The Yale Globalist - In Face of Eradication

In Face of Eradication

Tuesday, 06 January 2009 | Ali Seitz

Many residents of the two villas and their supporters fear that developers and the city covet the land where the villas now stand (Courtesy of The Taller Libre de Proyecto Social).

The walk from the elegant Sheraton Hotel in downtown Buenos Aires to the bustling Retiro bus terminal takes only ten minutes. Behind the terminal, most maps show empty space. But reality proves the map mistaken—or lying. Over 30,000 people are estimated to live in that void.

Teófilo Tapia lives on the edge of this space, between a busy road and makeshift buildings—some up to six stories tall, made of scrap wood, corrugated metal, and, when available, bricks and cement. This is the Villa 31, one of Buenos Aires’ oldest villas miserias—“poverty- villes”—massive shantytowns where people have built homes on unoccupied land.

Tapia organizes ollas populares, communal dinners, to feed people in his neighborhood. A gargantuan Nike advertisement towers over his tiny building.

Unsavory, Unsafe, Undeveloped

Most residents move to villas because they cannot afford to live elsewhere. Residents do not pay for services like electricity and water, which are taken illegally from the city grid. In the city’s public imagination, villas are breeding grounds for criminality, full of guns and kids high on paco, an addictive cocaine residue. At best, they are an eyesore for tourists and wealthier citizens.

“The tourists come here like, ‘Argentina, the City of Buenos Aires,’” explained Tapia, referring to the aristocratic palaces that the Sheraton guestrooms overlook. “And here is a villa miseria a few blocks away.”

Mauricio Macri, mayor of Buenos Aires, has recently turned the public eye on two particular villas downtown. In early October, Macri denounced the national government for not fulfilling constitutional rules that regulate rights to decent housing and public health. He argued that the housing in the Villa 31 and its neighbor, the Villa 31 bis, is neither safe nor decent. City officials claim that hundreds of houses in the 70-year-old Villa 31 and the 14-year-old Villa 31 bis are in danger of collapsing, and that the villas’ location, right next to the train rails, is dangerous.

The city maintains that the Villas 31 and 31 bis must be eradicated for the safety of their residents. Yet Macri seems unconcerned by the countless other villas in and around Buenos Aires, many of which are in much worse condition than the two at hand.

In the 1990s, an old port near the Villas 31 and 31 bis was redeveloped with high-rise apartment and office buildings, hotels, and restaurants. It has since become one of the choicest, most expensive neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. The central location of the Villas, next to one of the city’s main transportation hubs and surrounded by valuable downtown real estate, is one of the most desirable in the city. Many residents of the two villas and their supporters fear that developers and the city covet the land where the villas now stand. developing the land beneath them would require the forced removal of the current inhabitants—exactly what Tapia and other residents fear.

Urbanization and Radication

“To urbanize is to open streets, have water, light, all services, correspondingly paying what one owes. For me it would be that: urbanization and radication,” said Zulma Moretti, a resident of the Villa 31, explaining her vision for the future of the two villas. Radication—the little-used opposite of eradication—is to take root, to settle. Urbanization, as she uses it, is to become a permanent and integrated part of the greater city. ‘“For me, always, the two things go together—urbanization and radication.”

The Buenos Aires government is interested in neither. Argentina’s former military dictatorship attempted to eradicate many villas in Buenos Aires between 1976 and 1983, forcibly removing residents using tear gas, armored cars, and arson. In the Villa 31, of the nearly 6,000 families who lived there, only 44 outlasted the eradication.

Now Macri is campaigning for a different eradication process. Instead of tear gas and arson, he has said he will offer alternative housing and vague incentives to current residents to get them to move.

A group at the University of Buenos Aires’ School of Architecture, design, and Urbanism, headed by Javier Fernández Castro, the school’s academic secretary, has created an urbanization plan that would incorporate the Villas 31 and 31 bis into the surrounding city without evicting the current residents. The city government has not considered it a viable option. In an interview with the daily newspaper La Nación in June, Macri said the Villa 31 could not be urbanized because of its “dangerous” and “unhealthy” location.

Opposing Macri are residents like Moretti. As a child, Moretti had no home or steady material support from her family. Now living with her mother and her own children, she desperately wants recognition and protection by the law for her home and for all of the villas.

Moretti and Tapia are both former members of the Body of delegates, a group of representatives elected by residents of the Villas 31 and 31 bis to advocate on behalf of the villas. The Body’s most recent term ended in 2006, and, lacking the cooperation of the city government to hold elections, it has not been officially recognized since. Without a go-to representative organization, activists for the villas are now organizing open meetings to build consensus on how to proceed. Moretti hopes to send a representative acting on behalf of the villas to the legislature.

While the two villas struggle with the government, Moretti deals with a divided and angry constituency—including members who believe eradication is inevitable and others who want to continue the fight. Little jabs regularly remind residents their homes are in jeopardy.

The massive billboards that tower over the Villas 31 and 31 bis are obviously meant for drivers on the highway above, but their presence indicates the city’s hostility toward the villas. One has been plunked down in a resident’s front yard, almost completely obscuring the house.

Anger and Action

City officials have their vision for the Villas 31 and 31 bis, but they are not ultimately in control. The land under the two villas is owned by the national government, which is responsible for its use. At the end of October, a federal judge ordered the national government and the National Organization for the Administration of State Property (ONABE), the government body that manages federal assets like the land beneath the villas, to impede new construction by residents in an attempt to stifle the villas’ growth.

Quoted in the daily newspaper Clarín, Fernández Suárez, the director of ONABE, scoffed: “How should I prevent a person—who already lives in irregular conditions, on a terrain that is not his—from building upwards? Go into his house with the police?” The center-left national government has so far been unwilling to assist or fight the center-right city government, perhaps because it is unwilling to engage with Macri on such a charged political issue, or perhaps because national officials believe there is nothing they can do.

“We’re between life and death. Spiritual life and death,” Moretti lamented. She and other residents have not remained silent—they blocked a major highway in protest on November 19, causing traffic delays. Under threat of another highway cut, the city agreed to meet with a group of residents, only to tell them that they still planned to demolish hundreds of homes and relocate the families who lived inside. Nonetheless, Moretti and many of her neighbors hope to make the city listen and receive a representative of the residents at a legislature session—or they will again bring traffic to a standstill.

While the Villas 31 and 31 bis are kicked like a political football between the national and city governments, they appear again and again on television and in the newspapers of Buenos Aires. Nothing has been resolved. Anger at the government, anger at inaction, and anger at the system in which citizens cannot afford legal homes has begun to boil over.

A billboard advertising a cell phone towers over the highway that cuts through the Villas 31 and 31 bis. “Your life is changing,” it says. Like Nike’s trademark swoosh and ”Just do It” slogan outside Tapia’s dining hall, the cell phone advertisement’s message seems like a mockery of—or a challenge to—the villas’ current stasis.

The Villas 31 and 31 bis have been caught in a tangle of politics and protests, while other villas remain neglected—for better or worse. Unsafe housing becomes a problem when it exists on valuable real estate, in plain sight of downtown.

Ali Seitz is a senior Comparative Literature major in Trumbull College.

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