring for her, since one of the fundamental premises of Maleza is that women should be able to work outside the home, generate their own income and not be caught in the trap of unpaid housework.

Wages paid by social assistance

Brisa, who used to work as a cashier in a hairdresser’s shop, was left without a job in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and all non-essential businesses in Argentina were ordered to close. “Maleza was my salvation,” she says.

After the socioeconomic catastrophe of the first year of the pandemic, 2021 was a year of economic recovery in Argentina, although marked by an alarming level of precariousness in labor: official data show that almost three million jobs were created last year, but almost all of them are unregistered employees (1,329,000) and self-employed (1,463,000).

Informal or unregistered and self-employed workers are also the hardest hit by the loss of purchasing power in an economy with an inflation rate of over 50 percent a year.

Against this backdrop, Maleza is looking for a way forward. The factory’s current income is enough to pay the rent of the laboratory plus electricity, water and internet services and other expenses, but still not enough to pay the members wages.

Many of the young women in Maleza’s cooperative were classmates at a technical-chemical school and are using what they learned, as well as the knowledge about medicinal plants passed down to them by their families. CREDIT: Courtesy of Maleza Cosmética Natural

“We are looking for ways to lower costs and increase profitability. Although sales have not yet reached the levels we believe they could, we are making progress in advertising and opening new marketing channels, so we hope to turn a profit by the middle of this year,” Julia Argnani, another member of the cooperative, tells IPS.

Today, Maleza is divided into four work areas: administration, production, marketing and communication, which includes the design and administration of social networking. It also seeks to be a tool for empowering other social cooperatives, by delivering, for example, its products in reusable bags manufactured by another group of women.

All the members of Maleza have a fixed income thanks to the fact that they are beneficiaries of Potenciar Trabajo, a plan for socio-productive inclusion and local development administered by the Ministry of Social Development.

The program gives Renatep registrants half of Argentina’s minimum wage: 16,500 pesos (approximately 150 dollars) a month, in exchange for a four-hour workday.

In this Southern Cone country, 45 percent of the population receives some form of social assistance through a vast network that includes direct economic assistance, food aid, subsidized electric and gas rates and vocational training.

In the case of Potenciar Trabajo, it is currently paid to 1,200,000 informal sector workers, according to data supplied to IPS by the Ministry of Social Development. The 150 dollars a month they are given amounts to a quarter of the income needed to keep a family of four out of poverty, according to the official statistics institute.

“Our goal is also to be proud of where we started from and to show that a women’s cooperative like ours can make quality products,” Julia explains.

A garbage picker walks down Santa Fe Avenue, one of the main avenues in Buenos Aires. Argentina suffered a deep economic and social decline in 2018 and 2019, which was accentuated in 2020 by the pandemic. Although in 2021 there was a rebound, the most vulnerable did not benefit. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 2 2022 (IPS)

Accustomed for decades to recurring economic crises, and hit hard in recent years by a steady loss of purchasing power, Argentines were informed on Friday Jan. 28 of a last-minute agreement with the IMF which, in the words of center-left President Alberto Fernández, takes “the noose off their necks”.

The understanding, which will refinance a gigantic 45 billion dollar loan that the IMF (International Monetary Fund) gave Argentina in 2018, was reached within hours of the first installment falling due in 2022. Argentina owed 18 billion dollars in payments this year, which the country could not afford and which have now been postponed until 2026.

After exhausting other sources of financing and resorting to the IMF in 2018, Argentina underwent a pronounced economic and social decline, which led to then center-right President Mauricio Macri’s failure to win re-election in late 2019.

When recovery was expected in 2020, the country was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and a historic collapse of more than 10 percent of the economy. And although there was a rebound in 2021, it did not benefit the most vulnerable, as inflation exceeded 50 percent and was even higher in the case of staple foods.

This South American country of 45 million inhabitants which is the third largest economy in Latin America has, according to official data, a poverty rate of more than 40 percent, a proportion that climbs to 54 percent among children under 14 – a phenomenon that is partly explained by the higher proportion of large families among the poor.

However, Argentina was heading for an even greater economic and social catastrophe, warned the president, if it did not reach an agreement with the IMF.

“We had an unpayable debt that left us with no present and no future, and now we have a reasonable agreement that will allow us to grow,” said Fernández.

Thus, the IMF is once again lending money to Argentina to pay its debt, thanks to an agreement subject to quarterly reviews of the national accounts that -according to the government- do not imply a structural adjustment, like the many that the country has experienced in the context of its traumatic relationship with the multilateral financial organization.

“The best thing about this agreement with the Fund is what was avoided,” economist Andrés Borenstein, professor of public finance at the public University of Buenos Aires (UBA), told IPS in Buenos Aires.

“Without this understanding, the country would run out of financing and the consequences would be paid by those who have the least, because there would be more inflation, a greater decline in the real value of wages and a sharper devaluation of the currency,” he explained.

The government sought to allay the fears of the public who, based on past experience, associate agreements with the IMF with public spending cuts that lead to a decrease in economic activity and to general impoverishment.

“Compared to previous agreements that Argentina signed, this one does not contemplate restrictions that postpone our development,” said Fernández. “There will be no drop in real spending and there will be an increase in public works investment by the national government.”

Analysts, however, do not take the president’s words at face value. “It is true that the agreement is quite reasonable for the situation Argentina was in, but, as in any IMF program, there will be adjustments,” said Borenstein.

“Sharp increases in utility rates are coming and that will have an indirect impact on inflation and consumption,” he added.

Indeed, in a brief communiqué, the IMF pointed out that it had agreed with the Argentine government to reduce the large state subsidies to energy companies, with the aim of gradually reducing the fiscal deficit – which will increase the burden

Argentine President Alberto Fernández announced on Jan. 28 the agreement with the International Monetary Fund which, he said, took “the noose off the country’s neck”. CREDIT: Casa Rosada

on society.

Between realism and skepticism

Although the agreement was described as positive by most economists and even by the opposition, it sparked an internal crisis in the government, with one wing believing that the negotiation was too soft.

The clearest sign of the crisis was the resignation of Máximo Kirchner (son of former president and current vice-president Cristina Fernández Kirchner) as president of the ruling party’s bloc in the Chamber of Deputies, with a letter in which he stated that the IMF has been “the key trigger for every economic crisis since the return of democracy” in Argentina in 1983.

On the street, skepticism prevailed. In response to questions from IPS, the most frequently heard comment was that this news will not change anything for ordinary people, who see inflation as their main daily problem and believe it will continue to be so.

Juan Galíndez, who commutes almost two hours a day from a poor suburb of Buenos Aires to the city center to watch over cars parked outside a club, told IPS: “I don’t care about the IMF agreement because I know it won’t change anything for me. As long as I can get a few pesos to live on, I’m fine.” Galíndez works in the informal economy and depends on tips from customers of the club.

The plight of the poor in Argentina, however, is cushioned by a strong social assistance scheme that benefits almost 45 percent of the population in its various forms.

“Argentina has had a decade of economic stagnation and 30 years of a more structural deterioration,” Agustín Salvia, director of the Social Debt Observatory at the private Argentine Catholic University (UCA), told IPS. “Since 2018, what we have seen is a debt crisis to which the pandemic was added and this had very harsh consequences: it raised poverty levels from 35 to 48 percent at its peak, in 2020.”

The expert said that as of 2021, when the COVID vaccines began to arrive, restrictions on movement were relaxed and a process of economic recovery began, and poverty decreased although it has not returned to pre-pandemic levels.

A clothing and footwear store in downtown Buenos Aires tries to attract customers with big sales, despite constantly rising prices in Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“It stabilized at around 40 percent, because there is little investment from small or large companies that generate quality employment. What is growing the most is precarious informal work, with low wages that lose against inflation, and self-employment,” said Salvia.

The inflation that hits the poor especially hard is fundamentally driven, according to economists, by a fiscal deficit that in 2021 reached three percentage points of gross domestic product (GDP) and that is difficult to lower without social costs, in a country that spends 40 percent of its budget on pensions and other social security benefits.

In the understanding with the IMF, a path of progressive reduction of government spending was established, which postpones the zero deficit goal until 2025, in the next presidential term, which begins in December 2023.

“The agreement imposes some conditions of course, but this time the IMF is not demanding structural reforms that affect pensions or labor rights, as it has in the past, which means that they are a little more lax,” said economist Martín Kalos.

Kalos told IPS that reducing the fiscal deficit was a path that Argentina was going to have to go down with or without IMF surveillance: “While no country likes to be audited on its sovereign policy decisions, this was an agenda that Argentina was not going to be able to escape.”

Aida Valdez stands outside her home in the Guaraní indigenous community of Yariguarenda, in northern Argentina, in front of the wood-burning oven she uses to cook - an example of energy poverty in vulnerable rural communities in Latin America. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Dec 15 2021 (IPS)

The effects of the covid-19 pandemic and high energy prices have had an impact on the consumption of polluting fuels in Latin America and the Caribbean, exacerbating energy poverty in the region.

In some countries there is evidence of an increase in the use of charcoal and firewood. But there have been few studies to reflect this, because it is a recent development and there has been a tardy focus on the behavior of vulnerable sectors in response to the new realities they face.

Macarena San Martín, a researcher at the non-governmental Energy Poverty Network (RedPE) in Chile, said the phenomenon goes beyond the notion of access to electric power, and includes aspects such as the quality and affordability of energy.

“In all Latin American countries, the problem is considered one-dimensional, but multiple factors must be considered,” she told IPS from Santiago. “Access has been seen as a question of: can you plug something in? If you can, it’s solved. While today they have access, that does not necessarily guarantee that energy poverty has been eliminated. There are also problems of efficiency.”

In central Chile, many people use kerosene, a hydrocarbon derivative, and natural gas for household use and heating.

Due to the pandemic, a Basic Services Law has been in force since May, by means of which vulnerable electricity and gas users may defer payments, without the risk of being cut off. But this benefit expires on Dec. 31, so the beneficiaries will have to start paying off what they owe next February, up to a maximum of 48 monthly installments.

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) establishes that a household suffers from energy poverty when it lacks equitable access to adequate, reliable, non-polluting and safe energy services to cover its basic needs and sustain the human and economic development of its members, and spends more than 10 percent of its income on energy costs.

Although access to electricity averages more than 90 percent in the region, in rural areas and urban peripheries more than 10 percent of households lack electric power in some cases, such as in Bolivia, Honduras, Haiti and Nicaragua, according to September data from ECLAC.

This charcoal factory in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico is an example of an ecological initiative that has not managed to curb the consumption of coal, despite rising prices, or the consumption of hydrocarbons. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Latin America and the Caribbean is the most unequal region in the world, according to international organizations, and this is reflected in the energy sector. While a minority can afford to install solar panels on their homes or drive an electric or hybrid gasoline-electric car, the majority depend on dirty energy or polluting transport.

When spending is highly unequal, as in this region, the resulting energy inequality tends to grow, concluded a 2020 report by three researchers from the School of Earth and Environment at the private University of Leeds in the UK.

Another report, entitled “Las luces son del pueblo (the lights belong to the people); Energy, access and energy poverty” and published in November by the non-governmental Observatorio Petrolero Sur, based in Argentina, puts the number of people lacking access to electricity in this region at almost 22 million, equivalent to 3.3 percent of the total population of 667 million people.

In addition, 12 percent of the region’s population use non-clean sources for energy services, as in Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua and Paraguay.

In the residential sector, the energy mix is based on kerosene, natural gas, firewood, electricity and liquefied gas.

The beauty of the snowy streets of Coyhaique, the capital of the southern Patagonian region of Aysén, belies the fact that it is the most polluted city in Chile, mainly due to the use of wet firewood to heat homes in an area where temperatures plunge in the wintertime. CREDIT: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

In Argentina, official figures indicate that more than one-fifth of the population lives in energy poverty, despite subsidized electric and gas rates.

In December 2019, shortly before the outbreak of the covid pandemic, the Social Solidarity and Productive Reactivation Law came into force in the Southern Cone country, which includes a revision of gas and electricity tariffs to avoid excessive increases, for the benefit of the economically vulnerable population.

Jonatan Núñez, a researcher at the Institute for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the public University of Buenos Aires, links the lack of access to electric service in the region to income level.

There is a link “to formal employment, which not only guarantees access to a certain level of income, but also to renting housing in certain areas, and the possibility of gaining access to areas with better energy infrastructure. In poor neighborhoods, there is no access to electricity or gas networks. They are put in place manually and that generates blackouts or precarious conditions that can cause fires,” he told IPS from Buenos Aires.

In Mexico, poverty rose as a result of the pandemic, affecting up to 58.2 million people, or 43.5 percent of the total population, according to official data released in September. This meant a more than six percent increase in poverty compared to 2018, despite the millions of government social programs aimed at tackling chronic poverty in the country.

In urban areas, liquefied petroleum gas and gasoline experienced the largest price hikes, while in rural areas, coal and firewood reported the highest increases, perhaps as a substitute for fossil fuels.

Due to the rise in gas prices, driven by international prices, the Mexican government created the state-owned company Gas Bienestar, which sells natural gas at a subsidized price with a ceiling.

At most service stations in Brazil, consumers can choose between gasoline and ethanol at the pump. But consumers only use the biofuel when its price is favorable compared to gasoline. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Brazil, where poverty was already on the rise before the pandemic, is also facing higher domestic gas prices and the consequent increase in firewood consumption.

Brazil is a pioneer of the energy transition because of its promotion of clean energy and the low level of polluting fuels burnt in households. But in the region’s largest economy the burning of firewood has overtaken bottled gas since 2018, a trend that has been exacerbated since then, according to figures from the government’s Energy Research Company (EPE).

The existence of subsidies and frozen rates makes it more difficult to estimate energy inequality, as they do not reflect real costs, according to the experts consulted.

Energy poverty is a hurdle in the way of achieving the goals of the international Sustainable Energy for All Initiative, the program to be implemented during the United Nations Decade of Sustainable Energy for All, from 2014 to 2024.

This initiative seeks to ensure universal access to modern energy services and to double the global rate of energy efficiency improvements and the share of renewable energies in the global energy mix.

In addition, energy poverty stands in the way of reaching goal seven of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aims to ” Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all” as part of the 2030 Agenda, adopted in 2015 by the members of the United Nations.

San Martín, the Chilean expert, said governments face a “complex problem” because there are many demands and difficulties.

“The planet is not infinite. The challenge must be adapted to the situation of each society and to territorial and cultural conditions. We have to work on how we use energy. The energy transition must consider access, quality and equality and it must be taken into account that we cannot continue spending beyond the planet’s capacity,” she said.

Núñez from Argentina said the solution is to consider energy as a right rather than a commodity.

“The response has been quite weak. Most of the energy consumed comes from gas-fired thermal power plants and hydroelectric plants, which are granted in concession to private companies. Services are still in the hands of private companies,” he stressed.

Francisco Montes shows the cement tank where he collects rainwater in El Impenetrable. Scarce rainfall in the last two years has created serious trouble for the inhabitants of this four-million-hectare ecoregion, who are scattered around the Chaco region of northern Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
GENERAL GÜEMES, Argentina , Nov 2 2021 (IPS)

Next to the brick or adobe houses of El Impenetrable, a wild area of forest and grasslands in northern Argentina, loom huge plastic barrels where rainwater collected from the corrugated iron roofs of the houses is stored. However, the barrels are empty, because it has hardly rained for two years, local residents complain.

“Things have been very bad recently. It rained one day in September, but very little,” said Francisco Montes, who has lived for 35 years in a house in a large open area in the middle of a monotonous landscape of trees and bushes, several kilometres from his nearest neighbours.

On the dirt road leading to his house, it is rare to run into a person or a vehicle, but it is easy to come across cows, goats, horses and even pigs, since domestic animals are raised loose in this area, to roam freely in their arduous search for green pastures.

Located in the Argentine portion of the Chaco – the great sparsely forested plain covering more than one million square kilometres, shared with Paraguay and Bolivia – El Impenetrable was so named not only because of the thick brush and the scarcity of roads.

The ecosystem covering some four million hectares also owes its name precisely to the lack of water, which turns most of the vegetation a yellowish hue and is made more dramatic by the combination with temperatures that can be suffocating.

From droughts to floods

Rainfall in the area usually comes in just three months, during the southern hemisphere summer. And rains have been scarce for as long as anyone can remember in this part of the Chaco.

But for two years now the situation has been worse than usual, because the drought has been especially bad, after severe flooding in 2018 and 2019 that wrought havoc among local residents and their livestock, when it rained three times the historical average.

In the absence of piped water, Montes, who lives on his remote property with his wife, is one of the best equipped in the area to deal with the complex scenario, because in his field he not only has a large cement tank with a capacity to store thousands of litres of rainwater, which lately has been of little use. He also has an 11-metre deep well that allows them to extract groundwater.

But this is not enough either. “The water is very brackish. You would have to go at least 20 metres down to get good water,” he told IPS.

Montes, however, at the age of 73, has the resignation of someone who has lived a lifetime knowing that water is a scarce commodity. “Back then we used to take water directly from the river or from a well, when it was available,” he recalled.

He was referring to one of the branches of the Bermejo, one of the biggest rivers in the La Plata basin, which originates in Bolivia and passes about 500 metres from his field. The Bermejito – or “little Bermejo”, as the branch is known locally – is one of the few rivers in El Impenetrable, and the vegetation on its banks is a deep green colour that is not usual in this region.

Goats cross a dirt road in El Impenetrable, an ecosystem of four million hectares, where livestock is raised loose, to roam the area in search of pasture. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

A few kilometres from Montes’ home, near the entrance to the El Impenetrable National Park -a 128,000-hectare protected area created in 2014 – there is a 160 square metre rainwater collector sheet metal roof facility with two tanks that can store up to 40,000 litres.

It was built in 2019 to supply local residents, as part of the “Native Forests and Community” programme.

This Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development programme was supported by a 58.7-million-dollar loan from the World Bank and 2.5 million dollars from the national government and seeks to generate community roots in areas where there are no sources of employment.

Native Forests and Community benefits vulnerable rural communities, both indigenous and non-indigenous, through infrastructure works and training for the sustainable management of natural resources.

One of the programme’s priorities is to promote the use of renewable energies, and it has installed solar panels for electricity generation and solar stoves in areas where the most commonly used fuel is firewood.

According to official figures, the initiative has so far benefited 1,200 families from 60 communities in different provinces of the country, most of them in El Chaco and the rest of northern Argentina.

A community solar panel and rainwater harvesting roof installation near the El Impenetrable National Park in northern Argentina was built in 2019 by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, with support from the World Bank. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Esteban Argañaraz lives only 100 metres from the rainwater collector. Sometimes he goes to fetch water from the community tanks, although he cannot get enough there either, so he resorts to buying drinking water in the nearest town, Miraflores, which is 60 kilometres from his home down a dusty dirt road.

“This year I brought an 8,000-litre water tank. It cost 700 pesos (about seven dollars), but the complicated part was transporting it, which cost 4,000 pesos (40 dollars),” Argañaraz explained to IPS, while showing the well that was dug in front of his house to accumulate water for the animals and irrigation, which is completely dry.

Argañaraz, 60, and his wife have a garden at home to grow vegetables and fruits. But they have had to practically abandon it since 2020, due to the lack of water. Skinny cows and goats are another reflection of the severe drought.

The inhabitants of El Impenetrable rarely manage to sell any animals and almost everyone survives on social assistance. This ecosystem – environmentally degraded by the extractive economy – is part of Argentina’s Northeast region, which has the highest poverty rates in the country, with 45.4 percent of the population living in poverty.

But the situation is complicated in urban areas as well. In fact, the provincial capital Resistencia, with a population of 300,000, has the highest poverty rate in Argentina, at 51.9 percent.

Unpredictability is the rule

“The main characteristic of rainfall in (Argentina’s Chaco province) is its high variability: there are cycles of dry, normal and wet years. The other important aspect is that most of it is concentrated in one part of the year: in the case of El Impenetrable, the rainy season lasts only three months,” water resources engineer Hugo Rohrmann, former president of the Chaco Provincial Water Administration, told IPS.

Jorge Luna, a family farmer raising cows, goats and pigs in El Impenetrable in northern Argentina, stands next to plastic barrels where he collects rainwater and a solar panel that provides electricity. Rainwater harvesting is a very limited solution for families in the El Impenetrable ecoregion due to the lack of rain. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The expert pointed to another important fact: rainfall in El Impenetrable is usually between 600 and 800 millimetres per year, but evaporation, due to heat that can reach 50 degrees C in summer, is much higher – up to 1,100 millimetres.

“That is why neither wetlands nor aquifers with the capacity to supply a population are formed and there is no other choice but to collect rainwater, which is also scarce. The lack of water is becoming more and more evident and makes life more and more difficult for the local population,” Rohrmann added from Resistencia.

Constanza Mozzoni, a biologist from Buenos Aires who has been living in El Impenetrable for two years doing social work, has a categorical answer when asked what life is like for the local population, both indigenous and non-indigenous people: “Everything revolves around how to get water,” she told IPS.

Mozzoni works for the Rewilding Argentina Foundation, an environmental conservation organisation that works in and around the El Impenetrable National Park, and lives in a prefabricated house that also has a rainwater harvesting roof.

The foundation, however, provides all its staff with bottled water that is brought from the town of Miraflores, along the only safe road in El Impenetrable.

One of the Argentine small farmer groups participating in the digital marketing project uses agroecological irrigation and tomato crushing techniques in the province of Mendoza. CREDIT: Nicolás Heredia/Alma Nativa

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 14 2021 (IPS)

“The biggest problem for family farmers has always been to market and sell what they produce, at a fair price,” says Natalia Manini, a member of the Union of Landless Rural Workers (UST), a small farmers organisation in Argentina that has been taking steps to forge direct ties with consumers.

The UST, which groups producers of fresh vegetables, preserves and honey, as well as goat and sheep breeders, from the western province of Mendoza, opened its own premises in April in the provincial capital of the same name.

In addition, it has just joined Alma Nativa (“native soul”), a network created to market and sell products from peasant and indigenous organisations, which brings together more than 4,300 producers grouped in 21 organisations, and now sells its products over the Internet.

“Selling wholesale to a distributor is simple, but the problem is that a large part of the income does not reach the producer,” Manini told IPS from the town of Lavalle in Mendoza province."The aim is to mobilise consumers to buy products from Latin American ecosystems that are made with respect for the environment, while small producers benefit from visibility and logistical support so that local products reach the entire country.” -- Guadalupe Marín

The rural leader argues that, due to cost considerations, farmers can only access fair trade through collective projects, which have received a boost from the acceleration of digital changes generated by the covid-19 pandemic.

Alma Nativa is a marketing and sales solution formally created in 2018 by two Argentine non-governmental organisations (NGOs) focused on socio-environmental issues: Fibo Social Impact and the Cultural Association for Integral Development (ACDI). Their approach was to go a step beyond the scheme of economic support for productive development projects.

“Back in 2014 we began to ask ourselves why small farmer and indigenous communities could not secure profitable prices for the food and handicrafts they produce, and to think about how to get farmers to stop depending on donations and subsidies from NGOs and the state,” Fibo director Gabriela Sbarra told IPS in an interview in Buenos Aires.

Sbarra was a regular participant in regional community product fairs, which prior to the restrictions put in place due to the pandemic were often organised in Argentina by the authorities, who financed the setting up of the stands, accommodation and travel costs from their communities for farmers and craftspeople.

It was only thanks to this economic aid that farmers and artisans were able to make a profit.

“The effort was geared towards finding a genuine market for these products, which could not be sold online because it is very difficult to generate traffic on the Internet and they cannot reach supermarkets either, because they have no production volume. Informality was leaving communities out of the market,” Sbarra explained.

Three cooperatives in the Chaco region, the great forested plain that Argentina shares with Bolivia and Paraguay, are dedicated to honey production and are part of the Alma Nativa project, through which they sell their products to consumers throughout the country via the Internet. CREDIT: Nicolás Heredia/Alma Nativa

E-commerce, the new market

So the founders of Alma Nativa knocked on the doors of Mercado Libre, an e-commerce giant born in Argentina that has expanded throughout most of Latin America. The company agreed not to charge commissions for sales by an online store of agroecological food produced by local communities.

Alma Nativa then set up a warehouse in the town of Villa Madero, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where products arriving from rural communities throughout the country are labeled for distribution.

“The pandemic has created an opportunity, because it helped to open a debate about what we eat. Many people began to question how food is produced and even forced agribusiness companies to think about more sustainable production systems,” said Manini.

Norberto Gugliotta, manager of the Cosar Beekeeping Cooperative, emphasised that the pandemic not only accelerated the process of digitalisation of producers and consumers, but also fueled the search by a growing part of society for healthy food produced in a socially responsible manner.

“We were prepared to seize the opportunity, because our products were ready, so we joined Alma Nativa this year,” said the beekeeper from the town of Sauce Viejo. Gugliotta is the visible face of a cooperative made up of some 120 producers in the province of Santa Fe, in the centre of this South American country, who produce certified organic, fair trade honey.

Argentina, Latin America’s third largest economy, is an agricultural powerhouse, with a powerful agribusiness sector whose main products are soybeans, corn and soybean oil, which in 2020 generated 26.3 billion dollars in exports, according to official figures.

Behind the success lies a huge universe of family farmers and peasant and indigenous communities. According to the latest National Agricultural Census, carried out in 2018, more than 90 percent of the country’s 250,881 farms are family-run.

But the infrastructure and technological lag in rural areas is significant, as demonstrated by the fact that only 35 percent of farms have Internet access.

The deprivation is particularly acute in the Chaco, a neglected region in the north of the country, home to some 200,000 indigenous people belonging to nine groups whose economy is closely linked to natural resources, according to the non-governmental Fundapaz.

Indigenous artisans from the Pilagá community in the northern province of Formosa, within the Gran Chaco region, have begun selling their baskets online throughout Argentina. CREDIT: Rosario Bobbio/Alma Nativa

New platform for indigenous handicrafts

Communities from the Chaco, a vast region of low forests and savannas and rich biodiversity covering more than one million square km in Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, which is home to a diversity of native peoples, also began to market their handicrafts over Mercado Libre in the last few weeks.

“This initiative originated in Brazil with the ‘Amazonia em Pé’ programme and today we are replicating it in Argentina, in the Gran Chaco area. It seeks to build bridges between local artisans and consumers throughout the country,” explained Guadalupe Marín, director of sustainability at Mercado Libre.

“The aim is to mobilise consumers to buy products from Latin American ecosystems that are made with respect for the environment, while small producers benefit from visibility and logistical support so that local products reach the entire country,” she told IPS in Buenos Aires.

On Sept. 27, Mercado Libre launched the campaign “From the Gran Chaco, for you”, which offers for sale more than 2,500 products in 200 categories, such as baskets, indigenous and local art, decorative elements made with natural fibers, honey, weavings and handmade games.

It includes not only Alma Nativa, but also Emprendedores por Naturaleza (“entrepreneurs by/for nature”), a programme launched by the environmental foundation Rewilding Argentina, which works for the conservation of the Chaco and now promotes the sale of products made by 60 families living in rural areas adjacent to the El Impenetrable national park, the largest protected area in the region.

“The idea for the project arose last year, after we conducted a socioeconomic survey among 250 families in the area that found that the only income of 98 percent of them comes from welfare,” said Fatima Hollmann, regional coordinator of the Rewilding Argentina Communities Programme.

She told IPS that “people raise livestock for subsistence and sometimes work on fencing a field or some other temporary task, but there are no steady sources of employment in El Impenetrable.”

“That is why we are trying to generate income for local residents,” Hollmann explained in an interview in Buenos Aires. “Our production lines are focused on ceramics, since most people have built their houses there with adobe. Many also know how to make bricks and we have held trainings to teach people to turn a brick into an artistic piece, inspired by native fauna, which transmits the importance of conserving the forest.”

According to the figures released by the expert during the first week of the programme “From the Gran Chaco, for you” in early October, 644 products were offered for sale, of which 382 were sold to buyers from more than 10 Argentine provinces, including 100 percent of the textiles available and 76 percent of the wooden handicrafts.

“The alternative is to cut down the native forests,” Hollmann says. “We are proposing a transition from an extractivist economy to a regenerative one, which contributes to the reconstruction of the ecosystem, and gives consumers in the cities the chance to contribute to that goal.”

Excerpt:

A view of Explora's biodiesel plant on the outskirts of the city of Rosario, where most of the companies that process soybean oil in Argentina are concentrated. In recent years, biofuels have generated investments of more than three billion dollars in the country, in addition to more than one billion dollars a year in exports, before the collapse in demand caused by the COVID pandemic. CREDIT: Courtesy of Explora

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 30 2021 (IPS)

Argentina, historically an agricultural powerhouse, has become a major producer of biofuels in recent years. However, this South American country is now moving backwards in the use of this oil substitute in transportation, a decision in which economics weighed heavily and environmental concerns have been ignored.

On Jul. 15, with the support of the government of centre-left President Alberto Fernández, Congress passed a new Biofuels Regulatory Framework, which will be in force until 2030.

The new law published on Aug. 4 reduced from 10 to five percent the minimum mandatory blend of soybean oil biodiesel in diesel fuel, and gave the executive branch the option of lowering it to three percent if deemed necessary to cut fuel prices for consumers."To mitigate we need all the available tools. And in this case, perhaps the worst thing is the setback in an area in which the country has gained a great deal of know-how and capacity, making it one of the largest users of renewable energy in transportation worldwide." -- Luciano Caratori

With respect to gasoline, the law maintained the current 12 percent bioethanol – based on corn and sugar cane – blend, but gives the government the option of lowering it to nine percent.

“The mandatory blends of petroleum-derived fuels with biofuels came into effect in 2010 and since then have generated the largest reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Argentine history, at least until 2019,” energy consultant Luciano Caratori, a researcher at the Torcuato Di Tella Foundation, which focuses on environmental issues, and former undersecretary of energy planning, told IPS.

The expert mentioned 2019 because it was the first year that non-conventional renewable energies – basically wind and solar – represented a significant share of electricity generation in this Southern Cone country of 44.4 million people.

Today, according to official figures, they account for 9.7 percent of the electricity mix, in a country where 87 percent of the primary energy supply is based on fossil fuels: 54 percent natural gas, 31 percent oil, and the rest, coal.

Argentina, Latin America’s third largest economy, is a net exporter of oil, but due to its limited refining capacity it is also a net importer of gasoline and diesel.

Caratori said the reduction in biofuel use is inconsistent with the climate change mitigation commitments Argentina submitted in December 2020, in the update of its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement.

This country has committed to cutting GHG emissions by more than 20 percent by 2030 from the 2007 peak, and to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

One of the ways to reach these goals, according to the NDC, is to reduce emissions from transportation – a sector that accounted for 33 percent of total energy demand in 2019 – through the use of biofuels and hydrogen and electrification.

The Argentine Senate special public session in which the law reducing the mandatory percentage of biofuels in the blend with petroleum derivatives was approved. Most of the legislators voted remotely, due to COVID pandemic restrictions. CREDIT: Argentine Senate

“There don’t seem to be too many opportunities in Argentina to offset the emissions savings lost from reducing biofuel use, and 2030 is just around the corner,” said Caratori.

“To mitigate we need all the available tools,” he stressed. “And in this case, perhaps the worst thing is the setback in an area in which the country has gained a great deal of know-how and capacity, making it one of the largest users of renewable energy in transportation worldwide.”

In the Senate, the ruling party’s Rubén Uñac, chair of the energy commission, acknowledged that the biofuels industry made possible the creation of “new companies and thousands of jobs” over the last decade, through “more than three billion dollars in investments.” But he said the system was in need of “in-depth reform.”

In the opposition, the chair of the Senate commission on the environment and sustainable development, Senator Gladys González, denounced “fierce lobbying by the oil companies” and argued that the government “says one thing and does another,” because it expresses in public a deep commitment to the fight against climate change that does not translate into action.

A study published in July by Caratori and Jorge Hilbert, an expert with the government’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), points out that the current installed biodiesel and bioethanol production capacity could cover between 4.5 and 8.0 percent of Argentina’s international commitment to GHG emissions reduction.

“The decarbonisation opportunity offered by biofuels is considered to be very significant with minimal investment,” the paper underscores.

Pros and cons, depending on who is looking at it

In any case, the real environmental impact of biofuels is disputed. María Marta Di Paola, director of research at the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN), raised several reservations.

View of a soybean field in the province of Santa Fe, in western Argentina. Biodiesel is made from soybean oil in more than 50 plants near the city of Rosario, located in the south of the province. CREDIT: Confederaciones Rurales de Argentina

“We are concerned that they fuel the expansion of the agricultural frontier, compete with the use of crops for food and rely on agricultural production that is highly dependent on fossil fuels,” she told IPS.

“Consequently, although biofuels are presented as an alternative for the energy transition, it is very difficult to quantify their real contribution to the fight against climate change,” said the expert from FARN, one of the country’s most respected environmental institutions.

“In any case, the decision made by the government and Congress had to do with other issues, which clearly demonstrates that the priority given in Argentina to environmental debates is very low,” Di Paola asserted.

At any rate, the industry dismisses the misgivings that are raised.

“Less than five percent of Argentina’s arable land is involved in biofuel production,” Claudio Molina, executive director of the Argentine Biofuels and Hydrogen Association, which has been promoting biofuel production for 15 years, told IPS. “Only three percent of the total corn harvest is used to make bioethanol.”

In Argentina, biodiesel, produced by national and international private capital, received its first big boost through exports, which between 2012 and 2019 generated more than one billion dollars a year, according to official data.

However, the drop in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic led to a sharp decline in 2020, when exports dropped to 468 million dollars.

The main market is the European Union, since the United States slapped high tariffs on Argentina’s biodiesel in 2017 to protect its soybean producers.

The pandemic’s impact on demand and a rise in the price of biodiesel put pressure on the government and left it with two alternatives that it wants to avoid: authorise an increase in consumer fuel prices or reduce the profit margin of the oil companies, especially the state-owned YPF.

This is included in the text of the new law, which states that the government reserves the right to further reduce the percentage of biofuels in the fuel blends when an increase in the prices of biodiesel or bioethanol inputs “could distort the price of fossil fuels at the pump.”

Axel Boerr is vice-president of Explora, a company with the capacity to produce 120,000 tons of biodiesel per year at its plant on the outskirts of the city of Rosario, an area he describes as “Argentina’s Kuwait”, due to the number of factories that generate energy from oil from the soybean fields that abound in the area.

In an interview with IPS, Boerr said biofuels were a way to add value to agricultural production and help Latin American countries become more than just exporters of primary products.

“In addition, this will aggravate our external dependence, because Argentina is an importer of gasoline and diesel and will have to buy more and more, since it has no more oil refining capacity,” he predicted.

The political negotiations ensured that the current six percent blend would remain in place for sugarcane bioethanol. This secured votes in Congress from legislators from the northwest provinces, which are sugarcane producers.

A possible reduction from six to three percent was left open in the case of corn bioethanol.

“We don’t believe in the argument that we have to take care of consumer fuel prices, because what determines them is oil, not biofuels,” Patrick Adam, executive director of the Corn Bioethanol Chamber, told IPS.

“Today we are working at 70 percent of our capacity and with these changes, which represent a step backwards in terms of the climate, we would drop to 40 percent. We were ready to grow and this law caught us off guard,” he concluded.