BUENOS AIRES, April 7 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The Argentine government has
ordered people to stay at home until mid-April, but thousands have literally
nowhere to go — for them “home” is the street.
The homeless are among the very few seen on the streets of the capital
Buenos Aires since President Alberto Fernandez issued a mandatory confinement order on March 20, and since extending beyond it an initial two weeks.
They sleep in squares and in the doorways of bank buildings and now-
shuttered stores in the city’s swanky center. They say municipality shelters
are overcrowded and some have decried police violence, saying they have at times been forcibly removed from spots they have lived on for years.
The city authority says it has accelerated plans to transfer homeless
people to temporary shelters in sports centers or hotels, which have been
readied to ease pressure on normal municipal shelters during the pandemic.
Official figures showed 1,146 people were living on the streets in Buenos
Aires in 2019.
However, according a count by social and political organizations, the
number of homeless in the capital soared to more than 7,500 in the last few
months of Argentina’s crippling economic crisis.
Currently, amid Argentina’s rising unemployment, over 35 percent of the
population is living below the poverty line, of whom eight percent are
considered destitute.
“We do not want anyone to be left on the streets before the arrival of the
coronavirus spike,” expected in mid-April, said city ombudsman Alejandro
Amor.
Amor said that 700 people have already been taken off the streets, but that
still leaves thousands more.
But he conceded: “It is very difficult to achieve this goal.” — NNN-AGENCIES
