One of them is Ángel Gómez, who has been living in the Jorge
Newbery International Airport for two years and has seen how the number of
people joining him has soared.
“After the pandemic, this became a total invasion,” Gómez
said early Thursday as he sat next to a sign advertising the Perito Moreno
glacier, an iconic tourist attraction in the Patagonia region.
As passengers and staff start arriving early in the morning,
dozens of people are still sleeping, some on chairs and others on the floor.
Some have blankets, but many sleep directly on the floor, strewn across the
airport with their few possessions close by.
The airport, known colloquially as Aeroparque, has
practically become a homeless shelter at night. Once passengers start arriving,
some of the overnighters head off to spend the day at soup kitchens, though
others hang around the airport grounds begging for change at traffic lights and
some stay seated in chairs blending in with the travelers.
It’s a stark reflection of the rising poverty in a country
where one of the world’s highest inflation rates is making it difficult for
many to make ends meet.
“If I pay rent, I don’t eat. And if I pay for food, I’m on
the street,” said Roxana Silva, who has been living at the airport with her
husband, Gustavo Andrés Corrales, for two years.
Silva gets a government pension of around 45,000 pesos,
which is equivalent to about $213 at the official exchange rate and about half
of that on the black market.
“I don’t have enough to live on,” Silva laments.She said
that she and her husband take turns sleeping so someone is always watching
their possessions.
The high inflation has been especially pronounced for basic
food items, hitting the poor the hardest. The poverty rate rose to 39.2% of the
population in the second half of 2022, an increase of three percentage points
from the first six months of the year, according to Argentina’s national statistics
agency, INDEC. Among children under age 15, the poverty rate increased more
than three percentage points to 54.2%.
Horacio Ávila, who runs an organization devoted to helping
homeless people, estimates the number of people without a roof in Argentina’s
capital has soared 30% since 2019, when he and others carried out an unofficial
count of 7,251 people in this city of around 3.1 million.
Amid the increased cost of living and diminishing purchasing
power, more people started to look to the airport as a possible refuge.
Laura Cardoso has seen this increase firsthand in the year
she has been living in the airport “sleeping sitting up” on her wheelchair.
“More people just came in,” Cardoso said while accompanied
by her two dogs that she says make it difficult for her to find a place to live
because no one wants to rent to her. “It’s packed with people.”
Mirta Lanuara is a new arrival, living in the airport only
about a week. She chose the airport because it’s clean.
Teresa Malbernat, 68, has been living in the airport for two
months and says it’s safer than being in one of the city’s shelters, where she
says she was robbed twice.
The Argentine company that operates the airport, AA2000,
says it “lacks police power” and “the authority to evict these people” while
also saying it has the obligation to ensure “non-discrimination in the use of
airport facilities.”
For Elizabet Barraza, 58, the sheer number of homeless
people living in the airport illustrates why she’s choosing to emigrate to
France, where one of her daughters has been living for five years.
“I’m going there because the situation here is difficult,”
Barraza said as she waited to board her flight. “My salary isn’t enough to
rent. Even if they increase the salaries, inflation is too high so it isn’t
enough sometimes to rent and survive.”
“I don’t want to come back,” Barraza said. -AP
0 comments:
Post a Comment