Another villa miseria (followup)

Last October I wrote a couple of posts about the Qom ethnic group (also known as the Toba) and their migration from Chaco to Santa Fe and Rosario, where they ended up in villas miseria (slums), marginalized from the rest of society and subject to discrimination. A blogger called mdiana found those posts and left a comment asking about Father Arturo Paoli and his work among the woodchoppers of the La Forestal logging company (the British-owned company which felled most of the quebracho trees of the Chaco, where the Qom tribe lived, and turned it into a desert).

Paoli, a missionary priest, came and settled in Fortín Olmos, in the north of Santa Fe, and organized a fraternity and cooperative with the woodchoppers and small local producers who were left without a job when La Forestal closed down in 1960. In November 2007 a section of Santa Fe's Provincial Route 40 was named after him in homage, and then-governor Jorge Obeid noted he had known Paoli when he was a young man, in the 1960s. At that time Paoli was over 90 years old and living in Italy, from where he sent a letter speaking of the strength of those woodchoppers as a symbol of Latin American endurance.

Well, I just learned that. My original intent was to post a video I took a few days ago, from the bus. It shows the expansion of the villa miseria I mentioned back then in those posts. The settlers have decided to occupy the neighbouring terrain, a large lot that was mostly vacant, though parts of it were devoted to vegetable gardens. The owner has never done anything with the lot, and the municipality, which long ago should have expropriated it for some purpose, looked the other way. Now a sprawling slum is forming, the neighbours are upset, and that's all for nothing, because the poor people who've illegally settled on the land will eventually be pushed away later, when the tortuous bureaucracy of the judicial system decides to command their eviction. This is a sad way for a free people to end.

The video is bumpy and the sound is that of the bus; you can turn it off if you want to. It's only a short stretch, maybe two blocks, along the street where I live (but 10 or 12 blocks from my house), just before and after the railway tracks. On the first part you can see precarious homes that were already there years ago; the rest is all new, a small shanty town assembled almost overnight.

I don't know how this can be solved. You can't let those people set up their huts anywhere; you can't build them houses in the short term; you can't bulldoze them; you can't send them back to their ancestral lands; but the thing you absolutely can't do is ignore them.

Vacations: A view of Junín de los Andes

As promised, I'll summarize the rest of my vacations in Junín de los Andes, and then on a different post I'll try and do the same with San Martín de los Andes, and be done with it (I kinda want to start writing about local news again!).

After our visit Lake Huechulafquen, the only other thing we did outside Junín was a couple of visits to San Martín. There are buses every other hour that take you there in about 50 minutes. We walked around the city a lot, and I visited Cerro Chapelco and its ski resort (obviously in the low season), but I'll speak of San Martín's main features later.

In Junín we took advantage of the river, which runs only a block and a half from Marita's. There's a little bridge that spans the river and takes you to the banks on the other shore.

The Chimehuin, as expected of Patagonian rivers, is shallow, with a pebbly bottom, very cold, and very fast. I tried to swim in it — but to my dismay I caught a strong current and had to surrender to it, until I was left on a bed of pebbles about 30 meters away.

My embarrassment was compounded by the sight of many children and teenagers who repeatedly jumped into the river, ignoring the certain danger of hitting the bottom, and then proceeded to maneuver easily following the swirls and eddies of the river, and getting (it seemed to me) exactly where they wanted. Needless to say I didn't try swimming again. Of course, these guys were all local people, so they knew the river from long experience; and being young and restless, they weren't afraid of anything.

The other thing we did in Junín was visiting the Via Christi, which is a kind of Via Crucis with sculptures and plaques representing and describing Jesus Christ's path to the place where he was crucified according to the Christian myth.

The special thing about this Via Christi is that it combines images and motifs of the Passion with local spirituality, focused on the Blessed Laura Vicuña and the (also recently Blessed) Ceferino Namuncurá, the latter being the first member of a native Argentine tribe to be on the road to Catholic Church-declared sanctity... plus a lot of ecumenical, or syncretic, references to aboriginal spirituality, a vindication of the indigenous tribes, and a retelling of the Spanish Conquest (which didn't reach Patagonia) and the so-called Conquest of the Desert in the late 19th century. The "desert" was Patagonia, which was indeed the frontier of European-Argentine civilization at the time, although it was by no means uninhabited. The Argentine Army, under the command of a typical plutocratic government, advanced over Patagonia and systematically drove away or slaughtered the native tribes it found, or turned the natives into virtual slaves, who were forced into military conscription or sent to work as servants of wealthy families of Buenos Aires; after the land was cleared of its original inhabitants, it was divided in huge fiefdoms and given away to ranchers belonging to the oligarchy who (directly or indirectly) ruled the country.

The Via Christi had elements of this story, as seen from the point of view of modern revisionist history and by recent popular Catholic leaders such as Bishop Jaime de Nevares (1915–1995). I found the whole mix quite funny in its heterogeneity, not because the story was funny in any sense, but because the story of liberation theology is so pathetic — educated folks, with the best of intentions, trying to reconcile modern views about human rights and the struggle of oppressed peoples with the teachings of a church that is fiercely hierarchical and misogynistic, that has supported oppressive governments and countless massacres in the name of its god, and is even today a major obstacle to certain basic human rights in large parts of the world. You have to admire and pity these people for the effort of weaving their version of history into Christian doctrine, even as their own Church stops short of calling them heretics.

The Via Christi also had certain obvious, and to me, rather distasteful hints of anti-abortion propaganda, with abortion compared to the genocide of the natives, and figures looking like small children or late-term fetuses embedded into the beam of Christ's cross.

This funny/creepy tour was very well kept, anyway, and it served as good exercise. When we reached the top of the hill, we could see most of the urban area of Junín de los Andes. The pictures were no good, unfortunately, due to the harsh lighting, but I managed to rescue some.

Our last days in Junín de los Andes were relaxed and festive. We had asado once, and the last night, after spending the afternoon by the river, my friend Gabriel pulled out his finest tricks and made us matambre a la pizza, which is a massive slab of flank steak with cheese and tomate sauce on top, cooked on a grill over charcoal embers (like asado, but not for so long). After that we went out to a noisy bar, and drank just enough to make fools of, but not so much as to endanger, ourselves. No pictures of that, thank you.

Sunday came. Mauro and Gabriel had bought tickets for a direct trip back to Rosario, a bit tired of vacations. I decided to make the most of my time and booked a place in a hostel in San Martín de los Andes. Somehow we woke up after 4 hours of sleep, and after some light breakfast, the guys escorted me to the bus terminal and waited until I left. Their bus departed later that day, at 2 PM — but by that time I was already in my next, and last, destination.

Two villas miseria

This is a followup on yesterday's post about the Toba tribe and how they came from Chaco to Rosario.

I live 10 blocks from a railway track around which a large Toba settlement grew in the 1990s. If you're wondering why they put it there, it's because the areas on the side of the rails have been jurisdictional "no man's land" for a long time, since the railway system started to decline. When the stations were shut down, the state-owned companies that ran them stopped caring about keeping people away from the tracks. The municipal and provincial government couldn't take care of them either.

Nowadays, with many trains transporting cereal and other types of cargo from the interior to the ports, the situation is a bit different. Private companies keep their land from being occupied. However, the rest of the former railway property is managed by the national state through an office called ONABE, which is powerless to stop people from taking residence beside the tracks.

So these Toba came, I don't remember when exactly — surely in the 1990s, but also before. Then a government housing programme built homes for them in a different part of the city and they moved there. But the settlement, though much reduced, is still there. A couple of years ago, after many requests, the provincial government built a police post near it, because people were scared of walking or driving along the street and being stuck right beside the villa miseria, on the level crossing, when a train had to pass.

I myself have never had a problem with the people of the villa. They've been there for ages and they're mostly decent fellows who happen to be very poor. But I still know better than to walk past the villa when it's dark, because if I'm robbed there, the thief can easily run into the villa and nobody there's going to tell on him.

There's another settlement, about 8 blocks in a different direction, where a Catholic nun started a "mission". It was built too near the Ludueña Stream, in a floodable area, without proper streets or sanitation. Nevertheless, word-of-mouth (especially along extended families) reached Chaco and the "mission" attracted more settlers. The lands around the Ludueña are another preferred place for villas, because until recently nobody has wanted them. The public works needed to make them safe are only being done now.

The "mission" was a bad idea, the grandiose scheme of an attention-hungry woman to become the benefactor and spiritual leader of the poor. María Jordán had charisma; she talked to politicians and the media and got donations, which her collaborators in good faith distributed following her will. She organized a couple of fund-raising events, got benefactors to pay trips for her, and even (I was told) a car and an apartment (to better conduct her charity work, of course).

She did do some missionary work in the villa: she enshrined a Virgin Mary whom she called "Mary the Mother of Hope", and even had stamps printed — the Mother of Hope looking suspiciously like her inventor. I don't know what became of that; the poorer segments of the population are nowadays overwhelmingly attracted to other sects, usually very active evangelical ones that get funds from the United States, and local upstarts.

She had no idea how to run the place. I don't know how many poor people came from Chaco to live in her ridiculous mission, but they were a major problem — they were quite literally refugees, and the city wasn't prepared to receive them. In my experience, religious initiatives tend to rely on good intentions alone (cf Mother Teresa's "Come Here To Die As We Pray For You" shelter franchise), and this was no exception.

Jordán was soon eclipsed by the exotic miracle healer Father Ignacio Peries, but she still appears now and then in the news, invariably referred to as "Sister María Jordán", and wearing a habit... even though she was forced to leave her order years ago, when she refused to obey her superiors and stop her lone "missionary" adventure.

I know all of this because I worked for this self-centered woman for six months (don't ask), and I saw other people being trapped by her deceivingly charming manners. The last time I heard of her was on the occasion of an art exhibition by the controversial León Ferrari, when she said publicly that, if she had the money, she'd buy up Ferrari's works and burn them all. Yeah, that'll help the poor and sick.

The Toba, from Chaco to Rosario

The other day I was visiting Rob's blog and I saw he'd posted a video about poverty in the province of Chaco. It was really strange to watch this report of something that's happening quite literally in our backyard... in English, by an Argentine journalist, via Al-Jazeera. I knew the reporter, Teresa Bo — I think I saw her once before but I didn't remember who she worked for.

Rob subtitled his post "Another thing I had no idea about", which is not surprising given he's just gotten here from a different country and he hasn't left Buenos Aires (that I know of). What is surprising and disappointing is how Argentinians themselves seem to ignore this as well.

Chaco is a province located north of Santa Fe. It belongs in a larger biogeographic zone called the Gran Chaco, and within it, in the Humid (or Low) Chaco, which is humid only relative to the arid High Chaco.

Red quebracho (Schinopsis balansae)

Chaco is a very poor province. At the turn of the 19th century, its land was exploited for quebracho trees. Quebracho produces a lot of tannin and has an extremely heavy and resistant wood. Developing the country, for the rulers of that time, meant driving away the Indians, occupying the fertile lands with European colonists, and selling the rest of the country to foreign companies, along with carte blanche to deal with the locals. So Chaco and the north of Santa Fe were given to a British company called Compañía Forestal del Chaco (later Compañía de Tierras, Maderas y Ferrocarriles La Forestal Ltda.). La Forestal started as a timber-and-tannin company and then became basically a private government, building new towns, railways and roads, hospitals and schools. Of course, the workers were not free to do anything but work on the company. They got paid in company bills and bought their stuff in company stores. The company wasn't very tolerant of strikes or anything of the sort.

Without government control, and given the lack of knowledge of basic ecological facts at the time, La Forestal destroyed the Chaco forest. When it left, in 1960, the quebracho trees were gone, the soil was absolutely degraded, the land had become a desert, and the population was desperately poor.

The main aboriginal group in Chaco are the Qom tribe, who are known as Toba — a derogatory term imposed by the technological more advanced and aggresive Guaraní. The Qom started migrating south as economic conditions worsened in the 1950s, establishing themselves in the outskirts of larger cities. There's evidence that, in the 1980s and 1990s, the government of Chaco encouraged them to abandon their lands and went as far as paying them a one-way ticket to Santa Fe and Rosario, where they joined their previously settled relatives in villas miseria (shanty towns). It was better for them to live in precarious homes made of corrugated iron and cardboard, scavenge for food in someone else's garbaga and work long hours in unqualified jobs in the big city than starving without hope of assistance or enduring alternating drought and floods in the middle of their desertified forest. In Rosario they found a robust public health system, an abundance of free schools for their children, and jobs.

Villa miseria (shanty town) in Rosario, originally a Toba settlement

What they didn't find was a return to their ancestral ways, which worked fine for them before their lands were ravaged. Like most of the rural poor that migrated to the cities, they fell prey to the political clientele system, and their children became accustomed to beg in the streets, to use alcohol and illegal drugs, and to expect nothing from the future.

This post is getting too long and sad, so I'll reserve the rest of what I'd written for tomorrow or the day after that. It concerns the local Qom and their involvement with one of those power-hungry religious characters that seem to be attracted to poverty and despair (not, not Padre Ignacio).