The garbage strewn across many streets and sidewalks in the Argentine capital reflects the inefficiency of a waste collection and treatment system that, paradoxically, has become increasingly costly for the city’s residents, say civil society groups and opposition parties.

The garbage crisis in Buenos Aires is a result of the saturation of the city’s landfills, due to increased levels of consumption over the last decade, and substandard collection service, with compactor trucks that tend to leave piles of trash and residue in their wake, especially in the city centre.

The generation of solid waste, such as plastics, textiles, glass, metals and food, increased by 24 to 35 percent between 2001 and 2011. The amount of trash sent to landfills from the city of Buenos Aires grew from 1.4 million tonnes to 2.2 million tonnes between 2002 and 2010, despite no significant increase in the number of residents, according to figures from the opposition party Proyecto Sur.

The landfills are located in municipalities in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area such as José León Suárez, González Catán and Punta Lara, all of which fall under the jurisdiction of the province of Buenos Aires, which surrounds the city. Their proximity to these populous municipalities entails a major health risk.

Once the trash is buried in the landfills, it is treated – at least in theory – through various methods including gas collection systems and solvents that separate the soluble substances from liquids.

The administration of these sites is overseen by the Coordinación Ecológica Área Metropolitana Sociedad del Estado, a company formed through an agreement between the city and the province.

Trash collection is carried out by five private companies and a sixth owned by the local government, with each responsible for a specific section of the city, although an upcoming tender foresees the division of the city into seven sections.

In addition to the obvious health concerns, the collapse of the trash collection system also has economic repercussions. Expenditure on street cleaning in the city has risen from 641 million pesos (128 million dollars) to 2.517 billion pesos (503 million dollars) since 2008, the first year in office of conservative Mayor Mauricio Macri, one of the most ardent opponents of centre-leftist Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

With a population of almost 2.9 million inhabitants, the city of Buenos Aires will end up spending 176 dollars per person on urban sanitation when this year’s draft budget is approved.

In 2006, the city of Buenos Aires adopted the so-called Zero Waste Law, which entered into force in May 2007, and includes among other measures a commitment to drastically reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfills.

According to the timeline established under the law, the city was to decrease the proportion of solid waste buried in these dumpsites by 30 percent as of 2010, 50 percent as of 2012, and 75 percent as of 2017. The ultimate goal was to ensure that 100 percent of recyclable waste was in fact recycled, and kept out of the landfills, by the year 2020.

Under the timeline, the trash buried in landfills was supposed to be reduced to 748,828 tonnes last year. In fact, however, the actual amount was three times this much, with an average of more than 6,000 tonnes a day.

Nevertheless, the minister of environment and public areas of the city of Buenos Aires, Diego Santilla, declared, “No other government has made as much progress as we have in fulfilling the Zero Waste Law.”

Although the city government admits to difficulties in meeting the targets until now, it claims that this will change thanks to agreements reached with the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Daniel Scioli, who is a member of the same Justicialista (Peronist) Party as Fernández de Kirchner, but represents the centrist faction within the party.

However, civil society organisations and opposition political leaders point to what they see as a lack of will on the part of the Macri government to effectively implement the Zero Waste Law.

Rafael Gentili, a deputy in the local legislature from the centre-leftist Proyecto Sur, told IPS that Macri’s performance has been “abysmal”, given that “he has not complied with any of the requirements established by the law.”

“The city is dirtier today than it was five years ago,” added Gentili.

In addition to the above-mentioned targets for reducing the proportion of waste sent to landfills, the Zero Waste Law also bans the incineration of garbage and calls for the promotion of the separation of waste at source, a crucial point that has been the subject of the loudest demands.

Consuelo Bilbao, who heads up the toxic waste campaign at Greenpeace Argentina, told IPS that there is “a major imbalance between the system for collecting and burying waste and the money allocated to recycling, which is 200 million pesos (40 million dollars).”

The 2001 crisis that devastated the Argentine economy also led to an upsurge in informal waste recycling, as thousands of families took to the streets to collect recyclable solid waste materials such as glass, plastics, metals, paper and cardboard.

The improvement in socioeconomic conditions since 2005 has led to a decrease in the number of people who make a living picking through trash, known in Buenos Aires as “cartoneros” (from “cartón”, the Spanish word for cardboard). Two years ago, the local government implemented a system that “formalised” the work they do.

Buildings with more than 19 floors, shopping centres, public offices and schools are required to separate recyclable waste, which is turned over to cooperatives of cartoneros registered with the authorities.

Bilbao and Gentili concur that this measure has enabled the recovery of 15 percent of the solid waste generated in the city, in addition to continued waste collection and recycling on an informal basis.

But according to Greenpeace and other critics, the local government is dragging its feet when it comes to further progress in the separation of recyclable waste at source – in homes and neighbourhoods – which could increase the proportion of trash recycled to up to 40 percent.

“Macri has no interest in reducing the amount of trash produced. On the contrary, he wants there to be a lot of it to make the business more lucrative,” said Gentili.

The companies contracted by the local government to process garbage and turn it into biogas and fertiliser, he explained, are paid according to the volumes they produce. As such, it is economically advantageous if a large proportion of solid waste continues to go to landfills, instead of being separated at source and recycled.

Gentili also pointed out that some companies, like Grupo Roggio, one of the largest in this sector in Argentina, are involved in both ends of the waste chain – collection and treatment – which represents a conflict of interests.

Bilbao agrees that the policy of the government of Buenos Aires “emphasises waste treatment, and not the prior stages that we consider crucial.”

She also finds it particularly telling that “the treatment plants are paid for their services, while the cartoneros are provided with a subsidy, not a salary, which leaves them at the mercy of market rates for recyclable materials.”

The result, she says, is “total inequality.”

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Latin America returned in 2010 to the strong economic growth it enjoyed over the past decade, after only a minimal slowdown during the global crisis that broke out in 2008. But the weakness of the dollar relative to local currencies is a cause for concern among governments and sectors that produce goods for export.

The Preliminary Overview of the Economies of Latin America and the Caribbean 2010, a report presented in December by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), indicates that GDP grew by 8.4 percent in Argentina in 2010, 7.7 percent in Brazil and 5.3 percent in Mexico, while the estimated average for Latin America as a whole was six percent.

These figures also reflect a steady strengthening of local currencies against the dollar, especially the Brazilian real, which in October appreciated by 26 percent, compared to the average exchange rate for 1990-2009.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Argentina, where the peso devalued by 36 percent against the dollar compared to the same period.

Argentina is Brazil’s biggest partner in the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), which also includes Paraguay and Uruguay, with Venezuela in the process of becoming the fifth full member.

Brazil is Argentina’s principal export market, while Argentina ranks third among purchasers of Brazilian goods.

The currencies of Colombia, Venezuela, most Central American countries, Uruguay, Ecuador, Chile and Paraguay, in decreasing order, have also appreciated against the dollar. In Peru and Mexico, the nuevo sol and peso respectively have maintained the same exchange values as the average for 1990-2009.

Most economists find the strengthening of local currencies a cause for concern, although not alarm.

Francisco Gismondi, until 2010 the head of economic analysis at Argentina’s Central Bank, said the macroeconomic indicators for Latin America’s economies and the high prices of the commodities they export serve to cushion the threat.

“It is Europe, in fact, that is in danger of behaving like emerging economies did years ago, while in countries like Colombia and Peru, conversely, productivity has improved,” Gismondi told IPS.

Latin American governments have adopted different policies to deal with their currencies, ranging from massive dollar purchases to interest rate hikes and taxes on speculative capital.

Lia Valls Pereira, an economist with the Brazilian Institute of Economics at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), told IPS that Brazil “has one of the highest interest rates in the world,” in contrast with the low rates in Europe and the United States.

The Central Bank of Brazil raised its benchmark SELIC interest rate 0.5 points to 11.25 percent on Jan. 19, in order to encourage savings and bring down inflation, which reached an unexpectedly high 5.91 percent in 2010.

“At present, manufactured goods make up 40 percent of exports. The growth of Brazilian export earnings last year was due to the high price of commodities, and strong demand from China,” Valls Pereira said.

Brazilian exports of manufactured goods to Argentina have risen, in contrast with sales to other countries.

The trade balance in favour of Brazil could become “a new cause of major tensions,” said Valls Pereira, referring to the way producers in the two countries have taken turns complaining about trading conditions over time. This was virtually the only issue broached by Argentine President Cristina Fernández at her first meeting with Brazil’s new President Dilma Rousseff in Buenos Aires Jan. 31.

In Valls Pereira’s view, the leftwing Brazilian governments of President Roussef and her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) “have so far only taken the most obvious measures, like raising import tariffs and regulating capital inflows.”

In Mexico, the government of conservative President Felipe Calderón has little room for manoeuver in terms of economic strategy. “Interest rates are low on the international markets, and the (Central) Bank of Mexico does not dare lower them because there is an uptick in inflation,” analyst Édgar Amador told IPS. The consumer price index rose by 4.4 percent in 2010.

As in Brazil and Argentina, the strength of Mexico’s Central Bank reserves is a key defence against economic catastrophe. The country has reserves of 118.5 billion dollars, and in January the International Monetary Fund approved a precautionary line of credit for 72 billion dollars.

Mexico was the country in the region that was hardest hit by the global economic and financial crisis, because of its close trading ties with the United States, where the crisis originated in the second half of 2008. Mexican GDP contracted by 6.7 percent in 2009, and 900,000 jobs were lost.

The case of Argentina is different: the economy has grown at an annual rate of between seven and nearly 10 percent since 2003, when it began to emerge from the social and economic meltdown that broke out in late 2001, the worst in its history. The only exception was 2009, when GDP remained static. Its reserves are also at a record level, at nearly 53 billion dollars.

But in recent years, inflation has been the centre-left Fernández administration’s biggest headache. The National Institute of Statistics and Censuses says prices rose by 10.9 percent in 2010, but the opposition, academics, the business community and trade unions question the credibility of this figure, and private estimates for inflation are twice as high.

“Inflation is causing regional currencies to appreciate,” said Gismondi. “When the Brazilian real and the euro stop helping them out, as they have in the past few years, things could get really difficult.”

The former Argentine official predicted that food price inflation, which was double the general inflation figure for 2010, will be lower this year, since many tradable goods and services have reached equilibrium with international prices.

In Gismondi’s view, “what is pushing prices up is the expansion of public spending, and the monetary policy” of printing bank notes.

However, Claudio Katz, an economics professor at the state University of Buenos Aires and a member of the network Economistas de Izquierda (Economists of the Left), told IPS that the exchange rate situation in Argentina does not appear to be “explosive.”

“The government is giving its approval to inflation, or at least allowing it to run its course, and one way or another this policy is affecting the exchange rate of the peso against the dollar,” he said.

Katz pointed out that during the 1990s, when the peso was pegged to the dollar, “the situation was much more complicated: the state budget was not balanced and there was a very large trade deficit.”

The Fernández administration counters criticism by pointing to wage increases, which in many cases are equal to or greater than inflation.

Inflation in Argentina “is not due to public spending, nor to the emission of bank notes, but is determined by the business sector,” Katz said. “After several years of rapid growth, they just adjust prices (upwards) instead of investing.

“When public funds are used to bail out banks, they see it as ‘natural and logical,’ but when subsidies combined with social expenditure are proposed, they are quick to call for cutbacks,” he said.

“There are mechanisms for dealing with oligopolistic groups,” Katz said. “They have made unprecedented profits; it is intolerable that they are raising prices, and the government just lets them,” he complained.

*With additional reporting by Fabiana Frayssinet in Rio de Janeiro and Emilio Godoy in Mexico City.

The nearly 200 theatres in the Argentine capital have been staging an increasing number of plays exploring gender identity or specifically gay issues in recent years, in mainstream, fringe and state-run productions.

Dozens of plays dramatising stories about gay people were produced last year, including “Juicio a lo natural” by Nicolás Pérez Costa, “Feizbuk” (Facebook) by José María Muscari, “Puto” (Faggot) by Alejandro Mateo and “Marejada” by Diego Beares — all by Argentine playwrights — and “Gotas que caen sobre piedras calientes” (Water Drops on Burning Stones) by German playwright Rainer Fassbinder.

Now playing in the southern hemisphere summer are “Loco Afán” (Mad Desire) by Chilean author Pedro Lemebel, presented in Buenos Aires and directed by a young Uruguayan playwright and actor, Gerardo Begérez, who took the Argentine capital’s theatre scene by storm in 2010 with his adaptations of Lemebel’s “Tengo miedo, torero” (Bullfighter, I’m Afraid), “Desamor. Mundos paralelos” (Indifference: Parallel Worlds) by Ulises Puiggrós, and “Reglas, usos y costumbres en la sociedad moderna” (Rules, Manners and Customs in Modern Society) by French author Jean-Luc Lagarce, all of which deal with homosexual relationships.

In a related sign of increased openness to people with different sexual orientations, Argentina became the first Latin American nation to legalise gay marriage in July 2010, granting same-sex couples the same legal rights, responsibilities and protections as heterosexual married couples.

Begérez told IPS that his theatre productions, partly featuring the gay world, “developed naturally out of personal interest.” He also found Buenos Aires to be “a city that provides a lot of freedom.”

“It’s much more difficult in Uruguay, Chile or Brazil,” said the Uruguayan director, who has lived in Argentina since 2008 and has worked in several other countries.

“In Montevideo, where I was born, society is much more straitlaced and puritanical, and this is expressed in homophobic jokes, nervous laughter, mockery and social condemnation of homosexuals,” he said.

The growth of gay-friendly theatre is part of the intense theatrical activity in Buenos Aires, which has 22 commercial theatres or complexes, according to the Argentine Association of Theatre Owners (AADET), and 14 official theatres dependent on the city or national government.

In addition, close to 140 independent theatres for alternative or fringe performances are registered with the municipal Instituto Proteatro, particularly in the neighbourhoods of Abasto, Palermo, San Telmo, Norte and Centro, and another 20 venues exist that are not on the register, sources said.

Muscari, one of Argentina’s best-known and most successful playwrights, told IPS that in his works he does not “specifically write for the gay public, but deals with issues that arise naturally for all kinds of spectators.”

At age 34, Muscari has directed some 30 plays, most of which he wrote himself. In 2010 he presented “Feizbuk”, “En la cama” (In Bed), “El anatomista” (The Anatomist) and “Escoria” (Scum).

“I find it very hard to categorise my plays according to sexuality or subject,” he said.

Juan Tauil, a reporter for Soy (I Am), a gay lifestyle supplement distributed with local newspaper Página 12 and the author of lacronicamechupaunhuevo.blogspot.com, told IPS that very few specifically homoerotic plays are being performed, but the rest are all tinged with gender identity issues, and show new kinds of families and different forms of love.

Muscari said his play “Shangay”, which has been playing for three years and will close in a few months’ time, “drew all kinds of audiences, contrary to what might be supposed.”

In Muscari’s view, the gay marriage law disseminated the topic widely in society, which promoted a natural approach to gay issues.

Begérez, for his part, said “there is a tendency to talk about these subjects because society needs to do so, in order to express the marvellous things that are happening in this country, through art — not in an aggressively militant way, as criticism, but in a way that just sheds more light.”

The present context calls for greater complexity in dramatic works, as in “Loco afán” where he was able to “effectively explore the aesthetics of transgression that happens naturally.”

“There is a much stronger taboo surrounding HIV/AIDS, so I took it to the extremes of sarcasm and black humour, which at any rate are present in the text by Lemebel,” said Begérez, who expressed great admiration for this author.

Begérez pointed out the value of “political incentives for this kind of dramatic expression,” and said a wave of tourism “is making Buenos Aires ‘the’ gay mecca of Latin America.”

Tauil said the direction Argentine theatre has taken shows that “identity is in flux, and this is hitting every sector of society.

“There is a new vision of what it is to be homosexual, female and male, and what it means to be Argentine and Latin American. The fact that we have a woman president (Cristina Fernández) has shaken up a lot of stereotypes,” he said.

This agenda has been historically present in Argentine theatre, although decades ago it was expressed differently. Homosexuality was portrayed with more complexity only in the alternative circuit, and sometimes in the official theatres.

Muscari described the impact he experienced at age 15, when he saw “Los invertidos”, directed by Alberto Ure at the state San Martín Theatre, which he said took risks that nowadays do not arise.

While word of mouth or passing out fliers in Avenida Corrientes, in central Buenos Aires, are still key forms of publicity for fringe theatre productions, the novelty in recent years has been how gender identity has come to mainstream theatre in this city and also in the southeastern city of Mar del Plata, the leading Argentine summer holiday resort.

Muscari remarked that more actors “are stepping outside their own conceptual boxes.” For example, he said he had invited actor Gonzalo Heredia, a television soap opera star and a media symbol of straight masculinity, to play the lead role in “Shangay”, a play he describes as “homoerotic.”

Heredia expressed interest, although he ultimately declined the part because of conflicting commitments, he said.

The magazine El Teje, which is published in the Argentine capital and presents itself as “the first transvestite publication in Latin America,” has been fighting the stigmatisation of the trans community for nearly three years.

Although the twice-yearly publication is now distributed free, the aim of its director, Marlene Wayar, is for it to be sold at newsstands.

In Argentina, which in late July became the first country in Latin America to legalise same-sex marriage, El Teje and other publications by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community enjoy a growing space in the world of print and online publishing.

“In Argentina there is no dearth of activism and social ferment aimed at fighting the fictitious messages sent out by the big media,” Wayar told IPS, as the magazine prepares to celebrate its third anniversary in November.

The often stigmatising and discriminatory attitude on the part of the media was also deplored by Jordan Medeot, editor of the Gaymente.com web site based in the central province of Córdoba.

In an exchange with IPS, Medeot said his publication attempts “a thought-provoking approach, but without being overly sophisticated or overly simplistic either.”

El Teje is published with the assistance of the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Centre at the public National University of Buenos Aires, which trains the transvestites who write for the magazine, in a writing workshop. The magazine distributes 2,000 free copies twice a year.

“With sheer effort, we try to get the publication to the houses, pensions or slums where the girls live,” Wayar said.

Other print publications in Argentina focusing on the LGBT community include Soy, a weekly supplement that comes out with the Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12, and Ají magazine, which describes itself as being “about gays, your run-of-the-mill transvestites…who are hot and who have no problem showing ourselves just as we are.”

There are also more traditional magazines that target gay men with a focus on pornography, eroticism, the obsession with physical appearance or fashion trends.

Then there are the radio programmes, the odd TV programme, and several dozen web sites along the lines of Gaymente.com or others with a more commercial approach, like Cordobagay.net.

Wayar said the aim of El Teje is to be a “carefully edited publication that fights the stigmatisation of the transvestite identity, which is so closely rooted in prostitution.

“‘Teje’ is a ‘multi-use’ slang term that can refer to whatever — drugs, money, documents, a man, genitals, a wig or makeup. It was born of the need to communicate in prison in a way that the guards wouldn’t understand,” Wayar explained.

“The people in the conversation know what they’re referring to, from the context,” said the journalist, who is also a social psychologist.

Along with a number of colourful photos, one recent issue included an interview with legendary Argentine sex symbol Isabel “Coca” Sarli, who starred in soft-core sex films in the 1960s and 1970s, and an article on “carrilche” — slang that emerged among transvestites in prisons in the 1970s and 1980s. The piece, which provides the meaning of some 50 terms, was written by Malva, who is 86 years old and says she has formed part of the “minority” for 66 years.

The issue also includes photos of the “chongo” or man of the month (a painter), cultural articles, opinion columns that lash out at the Catholic Church, medical alerts on the use of silicone and hormones, and advice on breast implants.

In the November issue, Sandra Sacayán, El Teje’s star writer, wrote about the mistreatment suffered by Johana Robledo, a transvestite who almost died after spending two months in jail in San Justo, a district on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, on charges that were reduced from homicide to armed robbery.

After she was mistreated by the other prisoners, Robledo was removed from the cell and left handcuffed on a mattress in the courtyard for a week, covered only with cardboard, in the middle of the winter. When she was finally released from preventive detention, she spent a month in the hospital.

Police harassment and brutality, the product of archaic or vaguely worded laws and statutes, or simply of discrimination and abuse, are a constant complaint of transvestites, who frequently have no choice but to turn to prostitution to survive.

Many members of the transvestite community live marginalised lives, far from their family homes. A large proportion have moved to Buenos Aires or other big cities from the provinces, or are immigrants from neighbouring countries.

“It is a key part of our identity,” Wayar said. “Our reality is infused with violence, which has to do with our bodies, with our families who kick us out at a very early age, when we are just girls and are forced to negotiate our very survival with adults in highly dangerous situations, especially in the slums and the provinces.”

She says the national debate that surrounded the parliamentary discussion of the law on same-sex marriage showed that people opposed to the new legislation “were almost proud to say it was a law that came out of the capital, and that they had other values and customs — which are basically machista, misogynistic and anti-trans.”

Another of El Teje’s goals is to reveal the discrimination that is deeply rooted in the country’s educational institutions, from which many transvestites drop out at an early age.

Wayar said the publication tries to reach “the girls who have been around for a while,” who are familiar with the city and its quirks and are often aware of their rights, as well as “the youngsters who have just come to the big cities” from the provinces.

Medeot, meanwhile, said Gaymente.com addresses “the reality of those who frequent the gay nightclubs and aren’t involved in the question of human rights, and of the political activists, which tend to be two separate worlds.

“Our aim is for whatever we do, even if it’s a frivolous celebrity-worshipping piece, to have an ideological foundation, to make the reader think,” the Cordoba-based journalist said.

He lamented that in the 1990s, when for the first time a number of transvestites became regulars on the small screen in Argentina, they accepted “the role assigned them by trashy reality TV,” and added that part of his aim as a journalist is to combat the media’s pigeonholing of members of the trans community.

Inequality and poverty in Argentina are explained to a large extent by a job market that discriminates against women, coupled with insufficient equal opportunity regulations and failure to enforce existing labour laws, experts on the issue told IPS.

According to Andrea Balzano, head of the gender division at the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) country office in Argentina, “entering the labour market is the only demographic and social event that enables households to escape poverty.”

But “women are much less likely to join the labour market, and even when they are able to find work, their opportunities are more limited because their insertion occurs through jobs in informal and low productivity sectors,” she explained.

Almost 14 percent of Argentina’s 40 million people, and 9.4 percent of its households, are classified as poor, according to data from the government’s National Statistics and Census Institute (INDEC) for the first semester of 2010. But private organisations place poverty at 31 percent and abject poverty at 11 percent.

Natalia Gherardi, executive director of the non-governmental organisation Equipo Latinoamericano de Justicia y Género (ELA – Latin American Team on Justice and Gender), says that “participation in the workforce and insertion in the job market are key factors in overcoming gender inequalities through economic autonomy.”

One of the most telling examples of how Argentina’s lack of regulations, large informal sector and gender discrimination shape the situation of women in the job market is the plight of paid domestic workers, a sector that accounts for 18 percent of all female employment.

Domestic work is carried out mainly by first and second-generation immigrants from the neighbouring countries of Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru, and by women from Argentina’s poorer northern provinces where much of the population is of mixed indigenous and European descent.

In Argentina, nine out of 10 working mothers with more than four children are employed by private homes to perform cleaning tasks, according to information from the official 2006 Permanent Household Survey.

Men make up 10 percent of the labour force in this sector.

Gherardi described domestic work as being “regulated in such a way as to be discriminatory, granting these workers exactly half the labour rights legally enjoyed by all other workers.”

She said there are currently no legal maternity leave provisions for domestic workers, while the state covers three months paid leave for working women in all other areas of activity.

Even the small proportion of domestic workers who are legally registered are denied the 60-dollar monthly bonus per child that the state provides as a “family benefit” to other workers in the formal sector of the economy.

This is compounded by the fact that these workers are only entitled to half of the paid annual leave and severance pay granted to workers in other sectors.

But the worst aspect is that most employers fail to register their domestics in the social security system, so that only 20 percent of them are formally recognised as workers and covered by social security.

Although in “recent years, undeclared work in the sector has declined, going from 95 to 80 percent,” Gherardi said, “this is not very significant progress.”

Argentina’s labour market is characterised in general by a high rate of under-the-table work, according to data from INDEC.

In the first quarter of 2010, only 63.6 percent of the local workforce was registered. And in the case of domestic workers the percentage of registered employees is significantly lower (approximately 16 percentage points less).

“The main problem lies in the enforcement of regulations, and, of course, any change would also involve a cultural transformation,” said the head of ELA, one of the leading organisations that advocates in favour of women’s rights in the country.

However, the poor working conditions prevalent in domestic employment should not eclipse other forms of discrimination that affect all women workers, regardless of the sector they work in.

“The access and pay gaps reveal that women earn 30 percent less than men in the same kind of job and for the same kind of tasks,” Balzano said. “There are also barriers that prevent women from reaching managerial and executive positions, a problem that is seen across the region.”

The UNDP official noted that women bear a double burden, as “society expects them to take on the responsibility of caring (for children, the sick and the elderly) and keeping house,” without being paid for it. “Society is full of prejudices based on stereotypes that see women as exclusively responsible for reproductive work and put men in charge of productive work,” she said.

Argentina ranked 46th among 155 countries in the UNDP’s 2007 Gender-related Development Index (GDI), an indicator introduced in 1995, along with the Gender Empowerment Measure, to highlight the status of women in the U.N. agency’s annual Human Development Report.

The GDI is basically the Human Development Index adjusted downwards for gender inequality, measuring achievement in the same basic capabilities as the HDI does, but taking note of inequality in achievement between women and men, thus imposing a penalty for inequality. That means the GDI falls when the achievement levels of both women and men in a country go down or when the disparity between their achievements increases.

The greater the gender disparity in basic capabilities, the lower a country’s GDI compared to its HDI. In 2007, Argentina’s GDI was 0.862 (of a maximum score of 1), while its HDI was 0.866, but GDI figures for 2009 reveal that Argentina has dropped to 0.699, with the country ranking 49th among 177 nations.

In terms of literacy, the rate is 97.7 percent for both genders, while women have a higher life expectancy than men (79 against 71.5 years), and also do better than men in education, as the female population is better educated than the male population.

But when it comes to measuring how each gender fares in terms of average annual per capita income, figures reveal that men’s earnings almost double those of women: 17,710 dollars a year against only 8,958 dollars.

“Work and Family: Towards new forms of reconciliation with social co-responsibility”, a 2009 joint study by the International Labour Organisation and the UNDP, sees the insertion of women in Argentina’s job market as an “irreversible phenomenon.”

This statement is backed by the fact that the economic activity rate for men remained steady at 72 percent from 1990 to 2008, while for women it jumped from 37 to 47 percent over that same period.

But Balzano noted that female unemployment stood at 15.1 percent compared to 8.7 percent for men, and that women were also more heavily affected by underemployment: 13.1 percent against 8.2 percent for men.

More than two years after he was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity committed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina, former police chaplain Christian von Wernich has not been penalised by the Catholic Church.

IPS found out that the 71-year-old priest even celebrates mass in prison.

Von Wernich was sentenced on Oct. 9, 2007 by a court in the city of La Plata, 57 km southeast of Buenos Aires, as an accomplice in the murders of seven members of the Peronist guerrilla organisation Montoneros, which was active in the 1970s, 31 cases of torture, and 42 cases of deprivation of freedom during Argentina’s dirty war.

According to human rights groups, 30,000 people fell victim to forced disappearance during the military dictatorship.

The Cámara de Casación, Argentina’s highest criminal appeals court, upheld von Wernich’s sentence in 2009.

As chaplain for the notorious Buenos Aires provincial police, von Wernich held the rank of inspector and frequently visited the regime’s secret torture camps, encouraging political prisoners to provide information in order to avoid being tortured.

Catholic Church leaders have kept mum on the case of the first clergyman accused and convicted of genocide. One Church source who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity said von Wernich holds mass in Marcos Paz prison, 50 km west of Buenos Aires.

“There will definitely be a penalty,” the source predicted, although he said what form it would take would depend on von Wernich’s superior, Bishop Martín Elizalde of the Nueve de Julio diocese.

Priests involved in progressive ecclesial base communities, which follow liberation theology, at the other end of the spectrum from von Wernich’s far-right views, preferred not to comment on the case.

Von Wernich’s parishioners in Marcos Paz are a unique lot. The priest shares the prison with dozens of former torturers, including high profile participants in the dirty war like ex-Navy Captain Alfredo Astiz, also known as the Blond Angel of Death, and former Navy Captain Jorge Acosta, alias “The Tiger”, who was head of intelligence at the Naval Mechanics School (ESMA), the regime’s most notorious torture centre.

Other fellow inmates are former police chiefs Luis Abelardo Patti and Miguel Ángel Etchecolatz.

Von Wernich had dropped out of sight for seven years after he was relocated to Chile in 1996, where he served as a parish priest in the city of Valparaíso, under a false name.

But although an arrest warrant was out for him, he was not captured until 2003, after he was tracked down by investigators and extradited to Argentina when Congress struck down the amnesty laws that put an end to prosecutions of human rights abusers in the mid- to late 1980s and human rights cases were reopened.

In the trial held in 2007, the witnesses testifying against him included 41 torture survivors.

One of them, Luis Velazco, testified that when one desperate torture victim begged the priest “Father, please, I don’t want to die,” von Wernich responded “Son, the lives of the men who are here depend on the will of God and the cooperation that you can offer. If you want to stay alive, you know what you have to do.”

Since Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983, the position taken by the Church with regard to the accusations against Von Wernich was that it was up to the courts to decide.

And when the sentence was handed down, the only reaction was a brief statement from Bishop Elizalde saying “we are praying for him, for God to assist him and to grant him the necessary grace to comprehend and repair the damages caused.”

The statement, which made no mention of penalties for the priest, apologised for the fact that “a priest, by action or omission, was so far from the requirements of the mission commended to him.”

The bishop also said that “at the appropriate time von Wernich’s situation will have to be resolved in accordance with canonical law.” He never again referred to the issue in public.

When the sentence was handed down, Father Guillermo Marcó, who was spokesman for conservative Buenos Aires Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio at the time, said it was a case of political manipulation by the court in La Plata.

Marcó also accused the government of then-president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), of the centre-left faction of the governing Justicialista (Peronist) Party, of being involved in the manipulation.

In Marcó’s view, which was taken by analysts as a reflection of the Catholic Church hierarchy’s stance, von Wernich “deserved to be tried,” but the sentence was used to “undermine the Church’s image.”

During the dictatorship, most of the Church’s leadership had a close relationship with the regime, which they publicly supported.

However, hundreds of church activists, along with around 30 members of the clergy and 60 lay leaders, were murdered or forcibly disappeared, like bishops Enrique Angelelli and Carlos Ponce de León, and three priests and two seminarians who were killed in the San Patricio church in Buenos Aires.

Church leaders have only issued a few demands for justice for their murders.

“The great majority of the bishops believe von Wernich has not committed any crime,” Fortunato Mallimaci, a researcher on the sociological history of Catholicism at the public National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET), told IPS.

In their view, he said, von Wernich merely “fulfilled his role as a priest, which at that time was to support the military during a terrible time caused by the attack by Marxist subversives.”

Mallimaci, who is also a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, said the close ties between the Church and the armed forces are due to historical factors.

“Since the country’s independence, Church leaders have seen themselves as a pillar of support for the fatherland and the nation, above and beyond political parties.”

In keeping with that view, “the official stance of the enormous majority of Argentina’s bishops is that the trials (for crimes against humanity) should be stopped,” said the analyst.

The concept of “complete memory” supported by Cardinal Bergoglio “runs along these lines: reconciliation must be brought about in Argentine society by acknowledging that crimes were committed on both sides,” said Mallimaci.

In the cardinal’s view, he explained, “if only one side is going to be tried, that is because the country is now ruled by a government of the Montoneros” leftwing guerrillas, which the far right insists on associating with President Cristina Fernández and her predecessor and husband Néstor Kirchner.

Bergoglio was criticised for his behaviour during the dictatorship by different religious orders, including the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), to which he belongs.

Since the return to democracy, the cardinal has protested against “impunity” and “revanchism” or political retaliation against the military’s performance during the dictatorship, and has sent friendly messages to far-right organisations that say the dictatorship’s state terrorism was needed to combat “Marxist” guerrillas.

Mallimaci said the position taken by the bishops’ conference is in line with the Vatican’s conservative stance on issues like artificial birth control, which it says runs counter to “natural law”, and homosexuality, which it calls a “deviation.”

A bill on same sex marriage and adoption by same sex couples that has the support of the government will create further tension between the Church and the Fernández administration, he said.

The violent deaths of four inmates in Argentine prisons in recent weeks confirmed the “systematic” violation of human rights in the country’s penitentiaries, according to human rights activists.

The Coordinating Committee against Police and Institutional Repression (CORREPI), an organisation for families of the victims of police brutality, has documented 2,826 deaths since the restoration of democracy in this South American country in December 1983, up to October 2009.

Of those fatalities, 33 percent took place in prisons, juvenile detention centres or police station holding cells. A considerable number of the deaths were attributed to suicides or fights between inmates, but CORREPI says that prison authorities played at least an incitement role in these.

CORREPI says that abusive treatment in prisons occurs all over the country, but is particularly serious in two provinces: Buenos Aires, home to 34 percent of Argentina’s 38.5 million people, and the western province of Mendoza.

In 2004 and 2006, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered provisional measures to be taken to protect the life and personal integrity of inmates in certain prisons in those two provinces.

The Court also required the state to clarify the circumstances surrounding deaths that occurred in specific facilities in Mendoza.

In its December 2009 report on prison conditions, CORREPI said that according to official reports, of the four deaths that month, one was due to burns, one was a suicide, one person died in a fight with a prison guard and one was shot at close range. The deceased were three men and a woman between the ages of 22 and 30.

Pablo Salinas, a lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs in the Argentine prison cases before the Inter-American justice system, told IPS that precautionary measures had been ordered for two penitentiaries in Mendoza: the provincial prison, known as Boulogne Sur Mer, in the capital of Mendoza, and the Lavalle Penal Colony.

Only one other prison in the Americas, in Urso Branco in the Brazilian state of Rondonia, has been handed a similar order from the Inter-American Court, the Mendoza lawyer said.

In its 2006 ruling, the Court reiterated that the Argentine state has the duty to protect the life and personal integrity of persons deprived of liberty, and ordered provincial and national authorities to undertake “effective and transparent” coordination to remedy the critical situation of overcrowding and insecurity.

The Argentine state acknowledged its responsibility for the situation at the Court hearings. The following year, in February 2007, the Argentine Supreme Court itself ordered Mendoza authorities to ensure that human rights are respected in prison facilities.

But nearly three years later, “unfortunately, the situation remains unchanged” in Mendoza prisons, Salinas said.

Human rights organisations in Mendoza reported that the Boulogne Sur Mer prison, built in the early 20th century, houses 1,700 inmates although it has capacity for only 500.

The prison “is built over a sewer, and inmates dip their knives in the raw sewage and then attack each other. Stab wounds become infected, sometimes causing meningitis. The entire sewer system is in a state of collapse,” Salinas said.

He added that “the healthcare system is like something out of Dante’s Inferno, to the point that inmates have to cut or injure themselves in order to receive medical attention. The self-inflicted wounds infect them with hepatitis B, and in other cases, sexual abuse leads to AIDS and syphilis.”

Seventeen deaths occurred at the Boulogne Sur Mer prison in 2004, when complaints began to be filed with the Inter-American human rights system. A new facility to relieve congestion is being built, but is proving to be no solution, the lawyer said.

At the new prison of Almafuerte, 45 minutes by road from the city of Mendoza, the policies and practices are much the same. “The worst thing is the hours spent on lockdown, as well as the lack of hygiene and safety for the prisoners,” Salinas said.

Mendoza, a province devoted mainly to vineyards and wine-making and which in former decades enjoyed a high standard of living, has been the setting for various “mano dura” or “iron fist” policies to clamp down on crime.

Governor Celso Jaque had appointed to the province’s security services several officials implicated in the human rights violations committed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship – when as many as 30,000 leftists and other dissidents fell victim to torture and forced disappearance – but was forced to remove them under pressure from human rights activists and the central government of President Cristina Fernández.

Although both Fernández and Jaque belong to the Justicialista (Peronist) Party, the president is in the centre-left faction of the party and Jaque in its right wing.

The Mendoza provincial legislature created the post of ombudsperson for prison affairs, and approved specific mechanisms for preventing the use of torture in prisons. However, implementation of both these measures has been delayed by the governor’s office.

Human rights abuses in Argentine prisons are also concentrated in the province of Buenos Aires, governed by conservative Peronist Daniel Scioli. The non-governmental Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) has just issued its 2009 Report on Human Rights in Argentina, in which it roundly condemns prison management by the local authorities.

The human rights group’s report says the Buenos Aires provincial government has adopted prison policies that cater to society’s demand for security by stiffening sentences and treatment of prisoners, and that regard constitutional rights as a hindrance to law enforcement.

According to CELS, the provincial government has focused again on heavy-handed “mano dura” policies, in spite of this strategy having had disastrous results in the past.

As a result, the province’s prison population was 24,166 at the end of 2008, with 3,448 more suspects being held at police stations, while the provincial government itself admitted that the capacity of its prisons was no more than 17,858 beds.

So far in 2010, conditions in Argentina’s prisons show no signs of improvement: a 24-year-old man was found hanged in his cell in a Mendoza prison. Lawyer Ismael Jalil, a member of CORREPI, complained to IPS about “how easy it is for prison guards to prepare the scene and make it look like suicide.”

Jalil said “prisoners are often used as drug mules (couriers) between police gangs. They are sent to another precinct and then suddenly turn up dead, apparently having committed suicide,” so that they cannot report the incident.

The lawyer described another way prisoners’ human rights are violated. The prison authorities act in collusion with the gangs that rule internal activities in prisons. As part of their deal, they hand over to the gangs prisoners who refuse to carry out the criminal activities they want them to perform.

In Argentina, the prevailing prison policy is “to dump human beings there for eventual extermination,” said Jalil.

Civil society groups in Argentina are concerned that private security firms, which have mushroomed to 850 in Greater Buenos Aires, employ many former police officers and troops who played an active role in the political repression during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

Non-governmental organisations complain that the state exercises very little oversight and control over the companies.

To shed light on the steadily growing business, the legislature of the city of Buenos Aires passed a measure under which the names and job history of the owners and employees of private security firms and the companies’ payrolls must be published on the internet by March 2010, to allow for scrutiny by civil society.

The measure was adopted after a court ruling in April forced the Buenos Aires city government, headed by right-wing Mayor Mauricio Macri, to give out information on the owners of two private security firms, Investigaciones Privadas Alsina and Scanner, which had been withheld from the local newspaper Página 12.

As the result of legal action brought by the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a local human rights group, a Buenos Aires judge declared unconstitutional a clause in law 1913 on private security firms in the capital, which the city government had invoked to refuse to hand the information over to the newspaper.

According to statistics made available by CELS, of the 100,000 private security guards in this country of 40 million people in 2007, approximately two-thirds were in Greater Buenos Aires, which is home to around 13 million people.

A study by the National Coordinator against Police and Institutional Repression (CORREPI) blames private security guards for two percent of the 2,557 deaths from abuses in police stations and prisons, summary executions or trigger-happy police committed since democracy was restored in 1983.

María del Carmen Verdú, a lawyer with CORREPI – which represents families of the victims of police brutality – told IPS that “the problem is not a lack of laws, but that they do not have any real influence.

“Nearly all provinces and cities have laws banning the hiring of people who have been dismissed from the security forces, have criminal records, or are facing prosecution for crimes against humanity,” she said.

“Nevertheless, every time we try to track down a fugitive from justice wanted for a ‘trigger-happy’ shooting, torture or arbitrary detention, we investigate the private security companies first,” she said.

Gustavo Palmieri, director of CELS’ Institutional Violence and Citizen Safety programme, told IPS that “the interrelationship between private security agencies and public security is a problem in most countries.

“In Argentina, that relationship is often seen in the illegitimate use of the information and resources of public institutions by private security agencies,” he said.

Verdú mentioned a case that highlighted the lack of oversight and enforcement of the laws prohibiting the hiring of private security agents with a dubious past: the case of Buenos Aires assistant police chief Jorge Ramón Fernández, found guilty of torturing to death 17-year-old Sergio Durán in 1992.

The legal ruling against Fernández, handed down in 1995, was the first to prove that the police continued to use the “picana” or electric shock device – a favourite torture technique used on political prisoners during the dictatorship.

Fernández was released from prison in 2003, just eight years after he was sentenced to life in prison. Four years later, CORREPI discovered that he was working for the Segur Part security firm, whose headquarters is located 100 metres from the police station where Durán was tortured to death and 200 metres from the courthouse in the Buenos Aires district of Morón.

“The most amazing thing was that the Parole Board and Criminal Court of Morón knew he was working there,” said Verdú.

Other examples are Colonel Aldo Álvarez, a fugitive from justice who managed, according to Página 12, the Alsina security agency, and police commissioner Jorge “Fino” Palacios, who advised the police from the Strategic Security Consultancy SA although he is accused by prosecutors in connection with the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre, in which 85 people were killed.

Another case is that of Buenos Aires province police sergeant Hugo Cáceres, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for heading a death squad, and was discovered at the head of a security company in Don Torcuato, to the north of Buenos Aires.

Many other private security agents belonged to the “carapintada” movement of far-right junior officers who staged four uprisings against democracy between 1987 and 1990. One of their leaders, Mohamed Ali Seineldin – who died Sept. 2 – was employed by the Fidei security company until 2002.

According to a CELS report, “the informal and illegal relations between the private security agencies, people linked to state terrorism in the last dictatorship, and Buenos Aires police officials were proven in the case of the Jan. 25, 1997 murder of photo journalist José Luis Cabezas,” the only proven politically-motivated murder of a reporter since the return to democracy.

“There comes a point where you reach the conclusion that having people with these kinds of backgrounds is an objective, besides the fact that all the retired police chiefs have their own companies,” said Verdú.

Understanding desertification as a macroeconomic problem, with financial, productive, environmental and civil society aspects, is a major concern for Christian Mersmann, the managing director of the Global Mechanism of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

Deforestation causes soil degradation: logging in Chiapas, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

The Global Mechanism’s mandate is to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of existing financial instruments and promote action to channel resources to developing countries affected by desertification.

Mersmann is taking part in the Ninth Session of the Conference of Parties (COP 9) to the Convention, being held Sept. 21 to Oct. 2 in Buenos Aires. The gathering has brought together some 2,500 experts in the fight against soil degradation, which over the next 40 years could forcibly displace hundreds of millions of people around the world, according to a number of studies.

In an interview with IPS at a hotel in central Buenos Aires, the U.N. expert said people in general must internalise the idea that environmental degradation affects the price of the tomatoes they buy at the greengrocer’s or the supermarket.

Mersmann stressed that many Latin American governments are increasingly understanding the macroeconomic effects of soil degradation, and are increasingly aware that enormous investments are needed to restore degraded farmland.

Everyone knows that finance ministers have other priorities, but in view of the loss of agricultural production and jobs, the main task is not to convince the ministers to make funds available, but to establish a multilateral agenda to examine what public policies, private investment and local and international financing are needed, Mersmann said.

Many participants at COP 9 have underlined that soil degradation is not a question of the soil alone, but includes aspects like water availability, vegetation and human development. The first results of the global strategy for 2008-2018 adopted at COP 8 in Madrid two years ago are being evaluated in Buenos Aires.

Mersmann, an anthropologist with extensive experience of programmes to recover degraded soils in Africa, emphasised the risks associated with the widely-held concept in Latin America that “soil (fertility) is inexhaustible,” because of the vast productive or semi-productive tracts of land that are not being farmed. Productive soil “is a scarce resource,” he stressed.

Asked about the effect of monocultures like the vast plantations of genetically-modified soybeans, which due to high international prices are displacing cattle ranching and traditional crops, Mersmann said they are “extremely risky” because market swings can cause the “complete collapse” of a country’s economy.

He pointed out that large-scale production of soybeans has a boomerang effect as it drives up the cost of other products, as in fact has been happening in Argentina, where a political and economic conflict between farmers’ associations and the centre-left government of President Cristina Fernández has been under way since 2008.

Mersmann said that a “green revolution” based on transgenic crops is absolutely unnecessary. On the one hand, presently available technology can be used to avoid the use of genetically modified seeds, whereas in terms of economic sustainability, the crucial European market and, no doubt, that of the United States, will not in future accept genetically altered products, he said.

Finally, Mersmann said the world is already in the midst of a huge conflict over water, which is becoming visible in local disputes. In 10 years’ time, the world will not be seeing traditional wars, but there will be many more local conflicts exerting a large impact on people’s lives, he said.

On the opening day of COP 9, Argentine Environment Secretary Homero Bibiloni acknowledged at a press conference that Argentina, both at home and abroad, is identified with the fertile pampas grasslands, even though they actually make up only one quarter of the national territory.

At the Scientific Conference held parallel to COP 9, the head of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), Mahmoud Solh, warned that global food sovereignty is in danger. Forty percent of the earth’s land surface is affected to some degree by desertification, changing the lives of 1.7 billion people, he said.

Argentine geographer and researcher Elena Abraham, head of the Argentine Institute for Arid Zone Research (IADIZA), said that half of the country’s cattle production takes place in the three-quarters of its territory that is regarded as drylands.

The felling of 850,000 hectares of native woods is an indication that by 2036, there will be no forests left to destroy in this country, Abraham added.

On a positive note, UNCCD executive secretary Luc Gnacadja told the conference that between 1991 and 2005, 16 percent of the global arid land area was improved thanks to the efforts of local and national governments.

After two years of the government health programme “Argentina justa, Argentina sin Chagas” (Fair Argentina, Chagas-Free Argentina) the fight against the endemic disease of that name is weakening, according to experts.

An adobe house in Jujuy, Argentina. Credit: Photo Stock

The disease transmitted by the protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi has no cure if it is not treated with an anti-parasitic drug in its early stages.

In 95 percent of the cases in Argentina, transmission is through bites from the “vinchuca” (Triatoma infestans), a blood-sucking insect that nests in the cracks of adobe, cane or log homes – common construction materials for humble rural dwellings in South America.

Other modes of transmission are blood transfusion, organ transplant, or via the placenta in pregnancy.

In 1911, the presence of the disease – named for its discoverer, the Brazilian Carlos Chagas – was verified in Argentina. One of the leading researchers of the disease, Argentine doctor Salvador Mazza, spent two decades beginning in 1926 studying its pathologenic, clinical, epidemiological and social aspects.

Chagas disease develops slowly, as the parasite can settle in the body tissues, mainly the heart, which leads to death in at least 30 percent of the cases. The initial infection symptoms studied by Mazza include fever, diarrhoea, vomiting, difficulty breathing and convulsion.

In October 2006, the government of Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) stated that there had been a worsening of Chagas due to the weakened cohesion and structure in efforts to fight the disease.

In that context, the Health Ministry launched the Federal Chagas Programme, which set a goal of “interrupting transmission and minimising the impact of its consequences in infected persons.”

“Due to the numerous factors involved, to which are added economic and political factors, the disease has gone from being not only associated with poverty, to become a paradigm of mechanisms of secrecy and exclusion as a form of social and labour discrimination,” states the programme on its web site.

Sonia Tarragona, director general of the Fundación Mundo Sano (Healthy World Foundation), specialising in Chagas disease, told Tierramérica that the government’s efforts “are good, but there still has been no significant change” and the statistical information available is limited.

The problem is part of what are known as “neglected diseases”, Tarragona said.

The connection between Chagas and poverty, she said, means “there is no interest on the part of the pharmaceutical industry in developing vaccines or medications. Who are they going to sell the vaccine to if nobody can buy it?”

Chagas disease can be found in a vast area ranging from the southern United States to northern Argentina and Chile, with cases totaling 15 million.

Argentina’s Health Ministry calculates there are 2.5 million people infected in that country, but just 25 percent develop the disease.

It is found in 19 of Argentina’s 23 provinces. Of those, seven are in a critical situation, with vinchucas found in more than five percent of homes. Those provinces include the poorest: Formosa, Chaco and Santiago del Estero, in the north.

From Chaco, Rolando Rivas, head of the Nelson Mandela Social Studies and Research Centre, based in the provincial capital Resistencia, told Tierramérica that the area needs health testing, “especially among the indigenous and criolle population”.

“The disease is part of the dark health statistics. There is no will to change things,” he charged.

Rivas recounted, based on official data, that between 2001 and 2003, during Argentina’s devastating economic and social crisis, “not one single house was fumigated in Chaco, despite the fact that the national government had sent insecticides.”

“From 2000 to 2006, medications were distributed to just 167 patients, when Chaco probably has at least 60,000 ill,” he said.

Arising from a change in administration in the provincial government, Rivas reported that in “the second half of 2008, after many setbacks, there was better fumigation of El Impenetrable forest – which includes part of Chaco, Santiago del Estero and Salta – with the arrival of brigades from the national ministry.”

Nevertheless, he warned that “anti-vinchuca” housing is necessary – with finished floors and walls – and that fumigation must continue.

Tarragona said the biggest problems in fighting Chagas disease in Argentina is the disparity in carrying out prevention policies in the different provinces, coordinated by the federal government, and the lack of follow-up in fumigation of the highest-risk housing units – the only on-the-ground preventative measure.

The biggest challenge facing the epidemiologists is that a high percentage of the infected population is not aware of the fact, because the disease can be asymptomatic for years.

Furthermore, because the infected people tend to be impoverished rural dwellers with little education and limited access to health services, they unwittingly promote the propagation of the vinchucas and the transmission of the disease.

In the region, Brazil and Uruguay were able to stop the vinchuca vector. But in Argentina, according to unofficial figures, there has been a resurgence in provinces that had once been able to halt transmission. Bolivia and Paraguay are facing the same trends as Argentina.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)

Non-governmental sources in Argentina report that Chagas disease is seeing an upswing.

An adobe house in Jujuy, Argentina. - Photo Stock

The disease transmitted by the protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi has no cure if it is not treated with an antiparasitic in its early stages.

In 95 percent of the cases in Argentina, transmission is through bites from the “vinchuca” (Triatoma infestans), a blood-sucking insect that nests in the cracks of adobe, cane or log homes — common construction materials for humble rural dwellings in South America.

Other modes of transmission are blood transfusion, organ transplant, or via the placenta in pregnancy.

In 1911, the presence of the disease — named for its discoverer, the Brazilian Carlos Chagas — was verified in Argentina. One of the leading researchers of the disease, Argentine doctor Salvador Mazza, spent two decades beginning in 1926 studying its pathologenic, clinical, epidemiological and social aspects.

Chagas disease develops slowly, as the parasite can settle in the body tissues, mainly the heart, which leads to death in at least 30 percent of the cases. The initial infection symptoms studied by Mazza include fever, diarrhea, vomiting, difficulty breathing and convulsion.

In October 2006, the government of Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) stated that there had been a worsening of Chagas due to the weakened cohesion and structure in efforts to fight the disease.

In that context, the Health Ministry launched the Federal Chagas Program, which set a goal of “interrupting transmission and minimizing the impact of its consequences in infected persons.”

“Due to the numerous factors involved, to which are added economic and political factors, the disease has gone from being not only associated with poverty, to become a paradigm of mechanisms of secrecy and exclusion as a form of social and labor discrimination,” states the program on its web site.

Sonia Tarragona, director general of the Fundación Mundo Sano (Healthy World Foundation), specializing in Chagas disease, told Tierramérica that the government's efforts “are good, but there still has been no significant change” and the statistical information available is limited.

The problem is part of what are known as “neglected diseases”, Tarragona said.

The connection between Chagas and poverty, she said, means “there is no interest on the part of the pharmaceutical industry in developing vaccines or medications. Who are they going to sell the vaccine to if nobody can buy it?”

Chagas disease can be found in a vast area ranging from the southern United States to northern Argentina and Chile, with cases totaling 15 million.

Argentina's Health Ministry calculates there are 2.5 million people infected in that country, but just 25 percent develop the disease.

It is recorded in 19 of Argentina's 23 provinces. Of those, seven are in a critical situation, with vinchucas found in more than five percent of homes. Those provinces include the poorest: Formosa, Chaco and Santiago del Estero, in the north.

From Chaco, Rolando Rivas, head of the Nelson Mandela Social Studies and Research Center, based in the provincial capital Resistencia, told Tierramérica that the area needs health testing, “especially among the indigenous and criolle population.”

“The disease is part of the dark health statistics. There is no will to change things,” he charged.

Rivas recounted, based on official data, that between 2001 and 2003, during Argentina's devastating economic and social crisis, “not one single house was fumigated in Chaco, despite the fact that the national government had sent insecticides.”

“From 2000 to 2006, medications were distributed to just 167 patients, when Chaco probably has at least 60,000 ill,” he said.

Arising from a change in administration in the provincial government, Rivas reported that in “the second half of 2008, after many setbacks, there was better fumigation of El Impenetrable forest — which includes part of Chaco, Santiago del Estero and Salta — with the arrival of brigades from the national ministry.”

Nevertheless, he warned that “anti-vinchuca” housing is necessary — with finished floors and walls — and that fumigation must continue.

Tarragona said the biggest problems in fighting Chagas disease in Argentina is the disparity in carrying out prevention policies in the different provinces, coordinated by the federal government, and the lack of follow-up in fumigation of the highest-risk housing units — the only on-the-ground preventative measure.

The biggest challenge facing the epidemiologists is that a high percentage of the infected population is not aware of the fact, because the disease can be asymptomatic for years.

Furthermore, because the infected people tend to be impoverished rural dwellers with little education and limited access to health services, they unwittingly promote the propagation of the vinchucas and the transmission of the disease.

In the region, Brazil and Uruguay were able to stop the vinchuca vector. But in Argentina, according to unofficial figures, there has been a resurgence in provinces that had once been able to halt transmission. Bolivia and Paraguay are facing the same trends as Argentina.

On weekdays in the Argentine capital, 1.5 million people use the subway, which was the first underground train system in Latin America and the 13th in the world. But while it remains an affordable means of transportation, it is the target of myriad complaints.

Rush hour traffic jams in greater Buenos Aires, home to 13 million people, can be a major problem. Because of that, and the relatively low fares, the number of people using the “subte”, as the metro, tube, underground or subway is known in this city, has grown 50 percent since the mid-1990s, according to information provided to IPS by the Metrovías company, which runs the system.

The powerful local Roggio business group holds a more than 90 percent stake in Metrovías.

A report by the city’s public services regulatory agency found problems in the subway with lighting, signs, accident prevention and trains that do not arrive on schedule, in that order.

Some of the problems mentioned in the 2008 entries in the Metrovías book of complaints include severely overcrowded trains at peak hours, intense heat in the summertime, malfunctioning escalators, a lack of information when there are problems like trains that do not show up, closed bathrooms, obstacles for the disabled, mistreatment by employees, and filth and grime.

However, not only the subte has come under the scrutiny of consumer defence groups, but the public transport system as a whole.

The urban, interurban, land and air transport systems, nearly all of which are in private hands, are plagued by problems of all kinds while the state has failed to ensure that the companies fulfil the terms of their concession contracts, according to critics.

Ariel Rochetti, a delegate for the trade union representing workers on the subte’s Lìnea B (B Line), told IPS that “80 percent of the trains are at least 30 years old,” and the company “has failed to invest in maintenance of the trains and the tracks.”

The subte in Buenos Aires began to operate in 1913, when there were just 13,650 registered motor vehicles on the city’s roads. Today there are six subway lines. The newest, the “H Line”, began to function last year.

With just 44 kilometres of rails and 76 stations, the subte has fallen far behind the subway systems of cities like Berlin, Paris and New York, which had underground train systems a few years before Buenos Aires.

Expansion of the subte continued apace until the 1940s, but after that, periods of stagnation alternated with periods of slow growth.

But there is also a steep difference in fares. A ticket for the Buenos Aires subte costs 31 cents of a dollar, compared to two dollars for a ride in New York, or 60 cents in Chile, which in the last 19 years has built the largest subway network in South America, which will have a total of 105 kilometres of tracks in 2010.

And in Buenos Aires, pensioners and school children ride free.

The privatisation of the subte in 1993, carried out by the government of Carlos Menem (1989-1999), of the right wing of the governing Justicialista (Peronist) Party, marked a watershed in the subway’s development and expansion.

Although the state-run Subterráneos de Buenos Aires subway company continues to own the tracks and the stations and is in charge of any expansion of the system, Metrovías holds the concession to operate the service, one of the few in the world run by private companies.

Under the privatisation agreement, the concession holder was to provide the service and maintain the trains and tracks in exchange for ticket revenue and the earnings gained from the rental of advertising space.

In the first three years, the stations were renovated and advertising space was expanded to the maximum. But in the process, murals and wall tiles of enormous artistic, cultural and historic value were damaged or destroyed. Later restoration projects and new works partially repaired the damages.

Metrovìas is to pay a concession fee for running the subte, which was profit-making up to the 1980s, while the state is in charge of investing in infrastructure.

The contract established that if the system showed a loss, the state would cover it with subsidies, which it eventually had to do.

As soon as it took over the subte, Metrovías drastically reduced the hours during which the trains ran, with the last one pulling out at 22:30 every day. It also put in place tighter controls at entrances to the subway.

Trains became more punctual, and an increase in the number of subway cars, provided mainly by state funds, made it possible to expand the service frequency. In 1999, the contract was renegotiated and extended until 2017, despite the opposition of many non-governmental organisations and much of the general public.

The system of state subsidies to public transportation concession holders has been in place in Argentina since the country’s late-1990s recession. The companies receive enormous sums from the state to keep fares low.

In addition, the 2002 “railroad emergency” law enabled Metrovías to get out of paying for maintenance tasks that were its responsibility.

Metrovías, which closed its books in the black in the last two fiscal years, received 116 million dollars in government subsidies in 2008.

Subte workers complain that the government of Cristina Fernández, of the centre-left wing of the Justicialista Party, does not make any demands in exchange for these funds. The government’s transport officials are holdovers from the administration of her predecessor, her husband Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007).

“The whole thing has to do with a series of ‘arrangements’ between the government and the company, and the discretional handling of funds, as we have denounced,” said Rocchetti.

The trade unionist added that “those of us who fix the subway cars know what state they’re in.”

The combative trade union that groups 4,000 Metrovías employees has been headed for the last few years by unionists affiliated with Trotskyist and social democratic parties, unlike most of Argentina’s unions, which have historically identified with the traditional wing of the Peronist party.

Some of the complaints by subte riders have to do with the frequency and unpredictability of strikes and other measures by subway workers, whose effects can be felt several weeks a year.

Rochetti admitted that this was a problem. “We have learned that you cannot just bring a dispute to the terrain of confrontation in the case of a public service, and that we must have a policy aimed at passengers, with campaigns, signs, pamphlets and press conferences, to announce our actions and explain our problems,” he said.

In the 25 years since the end of one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the history of Latin America, Argentina has racked up a total of 2,557 deaths from abuses in police stations and prisons, summary executions or trigger-happy police, according to an organisation for families of the victims.

The Coordinating Committee against Police and Institutional Repression (CORREPI) describes the profile of most police victims as “dark-skinned youngsters living in poor neighbourhoods with a high level of violence.”

More than half the victims were under 25, and two-thirds were under 35, CORREPI said in its annual report released in late 2008 in the historic Plaza de Mayo in front of the seat of government in the Argentine capital.

The study highlighted 1,341 cases described as on-the-spot shootings, or “summary executions,” sometimes with the involvement of “death squads,” especially in “the Greater Buenos Aires conurbation and districts within the city itself.”

In second place, 822 deaths occurred since 1983 in prisons, police stations or “in custody.” CORREPI says that the worst places for such abuses are the provinces of Mendoza, in the west, Santiago del Estero in the north, Santa Fe in the northeast and Buenos Aires in the east, and that the deaths are usually reported as “suicides by hanging or fire.”

In 2004, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a resolution condemning prison conditions in the province of Mendoza. Furthermore, in every case of prison riots and fires, in which dozens of inmates die, their families complain that the prison guards used excessive force, or adopted a “laissez-faire” attitude.

CORREPI’s statistics continue with what they categorise as “intra-force violence,” which includes “210 cases in which victims and killers were colleagues in the same service or force.”

In the chapter on “other circumstances,” the group refers to “105 deaths of passersby or third parties caused by the disregard for human life displayed by police officers.” In fifth place, 52 people were killed in protests and demonstrations.

Finally, 23 deaths resulted from “fabricated charges or as a consequence of other crimes,” and a further eight deaths from unspecified causes.

Gustavo Filograsso, a member of CORREPI, told IPS that the figure of 2,557 deaths due to police brutality is only “part of the total, as there are in fact many more cases.

“What we are talking about is not illegal repression, but state repression which is moving forward on the legal front, and is being legitimised by the legislative reforms that are being approved in quick succession. In fact, in the justice system, many cases are won but many are also lost,” he said.

CORREPI activists take action when they receive a complaint, or on their own initiative, and they monitor articles in the press. “We corroborate what happened when ‘confrontations’ between the police and criminals are reported in the media, and we find that 90 percent of cases turn out to be fabricated,” Filograsso said.

The organisation is made up mainly of lawyers, and works to defend victims of police brutality. It was formed in 1991 in response to the violent death of a young man, Walter Bulacio, who was arbitrarily arrested by the Buenos Aires police after attending a concert by the rock group Redonditos de Ricota. He was taken to a police station, badly beaten, and died in hospital one week later with a fractured skull.

Filograsso said the government of former president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and the current administration of Kirchner’s wife, President Cristina Fernández, have the highest death toll at the hands of state security forces, despite the fact that they are recognised for their policies of promoting the trials of those responsible for human rights violations during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

“Their governments have been responsible for the greatest repression” since 1983, Filograsso said.

Kirchner and Fernández lead the centre-left sector that is predominant today in the Justicialista (Peronist) Party (PJ), founded by Juan Domingo Perón in the early 1940s, which covers a wide ideological spectrum, from leftwing to far-right groups.

With regard to the pronounced differences between the perception of these recent governments by leading human rights groups like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo and the position taken by CORREPI, Filograsso said “while respecting their track record, nowadays, in concrete terms, we no longer have a close relationship.”

Raúl Abraham, a lawyer and adviser to the Axel Blumberg Foundation, set up in 2004 by the father of a young man who was kidnapped and murdered, which promotes “zero tolerance” or “strong-arm” policies on crime, disagreed with CORREPI’s conclusions.

“The police do not have the elements they need to fight crime. Criminals die because they are criminals, period. The police are often hampered in their actions,” he said.

Abraham told IPS that “ineffectiveness on the part of judicial officials means that many criminals are not where they ought to be.” The Foundation proposes fast-track oral trials before juries and tougher penalties, and criticises measures to ensure alleged criminals’ rights.

Jorge Casanovas, a former judge, justice minister for the province of Buenos Aires and lawmaker for a rightwing sector of the PJ, has similar views. “The police have been disarmed in every sense: not only in terms of training and weapons, but also in terms of their authority and morale,” he told IPS.

After Casanova’s period as minister, another PJ government of Buenos Aires province carried out a drastic reform of its police force, which was criticised by the right.

But present Governor Daniel Scioli, of the PJ centre-right, put a stop to the reforms, and has promoted measures like lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16 or even 14.

According to Casanovas, “the most important factor undermining public safety is drugs, which are the greatest cause of crime.”

On the other hand, Vilma Ripoll, a Trotskyist political leader and former presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers’ Party-New Left, said in an interview with IPS that “the repressive state apparatus has not been dismantled, and the police continue to use the same methods as they did during the dictatorship.

“In the metropolitan area of Greater Buenos Aires, the police are lords and masters of the brothels and the drug trade, and they see young people as the enemy,” she said.

Ripoll advocates an oversight and monitoring role for ordinary citizens and human rights organisations in police stations, and for judges and police inspectors to be elected by popular vote, with the possibility of being dismissed.

Over the last two decades, lack of public safety has been gaining ground among the concerns of ordinary Argentines, as social indicators have deteriorated on a scale not seen in the country for the last 60 years.

In response to this concern, former president Carlos Menem (1989-1999), of the PJ’s populist right wing, proposed during his failed reelection campaign in 2003 “to bring the tanks out on to the streets,” meaning using the army to fight common crime.

Along the same lines, Menem’s vice president during his second term, Carlos Ruckauf (1995-1999), called on police in the province of Buenos Aires to “shoot thieves on sight,” during the 1999 election campaign.

The wave of opinion in favour of strong-arm policies meant that even notorious participants in the military dictatorship received voters’ support, such as former General Antonio Domingo Bussi in mayoral elections in the northern province of Tucumán, and former police officer Luis Abelardo Patti, who became mayor of the city of Escobar, in the northern part of Buenos Aires province.

Since then, Bussi has been sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, which he is serving under house arrest because of his advanced age. Patti, who had publicly defended the use of torture, is serving a sentence for the same charge in jail.

A study titled “Mapa da Violência: Os jovens da América Latina 2008” (Map of Violence: Young People in Latin America 2008), by the Brazil-based Latin American Technological Network (RITLA), published in November by the Brazilian government of leftwing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, shows that the level of violence in Argentina is by no means the worst in Latin America.

Using data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) for 2003 to 2006, the study reports that there were 5.8 murders a year per 100,000 population in Argentina, slightly higher than the 4.5 per 100,000 in Uruguay and 5.4 in Chile.

This group of Southern Cone countries has murder rates well below those of El Salvador, with 48.8 per 100,000 population, Colombia with 43.8, Venezuela with 30.1, Brazil with 25.2 and Mexico with 9.3. The murder rate in the United States is also higher, at six per 100,000 population.

However, among young people aged 15-24, the murder rates rise to 9.4 per 100,000 people in that age range in Argentina, 92.3 in El Salvador, 73.4 in Colombia, 64.2 in Venezuela, and 51.6 in Brasil. On average, in Latin America, young people aged 15-24 are more than twice as likely to be murdered than the rest of the population.