Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Each year public protests of
piqueteros
in Buenos Aires and other large
cities decline steadily from a high of 2,336 incidents nationwide in
2002.
The second organization of the urban poor is that of the
cartoneros,
so
named because they wander the urban streets collecting cartons, bottles,
newspapers, and plastics to be sold for recycling. They engage much less
in politics than the
piqueteros.
Still,
cartoneros
appeal for public recogni-
tion of their profession because of occasional police and neighborhood
violence toward them.
Cartoneros
arrive daily in downtown residential
districts on commuter trains in special boxcars that accommodate their
oversized pushcarts, returning home the same way with their collections
to the shantytowns outside the inner cities. In the smaller provincial
capitals, they drive into the city center on carts pulled by emaciated
horses. Men, women, and school-aged children are prominent among
the
cartoneros.
Each group of collectors works designated blocks of
upper-middle-class neighborhoods, carefully closing plastic trash bags
after extracting cans, bottles, and bits of food. Myth has it that Bolivian
and Paraguayan immigrants predominate among the
cartoneros
, but the
research of sociologists has yet to confirm this belief. Persons of Andean
heritage do turn up playing musical instruments for money in public
transportation and in public squares. Official statistics indicate that
150,000
cartoneros
and street vendors operate in the 48 principal urban
centers of the republic. “Behind each one of us there is a story,” one
cartonero
told a journalist. “We are fathers, mothers of family without
formal work, unwed mothers. . . . We ask you respectfully to separate
materials such as cardboard, white paper, newspapers, and magazines,
because the cleaner city stays swept and less filthy” [Bonasso].
Argentina's chronically poor do not lack organization. They have
formed mutual-assistance cohorts to divide the city for purposes of col-
lecting recyclables and to pressure the government for a redistribution
of income. Cases of arson, intended to pressure public officials to pro-
vide more housing for the poor, have been reported in the shantytowns.
Many of the organizations representing residents of poor barrios do have
linkages to politics; however, the persistent poverty of these groups con-
tradicts the notion that growth in the formal sector of the economy will
trickle down to enrich the impoverished. Every Argentine is aware that
many poor children go to bed hungry. Government welfare may keep
the most vocal among them marginally fed, but the lack of educational
preparation and adequate housing does not prepare Argentina's unem-
ployed to take advantage of moments of economic boom in the age of
globalization.
