A 30-minute bus ride from central Montevideo sits a slum called the Felipe Cardoso settlement, next to the Uruguayan capital’s largest landfill site. Around 80 families are scattered along the roadside in houses with walls made of tin, wood and nylon and roofs that can withstand storms weighing pots and tires. Inside, the floors are dirty and most are windowless. Outside, the cold August breeze carries smoke from burning plastic and wires. You’re breathing a devilish substitute for the good air that’s abundant in other areas of this city. “All my children are chronic asthmatics,” says Estela Recalde, a neighbor of the settlement. Recalde has lived here for two decades with her six youngest children and her partner. Like the other neighbors, he denounces that the health of local children is being affected by the toxicity of lead in the environment.
In Uruguay, with 3.4 million inhabitants, around 157,000 children and young people live below the poverty line. Of these, 30,000 live in “emergency shelters” such as those in the Felipe Cardoso settlement. In the words of politicians and academics, these children are part of the “hard core” of the country’s poverty, which affects around 10% of the population. The Uruguayan state, known for its resilience, couldn’t bring it down.
“What Uruguay is doing to these children is criminal,” MP Cristina Lustemberg (Broad Front-Center-Left) said in the national parliament when she recently presented these figures. Lustemberg stressed that child poverty was “overdiagnosed” in the country. There is the data, the technical knowledge and the political consensus to overcome it. “We must have the courage to do something different,” he stressed July 12 in a discussion on the subject organized by the La Plaza Foundation.
“Poverty in Uruguay has the face of a child and also of a woman,” said Gustavo de Armas, United Nations strategic planning adviser in Uruguay. De Armas presented a preview of the Abate Poverty in Uruguay by 2030 report, according to which Uruguayan children and youth make up 44% of the population living below the poverty line in this South American country. Another 44% are the adults living with these children, mostly female householders who devote most of their time to unpaid work.
De Armas estimated that cutting those numbers in half would mean, among other things, increasing non-contributory benefits to $453 million a year. In other words: That would mean that 1.14% of the gross domestic product would have to be spent on this aid. “Uruguay is the country with the most developed welfare state in the region,” recalled De Armas. In this context, the report assumes that this goal is not unattainable.
In the urbanization of Felipe Cardoso, Estela Recalde begins the day at dawn. He prepares breakfast for his children in a brazier, prepares the little ones to take them to school, and then sorts the trash he collects in a landfill outside his home. Since childhood she has been engaged in the classification of paper, metal and plastic, which she sells to various buyers in the capital. She says her goal is to finish high school, and despite the setbacks, she longs to be able to move homes.
A house next to garbage bags in the Felipe Cardoso housing estate. Gabriel Diaz Campanella
“We’ve been waiting for years for them to help us resettle,” she says with concern. There are commitments from governments of all political persuasions, he assures, but the situation remains unchanged. The state supports Estela’s family through grants from the Equity Plan and the Uruguay Social Card, which were launched in 2006 to improve, among other things, basic access to food for households and for people in situations of extreme socio-economic need.
MEP Lustemberg made a plea in Parliament to “break the myth that people live on money transfers”, pointing out in this sense that these aids “do not cover 25% of the basic needs that a home needs for a dignified life “. Uruguay, he stressed, could not afford the level of inequality that existed. “The indicators show that public policy making is not appropriate for children,” he said.
Lustemberg is the author of a bill to reorganize programs for children in Uruguay, which has all-party support and is expected to be passed in September. Lustemberg’s opposition Frente Amplio initiative also received support from Prime Minister Luis Lacalle Pou (National centre-right party). As he explained, the law aims to overcome bureaucratic fragmentation by adopting a unified and multidimensional approach – in the areas of nutrition, education, health, among others – of public policies for children and young people.
From the Felipe Cardoso housing estate, Lorena Martínez has been knocking on the doors of establishments for at least four years in order to obtain accommodation for families living in the area. “We don’t want them to give us anything, we propose many alternatives, such as creating a cooperative,” says this neighbor and a benchmark in the neighborhood. He reports that the possibility of a transfer surfaced back in 2019 but he was frustrated by the pandemic. This year, authorities told him that 50 families were planned to be relocated, with priority given to mothers who run the household with young children. “I’ll keep insisting until I get out,” he adds.
Among the most pressing concerns, Martínez says, are cases of children being contaminated by lead released from the burning of various materials. Plastics, cables, tires. He also points out that the residents – 120 people, including 50 minors – have no formal access to drinking water or electricity. Neither buses reach Felipe Cardoso nor ambulances. “Most people here have no way of finding another job because they haven’t studied and have been working in the garbage since childhood,” he says. One generation after the other. Along with a group of neighbors, she and her two sons, ages 14 and 16, hope to change the fortunes of this community.
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