ARGENTINA: Homeless, Sex Workers, Slumdwellers Speak Out

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 20 2002 (IPS) - Some 400 people who live or work in the streets of the Argentine capital – homeless people, garbage pickers, slumdwellers and sex workers – met for four days to discuss the problems they face, and to come up with an agenda of priorities for joint action.

The meeting was convened by the magazine Hecho en Buenos Aires (Made in Buenos Aires), which is printed by volunteers and sold by the homeless, as part of a project that has the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The aim of the conference was to promote dialogue to enable grassroots groups to propose alternatives and solutions to Argentina’s severe economic, social and political crisis.

Since rioting, looting and protests toppled two governments in late December, this Southern Cone country of 36 million has defaulted on its foreign debt, the economy has collapsed after four years of recession, unemployment has climbed to 21.4 percent, and 51 percent of the population has fallen into poverty.

As a result, the number of people living in shacks alongside the railways or under bridges is growing day by day.

The director of Hecho en Buenos Aires, Patricia Merkin, told IPS that the participants in the conference held discussions and debates in workshops, before coming together for a plenary session.

“It was like a big parliament of those who are voiceless and do not have the tools to negotiate and fight for their rights,” she said.

The most important thing was introducing the people and the groups that participated, getting them to interact, and helping them get used to exchanging ideas and views with larger organisations, like government bodies or United Nations agencies, said Merkin.

The conclusions were presented during the last day of the meeting, in a document titled “Dialogue for the People of the Streets”, which was distributed to a group of representatives of the Foreign Ministry’s human rights division, the UNDP, and the city of Buenos Aires Secretariat of Social Development.

Prostitutes – women, transvestites and transexuals – who work on the streets, a sector that is growing fast amidst the crisis, took part in the gathering. So did homeless people, slumdwellers, and people who are living in overcrowded rundown hotels that are subsidised by the government.

There were also representatives of the growing army of “cartoneros” or cardboard collectors – entire families who work their way through the streets in the evenings and into the night with small carts, picking through the trash in search of paper, cardboard or other refuse that they later sell by the kilo to recycling businesses.

Scavenging has become a bit more profitable this year due to the crash of the peso, which has driven up the price of paper, while the skyrocketing of poverty and unemployment has led to a huge increase in the number of “cartoneros”.

Controversy is raging in Buenos Aires on the question of waste pickers, who some argue should be tolerated within certain limits, while others say their activity should be banned because it “makes the city ugly.”

“We have civic duties to comply with, but we also have rights,” Julio Andrada, a 59-year-old homeless man who took part in the workshops on health, human rights, work, and reinsertion in the labour market, told IPS.

“People are afraid to speak out, but once they start, no one can stop them, and what is emerging most loudly at this time is the problem of corruption, at all levels,” he said.

Andrada worked as a self-employed electrician until 1985, when, he said, the crisis “began to suck me under…Every year I would slip down one notch, until I ended up living on the streets.”

But things have changed for him since he began working with the magazine Hecho en Buenos Aires, which is put out, under strict quality standards, by a group of volunteers. Homeless people sell the publication on the streets, for a peso apiece – worth one dollar until January, but now equivalent to just 35 cents.

There are 250 vendors who, like Andrada, sell the magazine on street corners in the capital.

“I live off of this. I can now afford a hotel, send my clothes to the laundromat, eat. Thank God, if you try, you can sell, and you can pull yourself out of the pit,” he said.

The participants in the workshops underlined the “heavy discrimination” and exclusion that they suffer, and the consequent “loss of dignity” and obstacles standing in the way of their reinsertion into the labour market.

In the workshops, participants described how the lack of work often leads to a deterioration in physical and mental health, with loneliness, disorientation and sexual impotence frequently leading to depression and alcoholism.

They asked the state for support for projects like micro- enterprises organised in cooperatives, and for training and orientation programmes to support the reinsertion of the unemployed into the labour market, through initiatives like the magazine Hecho en Buenos Aires.

On the health front, participants complained that the public health system is currently unable to respond satisfactorily to the needs of people living in the streets.

Sex workers and the homeless expressed “profound concern and suffering” over the discrimination they suffer when they are in need of medical care, the lack of access to treatment and medicines, the requirements for receiving treatment, and the failure of health professionals to provide basic information on health.

“We want to be respected,” and “the way we are treated must improve,” but it seems that doctors must be reminded that “we are also human beings,” stated the conference’s final report, which quotes people who spoke up at the plenary session.

The participants in the workshop on human rights said the state did not guarantee their rights, and even violated them at times with its policies, especially in police stations, homeless shelters and hospitals.

They recommended awareness-raising on the rights of citizens, and said “we do not want welfare, we do not want to be given a hand, what we want is…for them to let us grow.”