Women gather at the Punto Violeta, a center where different government agencies and social organisations seek to address the gender-based violence suffered by women in the Padre Mugica neighborhood, or Villa 31, a shantytown in Argentina's capital city. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 4 2022 (IPS)

The Padre Carlos Mugica neighborhood looks like another city within the Argentine capital, which most people usually see from up above as they drive past on the freeway but have never visited. It is a shantytown in the heart of Buenos Aires, of enormous vitality and where women are organizing to confront the various forms of violence that affect them.

“I have a history of gender violence. And what I found here is that many other women have experienced similar situations in their lives,” says Graciela, seated at the table of the weekly Women’s Meeting, in a small locale in the most modern sector of the neighborhood, called Punto Violeta, which has become a reference point for victims of violence."We centralize the care at the Punto Violeta because, although the violence here is no different from that in other parts of the city, many women find it difficult to leave the neighborhood because they don't know how." -- Carolina Ferro

Traditionally known in Buenos Aires as Villa 31 and home to more than 40,000 inhabitants, the neighborhood’s name honors a Catholic priest and activist who worked with poor families, who was killed during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

The slum is located on more than 70 hectares of publicly owned railway land just a few minutes from the center of the capital and separated by the train tracks from Recoleta, one of the city’s most upscale neighborhoods. Families started to occupy the area 90 years ago and the shantytown grew as a result of the successive crises that hit the Argentine economy and with the influx of poor immigrants from Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru.

Different governments have tried to eradicate the slum throughout its history, but in recent years the official view of the neighborhood has changed. Today Villa 31 is halfway through a slow and laborious process of urbanization and integration into Buenos Aires that the city government launched in 2015.

Thus, it has become a strange place, which mixes hope for a better future with the social woes of poverty and overcrowding.

There are wide streets with public transport and modern concrete housing blocks where once there was only a total absence of the state. But there are also still many narrow, dark passageways, where precarious brick and sheet metal houses up to four stories high seem on the verge of crumbling on top of each other.

View of one of the passageways in the Padre Mugica neighborhood, a slum located in the heart of Buenos Aires. The process of regularizing the informal settlement and integrating it with the city began in 2015, but it is only halfway done and narrow passageways lined with precarious housing coexist with modern roads and buildings. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The struggle for a better life

Graciela, who became a single mother at 18 and now has six children she has had to raise on her own, says she lived in the western province of Santa Fe and decided to move to Buenos Aires in search of a better life, after an accident at work in which she lost a hand. “In order to get a disability pension, I had to be here,” she explains. That’s how she ended up in Villa 31.

She says that this year her ex-partner tried to kill her, cutting her neck several times with a knife, so today she has a panic button given to her by the police.

She shares the things that happen to her at the Women’s Meeting every Wednesday, a space where collective solutions are sought for complicated lives, marked by economic difficulties, overcrowded housing, interrupted studies, lack of opportunities, families with conflicts and a permanent struggle to get ahead.

“It is a weekly meeting where we invite all the women of the neighborhood and we work on emotional strength as a preventive strategy against violence. Sometimes women start to feel that what they experience at home is normal,” says Carolina Ferro, a psychologist of the Women’s Encounter Program of the Undersecretariat of Public Safety and Order of the Buenos Aires Ministry of Justice and Security.

Ferro explains that the goal is to bolster the self-esteem of the women victims of violence. “Once they are empowered, they can go out to work to become economically independent or go back to school. We help them to be themselves,” she says during the last meeting in September, in which IPS was allowed to participate.

“This is part of a comprehensive care project. We centralize the care at the Punto Violeta because, although the violence here is no different from that in other parts of the city, many women find it difficult to leave the neighborhood because they don’t know how,” she adds.

Graciela, a mother of six children whom she has had to raise on her own, is one of the participants in the Punto Violeta in Padre Mugica, where women come together to find solutions to the violence they have experienced and to empower themselves to improve their lives, those of their families and the community. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

When the psychologist asks the women what has been the greatest achievement in their lives, excited responses emerge. One says, “Raising my children on my own”; another says, “Going back to school as an adult, and graduating”; and another says, “Having stopped working as a house cleaner to open my own little salon where I do therapeutic massage.”

“This is the first time in my life that I have spoken to a psychologist,” says one of the participants in the meeting, who is anguished because her son, whom she dreamed would become a university graduate and professional, dropped out of school. The group coordinator and her fellow participants insist on the need not to place expectations on another person, whose life cannot be controlled, in order to avoid frustration.

Unceasing violence

In 2021, in this South American country of 45 million people, 251 women were killed by gender violence, an average of one murder every 35 hours, according to the National Registry of Femicides, kept by the Supreme Court of Justice since 2015. In 88 percent of the cases, the victim knew her aggressor, and in 39 percent she lived with him. In 62 percent of the cases she was killed by her partner or ex-partner.

The Supreme Court has been conducting the survey since 2015 and the figures have not varied much, with approximately 20 percent of femicides in the city of Buenos Aires committed in shantytowns and slums. In any case, during 2020, the most critical year of the COVID-19 pandemic, calls to emergency numbers increased fivefold.

Aerial view of the Padre Mugica neighborhood, or Villa 31, as many still call it, with downtown Buenos Aires in the background. The 90-year-old informal settlement now straddles a freeway and has more than 40,000 inhabitants, just minutes from the heart of the Argentine capital. CREDIT: City of Buenos Aires

It was precisely during the pandemic that the Punto Violeta was born, as a government response to a longstanding concrete demand in the neighborhood for a women’s center.

“When the pandemic began and mobility restrictions were imposed, it was a very difficult time in the neighborhood, when some local women told us that we should not forget the women victims of violence, who had been locked in their homes with their aggressors,” Bárbara Bonelli, deputy ombudsperson in the Buenos Aires city government and a driving force behind the creation of the center, told IPS.

Punto Violeta is the name given in Argentina and other countries to spaces designed to promote the defense of the rights of women and sexual minorities, in which public agencies work together with social organizations.

The program in Mugica involves several public agencies, which take turns on different days of the week, with the mission of providing a comprehensive approach to the problem of violence.

At the center victims can file a criminal complaint of gender violence with representatives of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, obtain a protection measure or gain access to psychological care or a social worker.

“Punto Violeta was created to respond to a demand that existed in the neighborhood. I would say that the problem of violence against women is no different in poor neighborhoods, but it does need to be addressed at a local level,” says Bonelli.

“Since it is very difficult for them to leave the neighborhood, the state did not reach these women. We hope that the Punto Violeta will contribute to the effective insertion of women from the neighborhood in terms of employment, education, finance, economic and social issues,” she adds.

Terry-Ann Lewis fears that this drain which runs through her community could lead to catastrophe if it is unable to handle heavy storm runoff. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
GREEN BAY, Antigua, Jan 28 2015 (IPS)

It was early on a Saturday morning and there was no sign of life in the community. The shacks erected on both sides of the old, narrow road that winds through the area are all surrounded by zinc sheets which rise so high, it’s impossible to see what lies on the other side.

But behind those walls is a story of life on the margins: poverty and fear for women. In spite of noticeable improvements in the overall quality of life in Antigua and Barbuda, inequality and deprivation continue to challenge development, with pockets of extreme poverty in some areas.“Whenever the rain comes, it floods my mother’s house, it floods my house and it floods my daughter’s house.” -- Cynthia James

For Cynthia James and other women living in this shoreline community on the outskirts of the capital St. John’s, hope is all but lost.

“A politician came here once and called me a dog,” James said as she stood outside her gate holding her one-year-old grandson. “The politician said all of us in here are dogs and are not used to anything good and we will always be dogs. I will never forget that. When you get hurt you never forget it.”

The two main political parties here hold differing views about the level of poverty and unemployment in the country. The Antigua Labour Party (ALP) has consistently placed the poverty level at around 35 per cent but the United Progressive Party (UPP) placed the percentage of the working population living on less than EC$10 a day at 12 per cent, the lowest in the region.

“The highest is in Haiti: 79 percent of the population, that is eight out of 10, live on approximately EC$10 a day. Guyana, 64 percent; Suriname, 45 percent; Jamaica, 43 percent; Dominica, 33 percent; St Vincent & the Grenadines, 33 percent; Grenada, 32 percent; St. Kitts, 31 percent; Trinidad, 21 percent; St. Lucia, 19 percent; Barbados, 14 percent; Antigua, 12 percent,” said former legislator Harold Lovell, citing World Bank figures. Lovell served a minister of finance in the former administration.

James, 53, does not care much for the numbers being debated by politicians. For year now, she and the other women living in this vulnerable area have been watching a drain which runs through the community wreak havoc on their modest dwellings whenever it rains.

James, her 78-year-old mother Gertrude and 28-year-old daughter Terry-Ann Lewis all live on the same street. Their biggest fear now is that the drain which runs through the area will one day cause their deaths.

Antiguan resident Cynthia James said a politican once called her a dog. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

“When I was a little girl they would always come and clean out the gutter, they would send the prisoners to clean up the area, but all of that has stopped,” James told IPS. “Whenever the rain comes, it floods my mother’s house, it floods my house and it floods my daughter’s house.”

The dozens of families here have thought about moving to safer communities but they say they are just too poor to relocate without assistance.

In 2014, the issue of poor drainage that leads to flooding in this and other communities across the country came into focus with a series of community consultations led by the Environment Division.

Senior Environment Officer Ruleta Camacho said the aim was to establish a sustainable financing mechanism and develop a climate adaptation project that could bring about significant changes to affected communities.

“Due to the impact of climate change we are having exacerbated drought and exacerbated rainfall – we are having large amounts of rain in a short amount of time and what we need to do at this point is to make sure our waterways and drains can handle that volume of water,” she said.

Terryann Lewis is anxiously awaiting the commencement of the promised project. She recalled her brush with death on Oct. 13, 2014 when Tropical Storm Gonzalo passed near Antigua, tearing roofs from people’s homes and knocking down trees.

For several hours, heavy rain and strong winds lashed Antigua, which bore the brunt of the storm as it cut through the northern Leeward Islands. Downed trees blocked many island roads and people lost power or reported that the storm damaged, or in some cases destroyed the roofs of their homes.

“I went to sleep that night and when I woke up, I was in water. I had just come home from work and I was tired so I just went to sleep but when I woke up the whole place was flooded. Everything gone; everything was soaked or washed away. I lost everything and I had to start fresh again,” Lewis told IPS.

“The gutter that runs through this community collects waste from all over the place so everything ends up right here in this community.

“That gutter is going to kill all of us; that is the only thing I can tell you. The gutter is blocked so whenever we have rain the water is not free to run. The drain is clogged up so the water quickly overflows. Whenever it rains this whole area is like a beach,” she added.

Prime Minister Gaston Browne, whose administration came to power just seven months ago, said his government will focus on improving human development, putting people first. He has consistently said he intends to make Antigua the region’s economic powerhouse, a Singapore on the Caribbean Sea.

“We will focus on building our human capital into internationally competitive individuals capable of driving the growth and social development of our nation state,” Browne said.

“We will concentrate on youth empowerment, providing our youth with employment, the opportunity to own a piece of the rock under our land for youth programme, a home under our home for youth programme or his/her own business through a dedicated entrepreneurial loan programme, that will commence in 2015 at the Antigua & Barbuda Development Bank.

“Our main focus of human development will be through education and training. No one will be left behind,” Browne added.

The International Monetary Fund anticipates growth in Latin America and the Caribbean in the region of 2.2 percent for 2015. This represents something of a rebound for the region, as growth in 2014 was estimated to be 1.3 percent.

But whether that figure will translate into improved living conditions for the poorest and most vulnerable remains to be seen.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at destinydlb@gmail.com