Neihgborhoiod Rallies in Support of Cartoneros

As I noted in an earlier post, I think the presence of the Cartoneros here in Buenos Aires is pretty much the most interesting thing about being in Buenos Aires right now. Throughout the whole city there is a small army of freelance recyclers combing through all the garbage looking for anything of value. Anything they find they carefully pack up and pull around in these very primitive two-wheeled carts:

They are called Cartoneros because most of what they gather is cardboard, or carton. Though they'll take anything of value. You see things like toilet bowls, old beat-up mattresses, and discarded computers in their carts -- anything, really.

They used to have a train that ran specifically for the Cartoneros, called the Tren Blanco, or white train. This ran from downtown out to the outskirts, where most of the cartoneros live. (They couldn't possibly afford to pay rent in the city. They make about a hundred bucks a month. And they work hard, all day, for a hundred bucks a month.) They canceled the Tren Blanco about a month ago, though I don't know why.

So now lots of the Cartoneros are screwed. The only option they have for moving their findings
is on a truck. And lord knows there are trucks working with the Cartoneros -- I see them loading up late at night when I'm out on my bicycle.

But unfortunately there appears to be more Cartoneros than trucks. So there are Cartoneros who are essentially trapped in the city, living on the streets, in lots, in parks, waiting for the weekend, or whenever they can get a truck to pick them and their findings up.

There was a big group of Cartoneros living in the fancy neighborhood of Belgrano the last few weeks. This isn't so far from where I live -- maybe two miles. It's pretty upper-middle-class, maybe like the upper west side of manhattan. (Recoleta would be the upper east side, I guess.)

Last week I was watching the local news, and they showed a "desalojo de Cartoneros" -- the police forcibly evicting the Cartoneros. There were a number of people passively resisting, and the police picked them up by the arms and legs and dragged them through the streets into police vans. And there were tons of people screaming and shouting and just general mayem all about. It looked pretty ugly on TV, and I guess it was.

This kind of bugged me, of course. These poor Cartoneros, lord knows they work hard, for probably the lowest possible pay. These people -- men, women, and lots, lots of children -- don't dawdle, they hustle around all day, very industriously. And then they have to manually pull these carts through the street, sometimes loaded crazy high with stuff. So all I could think was, oh, the fancy Portenos (residents of Buenos Aires) couldn't stand to have the unfortunate unwashed around, so they got the police to do their bidding. The bitter taste of vastly uneven distribution of wealth.

But my faith in the Portenos was renewed a few days later when I saw on the news again that there was a demonstration of residents of Belgrano protesting the police action to remove the Cartoneros. There were lots of man-on-the-street interviews with people at the demonstration, and almost all of them said some variation of the same thing -- these poor people, they are just trying to make a living, there's no other work out there, you have to respect them for trying to feed their families, etc., etc. It was nice, a nice reminder that despite its current economic situation, Buenos Aires still has a strong liberal, communitarian ethos.

Lots of good people here, even in the fancy neighborhoods.