Their bank accounts are frozen, their wages are being withheld and their businesses are closing. This is the situation facing Argentina’s middle classes, the new poor, whose lives have been turned upside down by the economic crisis.
They are furious, disgusted at the way they have been let down by the government. But they are also hurt and insecure — they feel powerless.
Suddenly, those who were comfortable are experiencing something of what the ‘old’ poor, those who were poor long before the present crisis, have always felt.
Pastor Roberto leads a small church, the Congregacion de Vida in Virreyes, a poor suburb north of Buenos Aires. “The attitude to the crisis is completely different here,” he explains. “These are people who have always been poor, who have never been listened to. So why should anyone listen to them now?”
With its history of prosperity, it’s a shock to find that today in Argentina some 40 percent of the population still live below the poverty line. It’s a hand-to-mouth existence. “Money is used for absolute necessities — putting food on the table and a roof over their heads,” Roberto says.
“They’ve stripped everything but the basics away. Even paying for electricity or a telephone would be considered an extra — usually obtained unlawfully.”
Four years of recession have sent the official unemployment figure soaring to 22 percent, but most of the work done by people who live around Pastor Roberto’s church is casual work that doesn’t figure in statistics. Many rely on middle-class people for work as maids, doing odd jobs, cutting the grass or trimming hedges — the first things people cut back on in times of hardship. Yet wages were so low that a reduction in pay, sadly, does not make all that much difference. “It’s a situation they are used to,” says Roberto.
“They have always coped, but the middle classes have never had to.” The government’s emergency freeze on savings accounts doesn’t affect them.
Those living in Virreyes who do have bank accounts are richer than most, but the small amounts of money they draw are well within the low limit set by the government.
Roberto and his wife, Julia, recognize that the people they work among will probably remain the same economically. “We can’t give them food, money or work, but we can offer spiritual support. Over the years we’ve changed from running a paternalistic model of church to become an incarnational ministry — we live alongside them, cry with them and rejoice with them. We’ve worked on ethics. We want change to come from within.”
(LAM)
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