Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina

5. Periculum in mora: Flammable Revisited

five | Periculum in mora Flammable Revisited Germán Solioz had lung cancer. He died in August 1998 after having stayed in an intensive care unit for a month and a half. Two years before her father’s death, Gladys Solioz cut out from a scientific journal an article that warned about the danger of high-tension electrical wiring in urban areas. ‘‘They are coming here,’’ she thought, and put the page away. There was a small warehouse of the state-owned electricity company Servicios Eléctricos del Gran Buenos Aires (segba) next to her house. The Municipality of Quilmes assured that it would be converted to a square, the same as the one where Gladys remembers playing when she lived half a block away. But so far the square is just a memory from childhood. Had Gladys and her husband known that the true designation of the land on the corner would be otherwise , they would not have started building the face-brick house where they now live at the age of forty-five with their three children. After the privatization of the company (it is now called Empresa Distribuidora Sur Sociedad Anónima [edesur]), workers arrived one September morning in 1992. Gladys’s clipping folder kept on growing as thick as a telephone directory of a big city. It contains the medical histories and death certificates of most of the nearly two thousand neighbors who live in the eleven blocks around her house. There is also a map inside the folder; a sketch that Gladys has been making by hand for several years. When unfolded, the sketch occupies half of the dining room table. On it, she draws green crosses indicating neighbors su√ering from cancer. The red crosses are dedicated to those who passed away. It is ten years now since she started the home-made census and the count comes to 115 dead and 112 ill.∞ flammable revisited 129 The case of Gladys and her neighbors is sadly familiar. Engaging in a version of ‘‘popular epidemiology’’ (Brown and Mikkelsen 1990), Gladys has been creating a map that records sickness and death (see fig. 6). Cases of leukemia, breast cancer, colon cancer, and lung cancer abound in the eleven-block area surrounding her home, all presumably the result of the powerful electromagnetic field generated by Subestaci ón Sobral, a power-transformer plant located in Ezpeleta, which is a half-hour drive from downtown Buenos Aires in the district of Quilmes . The plant receives 132,000 volts and distributes 220 volts, from which it provides electricity to the populous districts of Quilmes and Avellaneda. Gladys’s house sits adjacent to the substation. Yet Gladys is not merely a witness of collective su√ering. As a sort of Argentine Erin Brockovich, she has also been leading the struggle to close and move the plant. The decade-and-a-half long protest has included blocking with their own bodies and those of their little children the construction of concrete pillars to support the high voltage wires coming out from the power plant, a variety of collective actions against edesur’s initiatives, and even meetings with the company’s regional ceo. After being diagnosed with cancer in 1999, Angélica Boncosqui joined her neighbor Gladys in what they call la lucha (the struggle) against edesur’s power plant (see fig. 7). Since then, they have been inseparable friends. Together, they met with a√ected neighbors, lawyers , and state o≈cials. It has not been an easy task. As they told us when we interviewed them in July 2010, neighbors are ‘‘hard to persuade . They don’t want to talk about cancer.’’≤ According to them, state o≈cials such as the ombudsman tell them that ‘‘it’s a big problem. Reason is on your side, but we don’t know how to solve it’’; and until recently, lawyers ‘‘did not want to take up the case because they said it’s a very powerful transnational company’’ or, worse, they ‘‘ended up making arreglos [under-the-table deals]’’ with the company. Angélica and Gladys’s activism does not stop in Ezpeleta. They also join other protests against similar power plants in neighboring towns, such as the one in nearby Berazategui. They see their activism as a form 130 chapter five 6 Map of death in Ezpeleta. Courtesy of Agustín Burbano de Lara. of ‘‘consciousness-raising’’ so that others...