It is almost 6 p.m. Friday. Viviana, 31, who is raising two children alone, comes home from work. No time to ask, she is about to receive, like every week, the food and hygiene products that she will distribute to nearly 100 families the next day. Like many organizations in the neighborhood, with their soccer team, La Nuestra, they quickly activated solidarity to fill the gaps in the city’s authorities.
Located in the heart of Buenos Aires, the slum Villa 31, where more than 45,000 people live, is particularly connected to the rest of the capital Argentina. Adjoining a station where hundreds of essential workers still travel every day, it has become in less than a month the main home of Covid-19 from the country.
” I’m mad “
Here, most of the inhabitants work in the informal sector, and have lost their sources of income, in the personal care or trade trades. In their brick and sheet metal houses glued to each other, they struggle to apply the confinement decreed on March 20 and the barrier gestures. We are crammed together. We were without water for more than two weeks when we told you to wash your hands all the time. You had to make huge queues to get a bucket of water and get by with it
, says Viviana. She lives with five of her siblings, their families, and her parents, both at risk. I’m mad. I feel helpless and I am very scared
, she says.
Opposition MP for Buenos Aires, Maria Bielli proposed in mid-April a set of specific measures to help disadvantaged neighborhoods to fight the epidemic. Without obtaining satisfaction. A big month later, Villa 31 concentrates more than a quarter of the proven cases of Covid-19 “And the highest contagion rate in the country”, laments the chosen one.
In response to the city’s inaction, the national authorities came to the rescue, notably launching a targeted test campaign in the neighborhood. Too late. The final result: almost 60% of people tested are positive.
Originally seen as a wealthy disease
, imported by Argentinian tourists from the middle and better-off, the Covid-19 is swarming in the most vulnerable neighborhoods, at the risk of undermining Argentina’s good results in the face of the pandemic. Three and a half months after his first case, the country has fewer than 400 deaths.
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