ARGENTINA: The Gaping Social Wounds of the Crisis

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 23 2001 (IPS) - “There are patients in the corridors, and they’re not even on stretchers, because we don’t have enough. In fact, it’s a lucky thing we have sheets. The patients in the most delicate condition, on artificial respirators, are in the little room where the nurses usually eat, and women in labour take turns using the beds.”

Testimony from a health professional working in a war zone? No, merely a description by Dr. Silvia Lasarte of the situation in a municipal hospital in a low-income suburb of Buenos Aires, in today’s crisis-stricken Argentina.

Lasarte and two other public employees interviewed by IPS provided a glimpse of the gaping social wounds in Latin America’s third largest economy, which has entered its fourth year of recession.

The IMF and the Argentine government of Fernando de la Rúa agreed late Tuesday on eight billion dollars in fresh aid aimed at warding off a debt default and rebuilding confidence in the national economy.

Lasarte works in the Municipal Hospital of Pilar, 50 kms from the capital, in the province of Buenos Aires, the country’s most populous province, home to 14.3 million of a total population of 36.6 million.

Buenos Aires province is the focal point of a new experiment by a cash-strapped provincial government – the printing of one-year bonds to pay public sector wages above 730 dollars. Through the new scheme, which went into effect Tuesday, people will be able to use the freshly minted bills known as “patacones” to purchase food and pay off loans and federal taxes.

Dr. Lasarte commutes every Sunday from her home in the centre of Buenos Aires to Pilar, where she is on-duty for 24 hours. The shift pays 120 dollars a week, plus an additional 100 dollars that is cut if she fails to show, even if her absence was due to illness.

It has been a year since the hospital had tetanus vaccines, while the number of cases of tuberculosis has climbed alarmingly in the area served by the hospital, Lasarte tells IPS.

The municipal hospital of Pilar attends hundreds of unemployed and low-income local residents, as well as undocumented foreign immigrants. But the municipality is also home to posh “gated communities” drawing increasing numbers of well-heeled families from the capital in search of a safer lifestyle with a semblance of country living.

Residents of any of the walled neighbourhoods who have no choice but to be taken to the municipal hospital’s emergency room often refuse to even have an intravenous tube inserted as they anxiously await the ambulance that will take them to their private health providers, says Lasarte.

In the hospital, “patients with serious problems and accident victims who have lost limbs have to sit in chairs in the hallways waiting for the on-duty doctor, for want of beds or space,” she says.

But hospital staff are not only called on to deal with health problems.

Lasarte recalls one family who called an ambulance to their home. When the paramedics showed up, they found starving children who hadn’t had a thing to eat in five days. When the health workers bought them food, the littlest ones “pounced on it like animals.”

“Sometimes I feel that my work is doing no good, because I write out a prescription for a patient, and I know they won’t find the medicine in the hospital pharmacy, nor will they be able to afford it,” laments Lasarte.

Until recently, she adds, the hospital had no operating room or x-ray machine. And doctors in the pediatrics service cover 90 percent of the medicine they prescribe by bringing in the free samples they receive in their clinics from laboratories.

In La Matanza, a working-class suburb of Buenos Aires, the vice- principal of school number 202, Gabriel Szklair, also seems to be talking about a very different country than the one described in the mainstream media or the declarations of government officials and lawmakers.

However, it is similar to the landscape of social abandon depicted by Lasarte and by health professionals, teachers and activists in many other provinces of this once-rich Southern Cone nation, which was the tenth-largest trading country in the world and the sixth in income per head at the turn of the century.

Szklair smiles ironically as he listens to an announcement on the radio that the Ministry of Education sent a bill to parliament to set tbe minimum number of days of class at 180, to make up for schooling lost to teachers’ strikes.

“I laugh to keep from crying, because by my estimate, my students won’t have even 70 days of class this year” – but not precisely because of the strikes, Szklair tells IPS.

The vice-principal points out that at the start of the school- year, the shortage of classrooms for the student body of 820 was so great that different grades had to take turn coming to school.

“The first to fourth graders attended the first and third weeks of each month, and the fifth to ninth graders came the weeks in between,” says Szklair. “However, we soon realized that the kids were losing their sense of connection to the school, so we started alternating every other day.”

After the teachers exerted heavy pressure, two new classrooms were finally built in July. But “within a week, the doors, windows and electric fixtures had been stolen, so now the different grades are once again taking turns,” he adds.

But a shortage of space is not the only problem facing the schools. “This year, we had severe flooding just after the school- year started [in March], and the children had to give up their school for a week, because it was used to house evacuated families,” he says. The same thing happened again in July.

To all of that was added the indefinite strike declared by the teachers of the province of Buenos Aires, which has already lasted three weeks. The teachers are demanding payment of back salaries, and protesting wage cuts, delays in supplies for school lunchrooms, and the announcement that part of their wages would begin to be paid in the new patacones bonds.

Szklair has also been forced to deal with threats from the businesses that supply the school cafeteria, which have not been paid by the state since April, and say they will stop their deliveries.

“We went to a nearby cold-storage plant, but they told us they didn’t want any dealings with us. Nor can we turn to the supermarkets, because they are located too far away from the school,” says the vice-principal.

He insists that “the lunchroom must not stop operating,” because around 500 of the school’s 820 students depend on the school cafeteria for virtually the only food they receive daily. The lunchroom also serves some of the children’s family members, even though that is not permitted.

Meanwhile, the director of the province’s schools, José Bordón, promised earlier this year that all of the schools would be provided with computers in order to have Internet access, and would be fitted out with new lab equipment, while students would start coming to school for a full-day, rather than a half-day, shift in order to help working parents cope.

“They live in another world,” says Szklair, who shakes his head sadly as he refers to government officials whose statements often fail to reflect an understanding of the gravity of the situation.

The Pilar hospital is located to the north of Buenos Aires proper, and the La Matanza school to the west. On the southside of the capital, in the working-class neighbourhood of Quilmes, is Family Court Number Two, where lawyer Angela Elías works.

Due to a strike of judicial employees protesting wage cuts and salary payments in patacones, and demanding back-pay, Elías is only holding hearings on “urgent” questions like demands for child support or authorisation of organ transplants.

“I took an oath when I accepted this post, something like the Hippocratic oath for doctors, and I cannot refuse to hold a hearing,” the lawyer explains to IPS.

Elías frequently has to buy ink cartridges for the printer in her office and other basic supplies out of her own pocket, because if she waits for the state to provide them, she will fall behind in her casework.

Although they work in different fields, Lasarte, Szklair and Elías have several points in common. They are all middle-class professionals in their 30s, and they all belong to the category “employees of the state,” a sector often derided as “desk bureaucrats” who are accused of receiving special perks.

But here again, the reality is different than what meets the eye. All three of the public employees with whom IPS spoke live in Buenos Aires and commute to their jobs in poor suburbs, where they are frequently not paid on time, have seen their already sparse salaries cut by as much as 13 percent, and have received the news that they will begin to be paid partly in patacones, which some doubt will be honoured at face value.

As of this month, nearly 200,000 public employees in the province of Buenos Aires will begin to receive part of their salaries in the new bonds issued by the provincial government to compensate for its liquidity crisis.

Szklair says the state still owes him two-thirds of the June payment of his “aguinaldo” – an annual vacation bonus, half of which is paid in June and half in December – while he has only received part of his July salary of 900 dollars.

Teachers, who earn a paltry 400 to 500 dollars a month, will not receive any “patacones” this month. But they are owed their June aguinaldo payment as well as back salaries.

Elías, the lawyer, is also anxious about her salary. Of the 1,640 dollars a month she earns in the family court, she has only received 730 dollars (in cash) for July, and is still owed 520 dollars from the June aguinaldo.

Elías expects the rest to be paid in patacones, but she has no idea when. Judges, who earn 6,300 dollars a month, also received July paychecks of just 730 dollars, and are waiting for the difference to be paid in patacones.

“I know there are people in the state who receive salaries without doing any work,” said Elías. “But that is not my case, nor that of many others who choose to be here because we want to be on this side, and not because we lack opportunities for working in the private sector.”