The most polluted river basin in the Americas is the Matanza-Riachuelo, a 64km stretch of water that runs from western Buenos Aires into the Rio Plata estuary. It is a flowing mass of toxic poisons. Hundreds of factories line its banks, disgorging heavy metals, agricultural pesticides and countless other noxious chemicals into its foul waters. The surface bubbles with methane, pockmarked by rusting ship hulks. Islands of junk float down it. In a recent clean-up operation, over 12 tons of garbage was removed from just three metres of the river’s embankment.
Sharing this environmental holocaust with the river are the slums of the low-lying southern flank of Buenos Aires city, known to the locals as the villas miseria. Fewer than half of their inhabitants have sewers and a third have no access to portable water. As a result, they discharge their effluent and waste into the river as it meanders down to La Boca, the port’s mouth. With characteristic élan, radical theorist Mike Davis recently awarded one of these villas miserias the dubious distinction of having the world’s worst feng shui: it is built over a former lake, a toxic dump and a cemetery, and sits in a flood zone.
Within the next 30 years or so, two billion people – equivalent to the entire world population in the 1920s – will live in slums. The relentless forward march of slum development, documented with unswerving force by Davis is his Planet of Slums, has outpaced urbanisation over the last 30 years. If Davis is right, the cities of the future will not be built in glass and steel, but in plastic, corrugated iron, salvaged wood and concrete blocks.
In Buenos Aires, the baroque splendour of the city dubbed the Paris of the South gives way in the urban periphery to slums that have been swelled by repeated waves of migrants from Bolivia and Paraguay in search of work in the megalopolis and public education and healthcare for their children. The slums have also soaked up those catapulted into rootless poverty by the roaring inequality of the Menem years and the collapse of the Argentine economy that followed in 2001.
Here people exist at the nexus between social and environmental injustice. The villa miserias are built where environmental squalor and risk dictate low land values. Pollution and degradation and their associated health risks are compounded by the lack of utility and waste infrastructures. Fires are endemic because people rely on portable tubes of gas and oils for their cooking fuels and rig up unfused cable connections to corner side exchange boxes for their electricity supplies. Shit and filth are strewn everywhere, exposing the slum inhabitants to all sorts of health hazards. Walking through the dense networks of brick and corrugated iron homes is to navigate an obstacle course of effluent and garbage.
But Davis’s dystopian vision of relentless slum growth may not be an inexorable prospect, in Argentina at least. Whilst at night, slum dwellers head into the city to pick through the office waste for the cardboard and plastic bottles that earn them meagre pesos from recycling plants, by day thousands of them work on construction sites, rebuilding the cityscape. Argentina’s defiance of IMF orthodoxies, coupled with a massively devalued peso and the country’s abundance of natural resources, has propelled growth of nearly nine per cent per annum in recent years. Employment has risen by 30 per cent and poverty has fallen from its catastrophic heights. The idiosyncratic centre-left government of Nestor Kirchner has put jobs, growth and equity first. The effects are even being felt in the slums, where new social housing and paved roads are starting to dot the landscape. Their companion in misery, the Riachuelo river basin, has been declared an environmental emergency.
In Argentina, as elsewhere in South America, a horizon of hope has appeared. Freed from the Washington consensus, and buoyed up by Venezuelan petrodollars and rapacious Chinese economic growth, the governments of the continent are putting social justice back on the agenda.
But they have a mountain to climb. Inequality, poverty and political corruption are still rampant whilst many of the industries that have benefited most from the growth of the last few years are those that spew toxic waste into the environment. For the inhabitants of the villa miserias, justice will be a long time coming.