Eudelia is the last frontier against hunger in her neighborhood.
The woman manages to get a plate of food to her neighbors and sometimes, she believes, she works magic.
She turns insufficient quantities of rice, carrots, onions, tomatoes and chicken into pots of stew that feed dozens of families in the Fátima neighborhood, a popular settlement in the south of Buenos Aires.
More women in Argentina, people like Mónica, Reina or Librada, do that work that feeds at least five million people in community centers in the country.
The lines at the doors of these neighborhood spaces have grown in recent months, while poverty escalates and the Government of Javier Milei suspends the delivery of food to soup kitchens like the one in Eudelia.
Eudelia Galeano, 62 years old, arrives at seven in the morning at the dining room.
The space took the name of the cultural center that also operates there: Ni un pibe ni una piba less.
It is a bright place in block five of the town, as the marginal neighborhoods with narrow streets and exposed brick houses are called in Argentina.
Today it's rice with chicken and outside the line has formed since nine in the morning.
Eudelia made the meal plan for the week on Monday, when she received the supplies sent by the municipal government to cook 150 portions.
It is the only state aid they have received since the national government suspended the delivery of merchandise to review the assistance model used until now, analyze the “real” needs and “ensure that the help reaches” the people who need it.
The Executive's decision brought the defenders of these spaces to the streets since December, who this Friday mobilized again throughout the country to demand food under the slogan "The food emergency cannot wait any longer."
A cook prepares food in the soup kitchen in Bajo Flores.Amanda Cotrim
“I don't know how to do it,” says Eudelia, who manages it.
If they send her merchandise to make noodles with tomato sauce, she makes polenta, which yields more;
She goes out to see how the line of people is going and if it is too long she adds water to the pot to make it bigger.
Sometimes, in addition, the cooks—especially women—organize activities to raise money to pay, for example, for gas bottles: they sell chipa (cassava flour and cheese bread) or bread pudding, they organize a raffle, they make a popular bingo.
Another important part of the soup kitchens' resources are self-managed by the social organizations of which many of them are a part.
But there is still a lack and Eudelia sees how more and more people are gathering in line: “Before it was difficult, now it is worse.
I have never set foot in a dining room in my life, not even when I had seven little children.
But now the daughters I have, some of them go to soup kitchens.”
Canteens function in Argentina, and in other parts of Latin America, as neighborhood spaces where millions of people complement their diet and also function as places of accompaniment and socialization.
They are coordinated, mainly, by neighborhood groups, social organizations or the Catholic Church.
There are almost 4,000 spaces registered and validated by the Government, according to a request for information made by the Argentine Social Debt Observatory in 2022, although social organizations raise the figure to 50,000.
The soup kitchens financed by the United Nations Development Program with funds from the national government alone feed 4.8 million people.
When the crisis hits, the demand for these spaces is greater.
It happened during the debacle at the end of 2001, that of the corralito, when millions of Argentines were left without work and in different parts of the country popular pots were organized to offer food;
also during the covid-19 pandemic.
Today, when poverty reaches 57% of Argentines, according to the projections of the Social Debt Observatory, the demand for food is growing again.
Their price is one of those that increased the most in the last month - 20.4%, according to official data - and around 15% of the population does not have enough income to buy them.
In addition, Unicef estimated in 2023 that more than 3.5 million children stopped some of the main meals or modified the proportions they eat.
Eudelia Galeano, cook at a dining room in the Fátima neighborhood.
Amanda Cotrim
“This is not the first time we have gone through a crisis.
I've already gone through several and the poor people put the dead ones, we always put them there,” says Mónica Troncoso, pastry chef, founder of a cooperative in which eight people work and a cook in the same dining room as Eudelia.
“The community work we do to guarantee the right to food should be done by the Government,” she says.
Mónica assures that since December they have not received dry goods, that is, products such as rice, chickpeas or noodles, nor the money that allowed them to buy fresh products such as dairy products, fruits or vegetables.
“The debt they had with us [Previous Governments] was large, they owed us tons, but this Government now does not lower anything,” she says.
In the dining room, they collect bags of chickpeas, which they will not cook for now because doing so requires hours of cooking on gas;
There is grass and tea bags;
There is no rice left and they accumulate bags of a type of corn that is only useful for making popcorn.
In January, members of La Poderosa, the organization of which the soup kitchen is a part, contacted officials and gave them, they claim, the documentation they required, but they still have not received merchandise.
They even claim that some of the soup kitchens they coordinate throughout the country are in danger.
The cook criticizes the drastic adjustment that the Government applied, which cut subsidies for transportation and energy and froze social benefits, such as pensions and some aid, despite inflation.
As a consequence, the Argentine public sector recorded a financial surplus in January.
“At what cost?” Monica asks.
“Today there are many people dying in a hospital because they do not have an appointment and they have complicated illnesses;
There are people who have lost their jobs;
There are people who have to eat once a day or sometimes not even that to feed their children.
We are people who have resisted a lot, but how much more do we have to continue suffering to get where they [the Government] want to go?”, laments Mónica.
The line to receive food from the dining room, in Barracas, Buenos Aires.
Amanda Cotrim
"You are hungry?
Come one by one”
At the beginning of February, the Minister of Human Capital, Sandra Pettovello, refused to attend to the representatives of social organizations who showed up to protest at the doors of the ministry to ask for food.
“Guys, are you hungry?
Come one by one, I will write down your ID, your name, where you are from and you will receive help individually,” said the minister.
The organizations took the proposal literally and formed a kilometer-long line, but no one was received.
Days later, national media such as
La Nación
reported the resignation of an official who “was in charge of distributing the merchandise” to the canteens.
The ministry led by Pettovello, which concentrates the former portfolios of Education, Labor and Social Development, aims to change the assistance model that existed until now and “eliminate intermediaries” who, according to the authorities, “divert resources.”
As part of the new strategy, it has stopped sending supplies to soup kitchens that it considers do not “meet the requirements” and, instead, has signed agreements with evangelical churches or Cáritas.
The ministry believes, however, that the “most efficient” policy against hunger is the use of the Alimentar card, an instrument that the State gives to mothers or fathers with children under 14 years of age for the purchase of food and that reaches directly to 3.8 million people, according to official data.
The Government announced a 50% increase for that plan.
“We know that the process of normalization of the economy that we began when we took office mainly affects those who have the least.
That is why we are making fundamental changes,” a spokeswoman responded to questions from this newspaper.
“The ministry is concerned that the money is used appropriately.
That's valuable.
The point is that this can never be done by interrupting the feeding of millions of girls and boys,” says Francisco Rodríguez, lawyer for the Civil Association for Equality and Justice.
“No dining room received anything from the national State again and that should come with a very great justification.
It seems that the search to eliminate intermediaries depends on the type of organization it is,” says Rodríguez.
The lawyer also warns that a few days before the start of classes “the national State has not activated the budget execution of school cafeterias either,” which provide relief to the required community spaces.
The Catholic Church also joined the criticism from social and civil organizations.
The Episcopal Conference expressed in a statement that “food cannot be an adjustment variable” and urged the authorities to deliver aid “without delay.”
Later, Caritas joined in, signing an agreement with the Government for “more than 310 million pesos [285,000 dollars]” for the purchase of food.
The Catholic organization highlighted that the audits of the soup kitchens are a “fundamental element”, but insisted on “integrating all” those who “serve the poorest” and that “they be given the necessary help so that they can continue doing so.” .
“Today no one can assume the amount and complexity of social work individually,” she warns.
A cook prepares food in the Fátima neighborhood.Amanda Cotrim
The burners do not turn off
Despite the difficulties, thousands of stoves lit throughout the country are holding on as best they can.
In the Corazón Abierto dining room, in the 21-24 neighborhood, in Buenos Aires, it is very hot today.
The burners have been on since seven in the morning and will only turn off after noon.
The air is filled with the smell of bubbling oil and cumbia enters the door from the narrow hallway outside.
María Isabel,
Queen
they call her, runs this kitchen and today works with the assistance of Liberada.
Neither of them receive a salary for what they do.
They receive a benefit, the Enhance Work, for which today they charge 78,000 pesos each (about $90).
The cooks, however, demand “a decent salary.”
In 2023, they presented a salary recognition bill that has the minimum wage as a floor and includes vacations, retirement and social security.
“My life is this,” says Reina and says that her day passes between her house, the dining room and the hospital, where she is being treated for cancer.
Now she fries the medallions that the municipal government gave her for the 250 people registered in this dining room;
the mashed potatoes and pumpkin were ready early.
They will also deliver some apples, but they are not enough and they have prepared a sweet so that no one is left without dessert.
“If the Government does not send, I have to solve it.
"I can't wait for the State to solve me while I have people there," says the woman.
A girl waits sitting in line to receive food.Amanda Cotrim
Outside the dining room, which is coordinated by the Peronist organization Barrios de Pie, a line of families begins to form with
tupperware
to fill.
They say that “everything costs”, that “nothing is cheap”, that “something is always missing from the table”, that meat can no longer be bought and neither can fruit.
“Sometimes we look at each other in the face and wonder what we are going to eat,” says María Curioso Torres, 74, who has been going to the dining room for a year.
They are people who do not have a job or who only get temporary jobs in which they are paid hourly;
There are those who find full-time jobs, but the pay is little and they have no one to leave their children with;
There are those who are already too old and sick.
“At 11:00 they are already knocking on my door.
Some kids eat to go to school and depend on this food,” says Reina, who looks tired.
Her arm is swollen from the effort and she fans herself with her apron.
When the line ends, Reina and Librada stay a little longer because a woman told them that she was late.
She appears small, running and sweaty with her baby in one arm and then walks away from her down the hallway with the bag.
of food weighing down his other arm.
People do not miss any day and there are 80 waiting on the waiting list.
Reina is now preparing to leave: “It is difficult to say there is no more.”
Men bring food to the dining rooms in a popular neighborhood of Buenos Aires.
Amanda Cotrim
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