Despite the silence of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires and the mass media, yesterday, Sunday (3), it was confirmed that there are 182 people infected by Covid 19 in the slums of the Argentine capital. This is the inevitable result of the conditions in which thousands of families live in the country’s richest city.
Today, La Poderosa spreads the letter that Nora Cortiñas and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, recognized fighters for human rights, are leading before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, to demand an immediate solution.
The document begins by appealing to the authorities, the media and society in general, in the face of the violation of the human rights of more than 50,000 inhabitants of Villa 31 who – in the very serious context of this pandemic – have been without water for nine days. “No problem with the company providing the service can justify it,” they say.
The life circumstances of the first victim of the neighborhood are very clear: “she lived in a room of nine square meters, with her husband of 85 years and her daughter -who contracted the virus-, sharing the same bathroom with 11 other people.
The city of Buenos Aires has been under the same management for 13 years, so, faced with “such conditions of structural poverty”, the signatories of the letter wonder about the Head of Government: “Could he ignore it? No. Could he hide it? Yes.” Indeed, information about the growing contagion in the working class neighborhoods was hidden and only made public this weekend, when cases had risen from 57 to 182 in four days. The document also questions the role of the media: “How can there be media that repeat the same data all those days, without asking,” and adds “how can the official pattern silence such a brutal crime?
In the face of the overcrowding in which they live, it is clear that “the inhabitants of the slums become an indisputable ‘risk group’, massive. “Doesn’t Rodríguez Larreta (Buenos Aires’ head of government) know that no one can lather up every two hours, if a whole week goes by without water?
The government of the city of Buenos Aires and the national government, of opposite sides, have addressed jointly and in consensus the measures to face the pandemic. In this sense, the letter applauds the closeness, but also warns that “this framework of healthy coexistence cannot under any circumstances become a blanket of silence. What will the government of Alberto Fernández say to this?
Before adding the signature of organizations and personalities from all fields that accompany the denunciation, the document ends by saying: “we need those who have the responsibility to govern to stop looking the other way and to assume their role as guarantors of the right to life.
“…We must all outline some reaction. Here is ours.”
