Persecuted Precarity: Tracking the History of Working Class Housing in Argentina

Persecuted Precarity: Tracking the history of working class housing in Argentina Molly Rockhold December 2016 Government relations with the low-income and working-class inhabitants of Buenos Aires has undergone a number of phases that echo those of different nations across the world. These relations are seen clearest when dealing with a limited stock of housing stock for these residents that do not sit high on the socioeconomic scale. Many who face situations of homelessness have found a solution to the rising costs of housing and lack of affordable options by creating informal settlements, or villas as they are commonly referred to in Argentina, in unoccupied areas throughout cities, especially in Argentina’s densest city, Buenos Aires. Radical and populist democracies and authoritarian military dictatorships have all attempted to introduce solutions to the issue of precarious, urban housing, whether from a human rights perspective or one of urban aesthetics, but statistics show that the number of those living in precarious conditions has continued to rise within the last 20 years. Within these failed attempts to remedy the problem, the last and most repressive military dictatorship in Argentina’s recent history took the most severe stance to combat the growth of these settlements, waging a political and social war against villas and their inhabitants. For the nearly 7 million working class immigrants arriving from Europe in the immigration boom of the early 20th century, housing frequently took the form of conventillos. These were small apartment complexes with miniscule private rooms and a common, open courtyard in the center of the building, a layout of which is shown below. Entire families would share one or two of these small rooms and convene in courtyards for the children to play and the adults to cook or wash clothes (Tella). An alternate, more upscale option was the casa chorizo. These homes, were normally one story buildings, with small, street-front facades that extended quite deep into the city block (below). During this period of mass immigration, property owners quickly realized the potential of such large homes with as many as seven rooms, and they began to rent them out to the immigrants, who would share the space with fewer people than in conventillos (Liernur). Layout of a Traditional Conventillo (Liernur) A Casa Chorizo in Buenos Aires The next wave of migration would be largely internal and peripheral as Argentina developed its industrial sector and jobs became available in the capital city of Buenos Aires. Architect and “Urban Doctor” Guillermo Tella describes the process of industrialization in two phases. The first is the expansion of Riachuelo (also known as the Matanza River, a river that cuts through Buenos Aires to feed into the La Plata River Delta and the Pacific Ocean) into a critical port and warehouse center for the nation’s goods and merchandise. This triggered the second phase, the development of industry that required large factories normally bought on cheap land along what became the cordon industrial, the industrial corridor of Buenos Aires that followed Riachuelo (Tella). Although attempts were made to develop Argentina’s industrial sector in the 1930s under president Hipolito Yrigoyen, the populist government of Juan Domingo Peron (1945-1955) set the stage for this second phase of industry growth. As many European immigrants came to Argentina on a temporary basis (it is estimated that over 40% of these immigrants returned to their home nations after 1930), migrants from Argentina’s 23 provinces and immigrants from across the Bolivian, Uruguayan, Peruvian and Chilean borders began arriving to fill these gaps in the 1950s and 1960s (Jachimowicz). Beginning as early as the late years of European immigration, the working class began to settle around the centrally located neighborhood of Retiro, a neighborhood just on the coast of the La Plata River (mapped below). In Retiro, occupational opportunities abounded, with the large port and railroad centers located in the neighborhood. Housing stock, however was severely limited as the area was heavily centered on industry (Blaustein). The solution most found was to begin settling wherever possible, usually on unused plots of land or abandoned buildings close to places of employment: around ports or the developing industrial sector of Buenos Aires. The first shanty towns (or villas) began to appear in Buenos Aires after two crucial events: the international financial crash of 1929 and a military coup d’etat in 1930 (which would come to be the first of five in the nation’s recent history). In 1931 as journalist Eduardo Blaustein cites, the Buenos Aires municipal government began to give Polish immigrants refuge in a series of empty warehouses in Puerto Nuevo, an informal part of the Retiro neighborhood (Mapped below). From this point on, workers began settling in the area, creating informal settlements on public land. Named villas miserias or villas de emergencia, after the first “emergency” attempt to do away with these areas of precarity, these neighborhoods reached their apex during industry growth in the 1950s. Villas soon began to attract internal migrants and immigrants from peripheral nations that came to the city to work in and around the ports as well as in the surrounding railroad and production industries. The central location of Retiro and later and the northern neighborhoods of Bajo Belgrano (below) that housed villas also allowed for relatively easy access to urban services, such as the benefits of basic infrastructure (running water, electricity) (Ozlak 149). Informal settlements such as Villa Lugano in southern Buenos Aires (settled in the 1950s), on the other hand, were located closer to meatpacking districts and processing plants. As can be seen in the elevation map below, many of these neighborhoods are also located in areas prone to flooding, with low elevations and on the coast of major waterways, namely the large La Plata River or the Riachuelo that follows the southern border of Buenos Aires proper. In 1956, the recently created Comisión Nacional de la Vivienda (National Housing Commission) cited the existence of 21 villas with 33,920 inhabitants in the urban core (Blaustein). Since then, the number of villas in and around the urban core of Buenos Aires has only continued to grow. Neighborhoods of Bajo Belgrano, Retiro and Villa Lugano, Circled (Latido Buenos Aires) Elevation map of Buenos Aires (Floodmap) Within the last 60 years, the Argentine government has made many attempts to grapple with this growing number of informal settlements on public land, whether in hopes to secure all citizens a safe roof over their heads or in order to cleanse the city of visible, unorganized precarity. In 1958, residents of a number of villas began to organize, joining together to create la Federación de Villas y Barrios de Emergencia (the Federation of Villas and Neighborhoods of Emergency) in order to secure and fight for certain social and political rights. The federación successfully sustained a working relationship with the democratically elected, radicalist government of President Arturo Umberto Illia (1963-1966) who, in 1964 accepted a list of demands made by the Federation, including well-defined, guaranteed methods of rehousing displaced residents, neighborhood infrastructural repairs (which the residents would help construct), suspension of the deportation of Paraguayans, Chileans and Bolivians villeros and the prioritized assistance of families who were most in need of microloans and financial assistance to repair or rebuild their homes (Blaustein 5). As a result, in 1965, Plan Piloto was launched as an eradication plan with these requests in mind, but the policy would only ever see the completion of the first phase, the “urgent repairs” of power lines, running water and roadways (Liernur V5, 88, Ozlak 151-152). This relationship with villeros (villa residents) changed after a 1966 military coup (the third in Argentina’s history). In fact, both the municipal and federal governments’ relationships with the villeros changed so radically that the policy created within the seven years of this dictatorship (1966-1973) would present the most aggressive attempt to eradicate villas thusfar. The de facto government of Juan Carlos Onganía presented the Plan de Erradicación de Villas de Emergencia (Eradication Plan for the Villas de Emergencia) (PEVE), in 1968 as the first large-scale attempt to fully erase villas in the capital city and its surrounding areas. As a response to large-scale floods that ravaged a number of unprepared villas in 1967 in the Riachuelo area seen in the flood map above, this plan of action would see itself evolving multiple times in the years to come (Liernur V5, 88, Ozlak). President Ongania’s de facto government aimed to construct 56,000 homes in seven years to rehouse over 56,000 families it planned to evict. In the end, however, only 3,000 families a year were evicted (much less than the anticipated yearly number of 8,000) from their villas for total of 35,691 residents. 25,952 of these residents were housed in units, both temporary and permanent, that were located in the outer areas of the city, such as Ciudadela I in western Buenos Aires, pictured below (Liernur V5, 89). Although this plan did not treat residents as violently as those that followed, PEVE was revolutionary in its use of powerful equipment of force, such as bulldozers and methods of discouraging villa residents from protesting that left a mark on the city of Buenos Aires (Blaustein). (Ciudadela I y II (Now known as “Fuerte Apache”) with 2,360 housing units to house 13,400 inhabitants) (Liernur) (Photo: Tango Critico) With the second government of Juan Domingo Peron (1973-1976), the PEVE project came to be known as Plan Alborada until the last civic-military coup of 1976. The main goals of the second Peronist government were to improve the conditions of the villas.

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