Rocio Magnani
10/01/2020 - 18:01
Clarín.com
Society
A rabbit Alejo would not have imagined it, always on the street.
Sometimes he would stop with his younger sister and his mother under the bridge in Constitución and, before, behind the prison where his father was, in Florencio Varela.
The pet thing didn't fit in any way.
No, until July 20.
"When we came here, I felt like I had a home," he says slowly.
A few meters away, there is the little house, four walls of wooden planks and nylon awnings, that his family put together in the Guernica taking.
Alejo, out of thirteen who seem less, takes mate with the neighbors
of a nearby chapería and with his father, whom he accompanies to collect cardboard every day in a horse-drawn cart.
"I did not name the bunny," he says and his face fades.
Around, most of the boxes are empty or with a single person who is guarding. "They have it in another place", he says and states the obvious:
" Here it is not known if they will throw us out ”.
Alejo, 13, wants to have a pet for the first time in his life.
Photo: Rafael Mario Quinteros
On Wednesday at the last minute,
the Justice accepted the request of the Government of the Province of Buenos Aires to postpone the eviction
of the capture.
Some 2,000 families live in the 100 hectares that the settlement occupies in the President Perón district, and among them, almost 3,000 children and adolescents.
"Last night, no one slept," says Alejo's father.
Marcelo Spadafora Robles explains that his youngest daughter, Morena (11), and her mother, Mónica Guerrero, went to sleep in the neighboring neighborhood.
"In the middle of the night, the power went out and there was a very difficult feeling of instability," she describes.
Fear?
“My children have been accumulating it for a long time, on the street or in those places where there is only one piece of bread and there are ten children to eat.
I am 54 years old.
How long can I have to live?
10 more years?
I want a piece of land where I can build my house and leave it to my children when I am away.
I want a place so that if they want to raise their bunnies, they will.
Some 2,000 families live on the 100 hectares occupied by the Guernica taking.
Photo: Rafael Mario Quinteros
Since his release in 2014, Spadafora Robles had some jobs as a painter.
“But the work was finished and they fired me.
And nobody wants to take people with antecedents or living on the street ”, he clarifies.
“So,
for years we have lived by collecting cardboard.
My lady, if you have to collect bones from the garbage to make a stew for the four of us, you do.
And we have the Universal Child Allowance and a social plan that gives me 8,500 pesos per month, ”he says.
“With that you don't buy a house.
I am a painter, I have a trade, but there is no job.
And it makes me desperate to look at my children and tell them: 'Dad, now he's going to get a job and a loan to get a house.'
Lie.
I'm going to be a black carter who's going to keep collecting trash all my life. "
-What would you like to happen now?
-I do not refuse to dialogue, but first I ask that they treat me with dignity.
Because if it can be bought with the resources that I have, I want to buy.
Luz, a neighbor, nods to one side:
“I don't have a problem either.
If you have to pay, I pay.
Because I hear that people who, out there, did not experience this tell you 'go work if you want to buy a house'.
But it's not like that."
"Ten years ago I signed up for the municipality's housing plan and I go to Social Development to ask them to listen to me," says the woman.
I always wanted to buy but they did not give me the opportunity.
It causes me injustice to get into a place that does not It is my responsibility, but we have been waiting for an answer that we never had ”.
Luz says that ten years ago she asked the Municipality of Presidente Perón for a housing plan.
Photo: Rafael Mario Quinterosz
The social organizations, together with the delegates of the families, submitted to the Government a proposal for the urbanization of a part of the property, within the framework of Law 14,449 on Fair Access to Habitat.
In addition, they criticize the way in which the Kicillof management plans to carry out the social subdivision of another part of the land.
“These are regions 5 and 6, which have been inhabited for decades,” Horacio Rodríguez (19), one of the delegates of the seizure, assures Clarín, and affirms that “what the provincial government wants to do is absurd, which first wants to evict and then lot ”.
Spadafora Robles says that he is “rotten” from waiting and from the criminalization of the settlement's occupants:
“I am here, not because I don't care about private property, I am here because I need land
.
I was wrong many times, but I am not a scoundrel.
I don't smoke joint, I don't drink merchandise, I don't drink wine.
If I were a criminal, I would go out to steal.
But I don't want that anymore ”.
The eviction from the Guernica land takeover was postponed to October 14.
Photo: Rafael Mario Quinteros
“I am 54 years old and I am realizing that my life is ending and I am still the same.
There were a couple of days that my kids didn't eat.
I'll go back to jail if you want, but this time fighting for what belongs to me, ”he assures
and spreads the ID cards of the whole family on a wooden board.
"So they can see that I'm not lying, that we exist," he says and dials his wife's phone.
"I'm very sad", greets Mónica Guerrero (43)
and tells Clarín that the sufferings of being homeless are so many that she is ashamed that her husband listens to her.
“We lived with the two boys on the street for almost six years,” the woman continues, “I ate what people gave me, many times we went to visit him at the prison and we stayed there living outside the prison 23 because we had no where return.
Under the Constitution bridge, I was sexually abused by other people on the streets.
And I was afraid to go back. "
"Now I'm very bad, it brings back bad memories
that they want to evict us and again I'm going to stay on the street.
I never had a house, but what hurts me the most is not having a roof for my kids," says Guerrero
.
"The people who are in the taking continue to suffer, we do not have support from anyone."
GS