"What he said hurts me."
With her slow and subdued voice, the person in charge of the Los Piletones dining room,
Margarita Barrientos
, came out to respond to presidential spokesperson
Manuel Adorni
, who this morning accused her of not having presented her papers to receive help.
An aid that the social leader denounces does not arrive.
A week ago Barrientos expressed his concern about the situation in the most vulnerable neighborhoods and the lack of concrete responses to the economic crisis that overwhelms many families.
She said, in summary, that the Government did not help her with greater resources to be able to feed the more than three thousand people who visit her dining room every day.
The answer did not take long to arrive.
But not as the social leader expected.
It was Adorni who this Friday morning, during an interview with
Futurock radio
, said
that Margarita had not met the requirements
requested by the Ministry of Human Capital to continue with the aid and that is why she stopped receiving assistance.
Video
"Ask him if he met the requirements," questioned the presidential spokesperson.
With a slow and subdued voice, Barrientos attended to
Clarín
while preparing coffee with milk for the snack of a hundred boys and girls who visit her every day.
"What he said hurts me," he begins.
"It hurts me because no one called me to tell me if I was missing a piece of paper, which
is not the case because I presented everything.
But if that were the case, no one told me
and now this man comes out to say these things.
The truth is that it hurts me."
He says that today everyone who passed by the dining room told him the news and that no one could understand such mistreatment.
"Look,
I don't need to lie
, I don't lie to anyone, I work every day with people who don't have enough to eat.
The money isn't enough for me and that's the only reality
. If anyone has doubts, let them come see me, if you already They know where I am," said Margarita, one of the greatest exponents of solidarity in Argentina (a 2016 survey ranked her, with 2,500 votes, as the most honest person).
"Now people come with jobs," said Margarita Barrientos about her dining rooms.
Furthermore, Barrientos revealed an unprecedented situation in his dining rooms: "What I need is for them to reinforce their help, for them to realize that more and more people are coming and that
now the different thing is that people with jobs come
, it wasn't like that before. but now people come who have jobs and can't make ends meet."
Margarita Barrientos in her Los Piletones dining room.
Barrientos is confident that this situation will be resolved.
That someone from the Ministry is going to call her, ask her for the paper they say she is missing and send her the money: "That's it, I really do
n't want to fight anymore
, with the previous Government I had fights and I don't want that anymore. I hope this issue is resolved soon."
Margarita says that she herself does the shopping to feed those in need.
That she goes to the market and looks for prices, analyzes offers and looks for discounts.
"I see it, no one tells me. Before I didn't go out but now I do because I want to see how to spend less but feed more people," she described the change in her routine.
"Disappointed
," she uses that word when she returns to the central axis of the talk.
"Look, I don't have the education that they have, I did up to third grade and I can't speak to them with the same words. But I can tell you what I see here, the needs and what they tell me. Those are my tools to argue with anyone."
Margarita, who openly said that she would vote for Milei in the elections, preferred not to evaluate the Government yet and instead repeated that she
trusts that everything will be better
: "The only thing I want is for us to not fight anymore and for the conflict to end." violence. And that everything gets better."