ARGENTINA: Gov’t Launches Overdue Attack on Hunger

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 25 2002 (IPS) - The Argentine government launched an aggressive door-to-door anti-hunger campaign Monday in the northwestern province of Tucuman to combat pockets of acute malnutrition that have received extensive media coverage in the past two weeks.

But doctors and social organisations underline that people in the province have been suffering extreme poverty for many years.

”Operation Rescue”, which will involve the deployment of 1,500 physicians, nurses, social workers, volunteers and members of the military, mobile hospital units and kitchens, food supplies, and ambulances and helicopters, got under way in Tucuman, which has become the most visible epicentre of Argentina’s social collapse, a result of the worst economic crisis in the country’s history.

But poverty is affecting the entire country, not just provinces located far from Buenos Aires, say experts and social activists, who hold the past few governments and much of the political leadership responsible for the problem.

Although Argentina, one of the world’s top exporters of agricultural commodities, produces enough food to meet the needs of its 37 million people twice over, the statistics indicate that 52 percent of the population is poor and 20 percent is living in the most abject poverty.

Health Ministry statistics show that 25 of every 1,000 children die yearly of malnutrition-related problems in Tucuman – nine times the national average in this once-rich Southern Cone nation.

A full 80 percent of children under the age of 14 living in and around the capital of the province of Tucuman are poor.

But cold statistics do not move people like live images do, Health Minister Ginés Gonzalez García admitted Monday, referring to the spate of televised news reports that have come out of the region in the past 10 days.

The despondent look in the eyes of children with rickets, the tragic stories told by doctors and families, and the deaths by starvation of real children with real names and faces in Tucuman have deeply shaken Argentine society.

One case that caused a particular impact was that of 10-year-old María Rosa Gómez, who weighed just nine kgs when she died. Two of her four siblings, all of whom were younger than herself, were hospitalised with acute malnutrition.

The Gómez family is a typical case in which poverty has been passed down generation after generation, even causing neurological damage in newborns, as in the case of three of the family’s five children, the director of the Niño Jesús Pediatric Hospital in Tucuman, Lorenzo Marcos, told IPS.

María Rosa’s mother, Mariana Gómez, is just 19 years old. When IPS called the hospital in Tucuman from Buenos Aires and asked to talk to her, the young woman told Dr. Marcos to explain that she did not know how to talk on the telephone.

Marcos said Gómez has never gone to school, and that she cannot even distinguish colours by their name.

In response to the extreme cases of hunger and neglect, the government of Eduardo Duhalde has begun to create a social safety net in Tucuman, to detect families living in extreme poverty, and tailor social assistance to the specific needs of the local population.

But physicians in the local hospitals and social organisations working in the area say marginalisation and poverty are nothing new there, and that things have merely taken a turn for the worse, with a larger number of undernourished children and a more severe degree of starvation.

Four non-governmental organisations filed a lawsuit against the governor of Tucuman, Angel Miranda, last week, and demanded that he resign.

When the media reports on the deaths of local children began to be aired around the country and the region, Miranda, who belongs to the ruling Justicialista (Peronist) Party, was in a wealthy suburb of Buenos Aires buying a motorboat for his family.

The prosecutor in charge of investigating ”crimes against social welfare,” Guillermo Marijuán, was sent to Tucuman to verify reports that local officials were extorting recipients of unemployment benefits, who in exchange for the funds were forced to give the officials part of the money or sexual favors.

Marijuán also detected a number of cases in which national social assistance funds that were to go to unemployed heads of households were diverted to non-existent social organisations and distributed by local officials among their political clientele.

In a conversation with IPS, Matían Laín, a pediatrician who travelled to the province as a volunteer with the Fundación Alma (Soul Foundation), which visits the country’s poorest villages and towns in a ”pediatric train”, said the people of Tucuman are living in a state of utter abandonment.

The province’s primary health centres are without supplies or doctors, there is no dental service, the disinfectant needed to clean homes of the vinchuca bug, the transmitter of the deadly Chagas disease, is not distributed, and there are children as well as adults with ”moderate to severe” malnutrition, said Laín.

”When the train arrives, we announce it over the radio,” he said, still visibly moved by his trip to the province earlier this year. ”The first day, people from the town come, who are in the best condition.

”But on the second day parents carrying their children start to file in after walking or riding on horseback for hours. They are the ones who are in the worst condition.

”The state of abandonment of these people is so great that there is not even a glimmer of hope left,” said Laín.

But the public hospitals, to which the most severe cases are to be referred, are no paradise for the ill, he added.

Angel González, the head of pediatrics at the Niño Jesús Pediatric Hospital, has worked there since his days as an intern. ”Since then, in 1966, we have seen malnourished children as a consequence of the closing of 11 sugar mills in the province,” he said Monday.

González said the new social safety net being designed by the Duhalde administration should have been created before, not after, the main sources of employment in the area shut down.

The pediatric service found that 40 percent of the children admitted to the hospital are severely malnourished and have parasites and other poverty-related ailments, he explained.

”Malnutrition has been a permanent fixture in the province since those years, with ups and downs, and already affected the grandparents of today’s malnourished children,” said González.

But ”it is not only an illness, a problem of the body,” he added. ”We’re talking about a total loss of human dignity here.”

Between 800 and 1,000 people visit the Niño Jesús Pediatric Hospital every day, but there are many more people in the province who are unable to even reach the hospital due to a total lack of money and other resources.

The building is packed, with 250 patients for 220 beds. Thirty children laying on sofas, or held in their parents’ arms, are fed exclusively by IV drip.

Despite the shortcomings, González is sceptical regarding the arrival of a delegation sent by the national government to help combat the crisis.

”The government brings in doctors and nurses, the army brings its field hospitals, but we have hospitals here that have been closed down, and unemployed staff that could work,” he pointed out.

The official delegation is headed by Duhalde’s wife, first lady Hilda González. ”When the señora leaves, will the malnourished kids have clean water to drink? Will they have sewer services, decent housing? Will they be able to stop eating in the dumps? Because if that isn’t so, all that will have been done is (political) proselytism.”

In his view, many of the province’s problems are the result of political corruption and neglect.

”There is hunger and a total lack of dignity here, and votes are bought with bags of food. Everything is worth a bag of food: political proselytism, attendance at political rallies, a vote for every new election,” said González.