Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina

3. Poor People’s Waiting: Speeding Up Time, but Still Waiting

three | Poor People’s Waiting Speeding Up Time, but Still Waiting Patricia is very angry. She left her four children (twelve, ten, eight, and four years old) alone at home in order to come to the welfare o≈ce. She began the paperwork for the Nuestras Familias program four months ago but she has not been admitted yet. ‘‘The employees treat you badly here. When you ask them a question, they answer in a rude way. They don’t care because all the people here are poor, they are all in need. Even when you cry, they don’t care.’’ She first came to the welfare o≈ce to do the paperwork for the program Ciudadanía Porteña, which she received when she was living in Villa Cartón. Today, she hopes to receive some news about the Nuestras Familias through a friend whose brother works at the welfare o≈ce. If you don’t know somebody inside, she believes, your papers end up in a drawer and nobody looks at them (los cajonean, as she puts it). ‘‘If you are alone,’’ she tells us, ‘‘you can’t do anything. There’re people who come early in the morning and they left in the afternoon, without any news, tired of so much waiting. Last Friday I waited for four hours, I missed the end of the year celebration at my son’s school. I wanted to leave at noon but they told me to wait here because nobody knew exactly what was going on with my paperwork.’’ As she points to the crowd sitting in the waiting room, she says: ‘‘Look at people’s faces, people leave this o≈ce very, very tired.’’ A blazing fire that began in the early morning hours of February 8, 2007, destroyed the homes of three hundred families in Villa Cartón (Cardboard Shantytown), located beneath Highway 7 in the city of Buenos Aires. According to newspaper reports, emergency rescue vehicles assisted 177 residents of the shantytown. The following day the poor people’s waiting 65 federal fire chief told reporters that he was investigating ‘‘arson.’’ Weeks later, Gabriela Cerruti, then minister of human and social rights of the city government, confirmed in a press release the fire chief’s suspicions, and denounced the ‘‘political intentionality of the fire.’’ A barrage of accusations then erupted between di√erent political factions, some within the city government and others within the federal government. Each accused the other of ‘‘manipulating the poor,’’ or ‘‘using the poor to advance positions,’’ and each group decried the purported connections between the arsonists and ‘‘people in power.’’ Other o≈cials familiar with the events of February 8 confirmed the premeditated nature of the fire. For example, the chief of police sardonically intoned, ‘‘Can you imagine, not even a drunkard was caught desprevenido [o√ guard]? So, [clearly] most people in the shantytown knew about this beforehand.’’∞ The case of Cartón vividly illustrates one way in which clandestine kicks operate in the daily life of the urban poor. In this case, the kicks come not from ucep members but from neighborhood brokers with well-oiled connections to established members of the polity. Cartón shows us precarious living conditions in their extremes, and in doing so it also exemplifies how in the aftermath of a disaster the dispossessed become ensnared in the workings of the state’s invisible tentacles. equine paradox When the state prosecutor Mónica Cuñarro investigated the shantytown fire in Villa Cartón, she faced, in her words, ‘‘quite a paradox.’’≤ Horses and carts, which are some of the ‘‘most important working tools of the local population’’ who scavenge the streets of Buenos Aires as a means of subsistence, were surprisingly absent when the fire engulfed the shantytown. If the fire had been an accident, would not many of the horses and carts have been caught in the inferno? Indeed, the prosecutor noted that the horses’ absence was one of the many signs proving the preplanned character of the fire, along with the fact that the residents of the shantytown ‘‘avoided [other] vital losses [including ] goods such as appliances, chairs, desks, etc.’’ She concluded 66 chapter three that the ‘‘neighborhood leaders planned the fire, and informed most of the local residents who, at around 5 am, removed appliances, clothing, and mattresses from their houses and moved the horses [to safety]’’ in a...