ARGENTINA: The Long (Children’s) March Against Hunger

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 18 2007 (IPS) - “There are lots of hungry, barefoot children in Argentina, but they don’t talk about that in school, so I learn a lot when I come on these marches,” said Aluminé Giuliani, a teenager participating in a nationwide children’s march, which arrived in the Argentine capital Friday.

“Hunger is a Crime” and “No Kid Lost to Hunger” were the slogans chanted by some 400 children, teenagers and teachers belonging to the Movimiento Nacional de Chicos del Pueblo (roughly – the popular national children’s movement), who covered 4,500 kilometres in 11 days, from the northeast of the country to the capital, by way of towns and cities in the provinces of Misiones, Formosa, Chaco, Corrientes, Santa Fe and Buenos Aires.

“What struck me the most was that there aren’t poor people in just one province, but in all of them,” Giulianni told IPS. “How can they say that things are improving in Argentina? In some places we visited, the kids told us that things were getting worse all the time,” said the 16-year-old, who lives in Buenos Aires and also took part in the marches in 2001, 2002 and 2005.

Cristian, 15, told IPS he was from Tucumán, in the northwest of Argentina. He explained that he was hoarse from singing, but “not a bit tired,” and said he had made many friends along the way, and that he liked to be able to shout loudly everywhere they went that “Our Parents Need Work.”

“Otherwise, how can they expect us not to work (to support our families)?” Cristian said, referring to opposition to child labour.

Although social indicators show that conditions have been improving steadily and substantially over the last five years, since the late 2001 economic and political collapse, 26.7 percent of Argentina’s 38 million people are still living below the poverty line and 8.7 percent are extremely poor, according to official statistics.

On the basis of official Argentine statistics, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) indicates that 49.5 percent of children under 15 are poor, a proportion that rises to nearly 70 percent in the northern provinces.

The movement, coordinated by sociologist Alberto Morlachetti, is made up of some 400 children’s and young people’s grassroots organisations. Its main activity is the annual march from the provinces to the city of Buenos Aires. En route, the children are welcomed by other youngsters from a variety of institutions and organisations.

“The miracle of our march is that just for a moment, organisations put aside their concerns and conflicts and come together to hear about the paradox of this country, which is the fifth exporter of cereal grains in the world, but where children are dying of hunger,” Morlachetti told IPS.

“Not that hunger can ever be justified, anywhere, but in Argentina it’s an insult to common sense, a real crime against humanity,” he said. “It’s very hard for the kids to understand why they should suffer hardship when we travel through the lush dairy belt, or the huge soybean plantations in Santa Fe,” he added.

In Corrientes, a doctor at the Northeastern University came up to the travellers and greeted each one individually. “He was the author of a study we’d publicised, which said that 45 percent of the children in the provincial capital were undernourished,” said Morlachetti, who travelled part of the way with the children.

The children set out on their journey on May 7 from Puerto Iguazú, in Misiones province on the border with Brazil. Along the way they were met by social, children’s and human rights organisations and trade unions.

At Rosario, in Santa Fe province, veterans of the Malvinas/Falkland Islands war against Britain gave them warm woven vests. “We know what it’s like to be cold and hungry,” said the veterans of the 1982 war in the South Atlantic.

At other stopovers, members of trade unions and social organisations cooked the children’s meals.

“In my province, there are lots of children who don’t eat four meals a day and they never go on holidays,” said a boy in Formosa, on the border with Paraguay.

In Santa Fe there were some eye-catching placards: “We Don’t Want to be Flooded Again,” one of them read, referring to the two big Paraná river floods within the past four years.

“What on earth happens to people when they become adults, and all of a sudden they go blind to our bare feet, and deaf to our complaints that we’re hungry?” said a teenager in Zárate, in the north of the eastern province of Buenos Aires.

“In our neighbourhood there are no places to play, no sewers, no drinking water and there are big ditches full of rubbish and pollution,” another child protested, in José C. Paz, a poor suburb of the Argentine capital. He was attentively listened to by the children participating in the march, which shortly afterwards entered the city.

Morlachetti, who runs the “Pelota de Trapo” Foundation and Home, said that “not a single politician” had approached the children. “They all declared the march to be of national, provincial or municipal interest, but not even a mayor came out to meet them, because they’re afraid. They know that they are responsible for the inequity,” he said.

According to the latest figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, in 2006 the income of the richest 10 percent of the population was 35 times that of the poorest 10 percent.

“Some people consume the contents of whole supermarket shelves of goods, while others are struggling for their children’s survival and their own,” Morlachetti said.

“A true democracy has to go hand in hand with equity, otherwise it’s no democracy at all, but in Argentina there is no connection between the two,” he said.