HEALTH-ARGENTINA: Disabled Children, Victims of Spending Cuts

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 29 2001 (IPS) - Police in Argentina broke up a protest vigil staged outside the seat of government by the parents of disabled children whose desperately needed state pensions and assistance programmes are endangered by the government’s fiscal austerity measures.

“It was a nightmare. Around 70 armed police officers came in the wee hours of Wednesday morning with trucks, and without any notification just began to carry our things away. When I tried to stop them, they pushed me out of the way,” a crying María Moschietti, whose five-year-old son has cerebral palsy, told IPS.

Moschietti, along with dozens of other family members of disabled persons, began their protest Tuesday in the Plaza de Mayo outside the Casa Rosada – the seat of the presidency – setting up empty beds, nightstands, cupboards and wheelchairs in the square to draw attention and demand care for their loved ones.

A number of disabled people also took part in Tuesday’s protest. Youngsters with Down’s syndrome and other mental and physical disabilities accompanied their families to demand that the state come up with at least part of the funding it owes institutions that provide a wide range of services.

Adolescents with Down’s syndrome, for example, fear the closure of the Espacio Feliz (Happy Space) recreational and skills training centre, while others are worried that the vegetable garden project where they work will be closed down, or that they will no longer receive their monthly pensions – many of which have not even been paid in past months.

Health Minister Héctor Lombardo said Wednesday that “there is no money.

“This is not a whim. If we do not collect more (taxes) we will have no way to get the funds, so I cannot promise that the money will be there, because I don’t know whether it will,” he said.

Seven percent of Argentina’s 37 million people suffer some kind of disability. Of that seven percent, 40 percent are able to work. A large number survive on pensions paid by the state, which in many cases support an entire family.

Civil society groups working with the disabled say around 8,500 people – including many children – face the risk of losing their monthly pensions or the services they are provided by various public institutions or private ones that depend partly on state funding.

Argentina has been in the grip of a severe economic recession for nearly four years. Last July, the government decided to apply a “zero-deficit” policy, which stipulates that by law, the state can only spend what it collects in taxes every month, with top priority put on meeting the country’s debt servicing payments.

The policy was adopted to keep the government from paying high interest rates on credit, which were soaring due to the loss of investor confidence.

The “zero-deficit” policy led to a 13 percent cut in public sector wages and retirement pensions, widespread dismissals, and delays in transfers of funds to state institutions like hospitals, health centres, schools, vegetable garden projects, juvenile reform centres and research bodies.

Many of these institutions are still waiting for their share of the budget which, furthermore, has been cut, and they can no longer help maintain the social welfare network that the state centralised through regular allotments of funds.

Schools and other institutions have run out of money for essential services like lunchrooms, and in some cases public utilities – the power, gas, and telephone companies – have cut off their services to the institutions.

The media have found ample testimony that the public hospitals have no medicines, although no official statements on the question have been issued by the government of Fernando de la Rúa.

The Garraham Hospital, which uses hi-tech equipment to treat young patients, reported Wednesday that children with cancer have not received their radiotherapy treatments because despite repeated reports that have been filed, the broken machines have not been fixed.

María Moschietti’s five-year-old son is a patient at Convivencia, an institution that attends 50 children in the town of San Fernando, in the province of Buenos Aires. The government owes Convivencia five months’ worth of funding.

The institution will have to close its doors shortly if it does not receive at least part of what it is owed. Seventy-five percent of the families of minors who receive care at Convivencia depend on government assistance, because they have no private health care.

“I don’t have a job, and I wouldn’t have anywhere else to take my son. But it’s always the same thing, we’re always fighting to obtain assistance,” said Moschietti.

“Along with other families and the Permanent Forum for the Promotion and Defence of the Rights of People with Disabilities, we came to hold this protest and to present a letter to the president asking him to intercede on behalf of 500 centres that are on the verge of closing down,” she explained.

The protest was staged after the death of Sergio Martínez, an 11-year-old boy with neurological and hearing problems who had not received his monthly pension since February. His father said the state had cancelled the boy’s payments because he had been mistakenly registered as “deceased”.

The Solidarity Network, a non-governmental humanitarian organisation, included the case of Sergio Martínez on a list of 42 other grave omissions by the state.

Although Sergio Martínez’s family lives in the northwestern province of La Rioja, they were staying at a Buenos Aires hotel while they went from one hospital to another in the capital in their attempt to obtain treatment for the boy.

Up to March, the state provided them six dollars a day in living expenses. However, that aid was cut off when the boy was erroneously declared “deceased”.

The case, which shook public opinion, triggered the families of other disabled children to organise their vigil in the Plaza de Mayo while they awaited a response to their demands. But in the early hours of Wednesday morning, they were evicted by the police.

Gustavo Fernández, the father of another disabled child, said the police arrived and, without a word, began to load the beds, cupboards and nightstands onto trucks. “Two women tried to stop them, and climbed onto the trucks, but they shoved the women off and left,” he added.