Argentina is in serious social distress: almost six out of ten Argentines are poor, meaning they do not have enough income to buy basic necessities (food, transport, clothing and medicine). The number skyrocketed at the start of Javier Milei's government: it rose from 49.5% in December to 57.4% in January, more than 3.5 million new poor, as reported over the weekend by the Argentine Catholic University (UCA ) published figures. They are the worst since the Corralito crisis of 2002 and make the latest official data from the first half of 2023, when poverty was 40.1%, very outdated. In total, there are around 27 million poor people in a country with 46 million inhabitants.
After more than two decades of a regime of inflation, impoverishment and the expansion of social programs, to which a new orthodox economic adjustment program is added, poverty continues to rise despite public support. pic.twitter.com/BHVJOeR31i
— Argentine Observatory of Social Debt (UCA) (@ODSAUCA) February 19, 2024
The explanation for the current deterioration is simple: household income is growing much slower than inflation and the gap is widening. In 2023, prices increased by 211.4% and salaries increased by 152.7%. In January, monthly inflation was 20.6% and jumped to 254.2% year-on-year, the highest in the world, ahead of Venezuela and Lebanon.
The situation is particularly difficult when it comes to purchases. Food prices have risen by 300% in the last 12 months and some basic supermarket products cost similar prices to those in Spain, such as milk (0.85 cents) or bread mold ($2.1) and many others. The minimum wage, on the other hand, is eight times lower: in Argentina it is 156,000 pesos (the equivalent of about 155 dollars), while in Spain it is 1,134 euros.
The food crisis has led to scenes in Buenos Aires that until months ago were only sporadic, such as seeing people – sometimes children – in dumpsters looking for food or materials to sell. . The number of people who go door to door asking for help, or who go to free soup kitchens because they cannot afford food, has also multiplied.
One of them is the Comedor del Fondo, located on the corner of a square in Villa Ortúzar, a middle-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires. The organization that manages it receives 30 rations from the local government to distribute to the homeless, but thanks to donations it usually has up to 70 hotplates of food. “70 isn’t enough either.” “We’ll feed everyone who comes until it’s finished,” says one of the room’s coordinators. “We want to support people who are homeless, but now workers whose salaries are not enough are also coming,” he adds.
The long table on the street, with benches crowded with guests, attracts the attention of a young man who is pushing a stroller across the street. His name is Jesús Díaz, he is 27 years old and lives in La Carbonilla, a slum a few kilometers away. Díaz walks through the neighborhoods near his home every day, ringing doorbells and asking neighbors “if they have anything to give.”
Hanging from the stroller is a bag with a pack of flour and another pack of rice, a stuffed animal and several items of clothing for women and children. “I'm looking as best I can because I don't know if they're going to kick us out of the room we rented.” We're already two months into debt. But if I don’t get a job and everything increases, I don’t know how we’re going to do it,” says Díaz. This Argentine father of two worked without a contract as a bricklayer, but was laid off in November and has not found employment since. His family is now entirely reliant on government aid that barely covers food costs, a reality that is rapidly increasing. According to the UCA, 15% of Argentina's population is destitute.
Milei denies any responsibility for the recent rise in poverty, attributing it to the “inheritance of the caste model.” After the distribution of unofficial poverty data, the Argentine president warned that he would stick to the course he took when he took office on December 10th: “The destruction of the last 100 years has no parallel in the history of the West.” Politicians must understand that the people are for the change and that we will give our lives to promote it. “We didn’t come to play the mediocre game of politics, we came to change the country.”
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