Villa Soldati

Warning the following is my attempt at an educational post. It's long and I'm not really sure if it goes anywhere, my sincerest of apologies . . . you'll be ok:

I woke up on Friday and on the news was an intense story about incidents of violence between the neighbors and the residents of Villa Soldati in Parque Indoamericano in Buenos Aires, where three people have died in the last week.

A little bit of background on what a villa is:

The full name is "villa miseria" and in Argentina it is basically the name given to any densely populated informal settlement. It is characterized by extreme poverty and the majority of the residents are undocumented families from neighboring countries. There are a fair number of villas in and around Buenos Aires as a result of the huge economic crisis that the country experienced in 2001. A lot of people had come to the metropolitan area for work and after the economy collapsed, these people nor the government had any way of supporting them. To give a comparison these villas and the reasons for their existence are very similar to the Hoovervilles during the Great Depression.

Villa 31

I believe right now there are approximately 45 villas in Buenos Aires with an estimated population of over 150,000. Some of them are so big that they have developed their own educational and social programs.

What is happening this week in Parque Indoamericano is that there is a villa of about 1,500 families that have been living there for quite some time but in the last week or so there have been increasingly violent clashes between neighbors of the park and residents of the villa. (It's important to note that the neighbors of the park are also very poor as well).

Villa Soldati, if you notice the ground is parceled off into little squares which are more or less to mark the different areas of the homes.

The neighbors of the park are upset that there is such a large population of completely off the books people living in an area that is a park, designed for the recreation use and enjoyment of all the surrounding residents. In their eyes, these people have no right to move in and settle in the park and make it their home. The villa is going to keep increasing in size and the park will no longer be a park. The residents are asking the government to get involved and free the occupied areas of the park which was designed as a public and not residential space.

For the residents of the villa it boils down to the fact that they have no other place to go. They have no money, work, and very little food and are lucky to have a tent to sleep under.

What makes the situation very interesting is that both the government of Buenos Aires and the national government refused to get involved even after a week of intense violence with 3 dead coming to a head on Friday:



The residents eventually went into the park and started setting the different tents and make-shift houses on fire. Sparking a big back and forth where one side would run forward throwing bottles and rocks and the other would retreat until the roles reversed and the opposite ensued.

The neighbors are demanding the desocupacion of the park, while the residents of the villa are demanding some alternative place to live.

Yesterday the government finally put security in place and meetings have begun in the Casa Rosada (the White House of Argentina) with representatives of both sides to find a solution.
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I'm not 100% sure where I was going with sharing this story other than I thought it was really interesting and the news footage is pretty intense. I definitely see the gripe of the neighbors in all of this and in the end I believe they are in the right but lets face it, I'm guessing this was a fairly abandoned park that wasn't exactly being utilized by the surrounding communities, when everyone started setting up tents here. It's not like you can build a shelter in the middle of an active soccer field.

Since the situation is yet to be concluded, I guess for now I'll end with some food for thought while they try and resolve this:

• The head of the government of Buenos Aires is calling for the villa to be cleared out while the Casa Rosada (national government) is saying that the city needs to guarantee housing to the residents of the villa. 
• Christina Kirschner is the current president and comes from her husband's (former president) school of thought called "Kirchnerismo" which in a nutshell is a government of the people, of the worker. Therefore the Casa Rosada is demanding social services for the potentially soon to be even more homeless than before residents of the villa. 
• It's also important to note that the upcoming year is an election year so it is important for Christina to show solidarity with the people.
• The government of the city does not have the resources or any place to put the residents of the villa.