BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Yamila Rodriguez opened a broad smile as she turned to watch the sunset over the makeshift huts and canvas tents in her new neighborhood. the sweetness of the moon. He says he likes it that way.
“I wouldn’t have the strength because the night is beautiful,” he told VICE News, looking for the sky that was darkening. “I know this domain from start to finish. “
Rodriguez has been one of the thousands of people who occupied this wasteland in Guernica, at the southern end of the city of Buenos Aires, since July, many came here after wasting their jobs and houses because of the COVID-19 pandemic. rain and wind in makeshift wooden huts, steel veneers and canvases.
Rodriguez on his way to an assembly to see if the government would deport them the next morning.
The network hopes they will be allowed to stay and build decent homes for their families, but they are fighting a recovery order that would free them and cede the land to the owners, adding El Bellaco, a corporate structure that plans to build an exclusive closed network.
When the pandemic occurred, Rodriguez had to move from home to his mother. “I worked in catering, ” he said. My source of income has gone from 3 jobs to zero. “The space was crowded: his 8 brothers also lived there, and several of them had brought their families.
An aerial view of tents and makeshift shelters set up among homeless people on outdoor wasteland in Guernica, Buenos Aires province, south of Argentina’s capital, amid developing poverty amid an economic crisis aggravated by the pandemic of the new COVID-19 coronavirus. Photo via RONALDO SCHEMIDT/ AFP via Getty Images.
Then, when her brothers moved to occupy the land, she left and ended up staying. Community leaders say 2,500 families live there, adding about 3,000 children. Several women on the site flee domestic violence and others lived on the streets.
Ownership of the site is claimed through El Bellaco and several other personal owners. Lawyers who help families who now live there say that corporate claims on the floor are weak and that the site is a long-abandoned territory that the state can recover under Argentine law to protect the occupiers.
“These are lands that have been deserted for decades and are in an incredibly low land property in the plaintiffs’ component,” reads in the documents presented through María del Rosario Fernández and Eduardo Nés Soartores of the Bar Guild, a pro organization that focuses on human rights and social causes.
A team of architects and lawyers said there was room for El Bellaco to build its property on the land adjacent to the profession without evicting anyone. Under Argentine law, real estate developers who build such giant assignments must yield 10% of the land. When making this concession next to the waste lot, there would be enough area to build an urbanization for those who live in the profession.
Architects have developed detailed plans for the site in a new permanent housing district, with green spaces, gymnasiums and a kindergarten.
The eviction date has been slowly delayed as the occupiers, trial, and government seek a solution that avoids forced eviction. These expulsions are usually violent and few times other people die: two others were shot and five others injured after police used live ammunition evicting the profession of the Indo-American Park in Buenos Aires in 2010. Activist Rodolfo Orellana was shot dead by a profession in the Community of Ciudad Evita in 2018.
Last week, locals issued a ruling on Martín Rizzo, who was handling the case, postponed eviction until October 15, noting that the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof, had just announced a large housing plan that could influence the Guernica stage.
The profession of guernica is already ready in 4 neighborhoods. The plots have been kept loose consciously for public squares and even orchards, dotted in the grass through cane fences and ropes. With the constant risk of eviction, others are reluctant to invest in more permanent structures, according to Nazarene Olguin, whose space is a corrugated iron die forged into a component of the colony known as La Unión.
“Instead of preparing a neighborhood for millionaires, it would be a position where other people live,” he said.
He prepared breakfast with his neighbors while talking to VICE News, spraying sugar and grated ginger on his morning partner (an infusion of ubiquitous caffeine in Argentina) to avoid colds. nibbling cookies and heating water in a black soot kettle on a grill.
Without sewers or sewers, the rain wreaks havoc here, turning the streets into marshes and soaking clothes and beds. Olguin has few options yet to spend the days of refugee rain inside, playing cards with his neighbor Rodrigo. an almost impossible chimney.
“On rainy days, we don’t eat,” he says, “maybe just cold meats. “
Guernica’s profession is thought to be the largest in Argentina lately, but smaller settlements like these are common, according to Jonatan Baldiviezo, president of the City Observatory, a group of experts that analyses public policies that shape cities, estimates the Argentine Ministry of Security. there have been around 1,800 professions in the province of Buenos Aires so far this year. Observers that the number is expanding due to COVID-19.
Occupations deserve to be noticed as a result of an uneven and highly concentrated distribution of land, aggravated by the neoliberal deregulation of Argentina’s last dictatorship, which ended in 1983, Baldiviezo says.
“Historically in Argentina, the distribution of land has never been equivalent. Not to produce, to live,” he says. This distribution has been concentrated in the hands of a few in recent years. “
Groups are allowed to remain in the land they occupy, but it is difficult to expect the fate of the express instances because it depends on a number of factors, in addition to government policy and the nature of the occupied land, according to Baldiviezo.
Meanwhile, the occupiers are stigmatized as criminals through hostile and harassed local media through the police. The minister of security of the province of Buenos Aires, Sergio Berni, told the Argentine media that the intermediaries and arranged criminals were taking credit for people’s desperation to buy and sell. sell the land.
But the occupants are adamant that they are there because they desperately want a place to live. “What we are is a piece of land, ” said Rodriguez.
Argentina was going through a brutal economic crisis even before the pandemic hit, and COVID-19 made the stage worse. The economy has been in recession since 2018 and galloping inflation means workers’ wages are wasting value.
On Wednesday, the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC) released figures indicating that unemployment had reached 13. 1% and that 40. 9% of others lived in poverty. UNICEF has predicted that 63% of young Argentines will be deficient until the end. of the year.
For the population of the land profession in Guernica, they still have no choice to continue fighting. Crouched against the wind or crouched on car tires around the campfires, others reacted to the news that the eviction had been postponed with weary relief. .
They knew they could still be deported. But today.