Housed on a devil, the deep satchel accommodates an additional plastic bottle thrown by Jorge Olea, 42, who searches the trash cans of a poor neighborhood in General San Martin, a dozen kilometers northwest of Buenos Aires. “I have been up for 6 hours”, blows this father of a family under the still striking meridian sun of the southern autumn. “I collect waste to recycle to resell it. With this big bag full, they give me 100 pesos [90 centimes d’euros]. I ended up doing the trash “, he blurted out, his eyes scathing, still stunned by this improvised work that he decided to start a week ago, when the construction site where he was employed in an undeclared way ended.
“I absolutely want to work, I want a project”, insists this man, whose clothes covered with dry paint still betray the lost job. He joined the 42% of people now living in poverty in Argentina, according to the latest semi-annual report from INDEC (National Institute of Statistics and Census) published in March 2021, a jump of 6.5 points for the period from June to December 2020, compared to the same period of the previous year.
Almost six in ten Argentines under the age of 14 do not see all of their basic needs covered
This statistical photograph masks a heterogeneous reality: in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, 51% of the more than 12 million inhabitants (for a total population of 45 million), live in poverty. Children are overrepresented everywhere. Nearly six in ten Argentines under the age of 14 do not see all of their basic needs met, according to Indec, who estimates that a family of four needed 50,854 pesos a month to live on last semester ( 458 euros at the current exchange rate).
Mostly, “The situation of people living below the poverty line has worsened, due to the widening gap between their income and the standard of living required per household”, specifies the institute. Inflation, Argentina’s endemic disease and poverty machine, continues to suffocate households, with a price increase of 36.1% in 2020. Already overwhelmed by two years of recession, the population is now suffering the consequences of a contraction brutal 9.9% of the economy in 2020, under the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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