They creep out at night and tear apart garbage bags, feeding greedily on the remains left by those who are more fortunate than they — those Argentines who have enough to eat.
Their lives, such as they are, depend on the frogs’ legs that are delicacies in other countries, horse meat and the armies of rats and feral cats that comb the streets also looking for something, anything, to eat.
Their numbers have multiplied as the country staggers deeper and deeper into recession.
Their life expectancies top out at 35 — about half of the average for ”other Argentines”.
Once, Argentina was the breadbasket of the world. Now there are not even crumbs for the hundreds of newborns in Tucuman, in the country’s northwest, whose wan faces beamed into living rooms hearken to the famines that swept through sub-Saharan Africa.
Now, entire families dig through garbage. Most of them saw their livelihoods swept out from under them when the textile and construction industries collapsed in the last five years.
Retirees without pensions and children dressed as sad clowns stake out their positions during rush hour, dashing into the streets to beg for pennies from motorists. With them, they will buy meagre supplies to avoid, even for one night, pawing through the 4 250 tons of garbage tossed daily in the capital.
”There are no cats left. Bottle collectors have killed their horses, their most valuable assets, so they can feed their families. Now it is children who pull the carts,” said Beatriz Hamari, the headmistress of a school in Quilmes, a 400 000-strong suburb of the capital.
Driving rain has turned ”misery city,” Quilmes’ slum, into a muddy sinkhole, where people tread carefully among the makeshift shelters constructed of plywood and aluminium sheets. There is no clean water, and of course no electricity.
Four years of recession, an unemployment level hovering around 25%, annual income plummeting from $8 000 to $2 000 per person, and food prices skyrocketing by 42.6% since January 1, is the recipe for poverty being fed to more than half of the country’s 36 million nationals.
Nearly six million are starving and basic foodstuffs, costing 400 pesos per month for a family of four, are out of reach for too many households.
They are so hungry, Hamari laments, that for the last several months ”they have eaten rats, mice, frogs and toads”.
The daily Pagina/12 has filled its pages with how Pepe prepares stewed cat and the story of Ariel, a student who tells his classmates at provincial school 65 that ”frog is tastier than toad, because toad is too tough”.
But Quilmes Mayor Fernando Gerones says his hands are tied and issued a statement that his locality has no way to find a solution to the ”serious social injustices that have befallen the area”.
Hoping to shock Argentines into the plight of the least
fortunate, the association of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo organised a 24-hour sit-in by young people at the Buenos Aires cathedral on Wednesday, hoping to spur the Catholic church into intervening on their behalf with the government.
”It is unthinkable that in Argentina there are children eating rats, toads and horses,” the group’s president, Hebe de Bonafini, said, surrounded by people hoisting signs proclaiming ”One hundred children die every day,” under a banner proclaiming ”the lack of work is a crime” strung from the rafters.
But as the sit-in progressed, 25 000 desperate souls foraged in Buenos Aires, seeking out the choicest corners for their garbage-bag gourmet meals — near restaurants where, perhaps, a bone with some meat still left on it sat in the trash. – Sapa-AFP