Storm victims evicted from public housing

Around 1,000 people whose precarious dwellings were destroyed by a storm in Argentina's northeastern province of Chaco were violently evicted on Jan. 5 from housing units built by the national government, which had not yet been assigned to their future occupants. "The repression was brutal," said Nilda López with the Nelson Mandela Center for Research and Investigation, which is involved in human rights issues in Chaco. The eviction took place in the town of Puerto Vilelas, four miles from Resistencia, the provincial capital, and 560 miles north of Buenos Aires. "The police burst into the houses without prior warning and opened fire on people who refused to leave," López told IPS by telephone from Puerto Vilelas. At least 50 people were injured, several of them seriously, according to eyewitness testimony from neighbors. No official information on the number of victims was provided. Some 300 families had occupied the housing units in mid-December after a major storm in which the winds reached 80 miles an hour destroyed their dwellings made of sheet-metal, cardboard and plastic bags. When they sought assistance, the storm victims were ignored by municipal officials. "These people were asking for solutions. They had no intention of doing anything that was against the law. But all of a sudden this violent eviction was carried out, without any prior notification to the families of the eviction order, and without the presence of any municipal or provincial judicial or political authority," protested provincial lawmaker Daniel San Cristóbal. Chaco is one of Argentina's poorest provinces. According to official statistics, 60 percent of the population of the province–and an even higher proportion in some towns–lives in poverty, compared to 38 percent nationwide. Most of the province's population (which stood at 952,000 people in 2001) have no access to piped water or sanitation. The social problems are compounded by regular climatic disasters. Intense rains, which cause flooding in low-lying areas, alternate with prolonged drought. In the absence of government aid, a group of the families left homeless in December decided to occupy 218 housing units recently built in the area by the Housing Institute. Although the new homes were completed, they had yet to be allocated. "This is a problem that comes up regularly," said Rolando Náºñez, director of the Mandela Centre in Chaco. "People have no access to housing, but there are programs to build homes that are then handed out to friends, relatives and voters for political purposes," he told IPS. The institute responsible for housing construction filed court proceedings against the families occupying the new homes, and the public prosecutor called for their removal. Judge Héctor Geijo ordered the forced eviction of the families and ignored requests from human rights organizations for the operation to be carried out without weapons. Roughly 400 special operations commando troops, trained to handle riots and massive demonstrations, burst into the housing estate with guns, shields, tear gas grenades and attack dogs, and opened fire on dozens of occupants. López told IPS that the authorities have refused to report the exact number of individuals wounded in the incident, estimated at around 50, including children, elderly and disabled people. A photographer from the local newspaper Norte de Chaco was hit 17 times by rubber bullets, and a three-year-old boy was trampled by a horse. When the operation was completed, the authorities sent trucks to transport the evicted families to a school, where they will have to live until a permanent solution is found. López said there is a good possibility that the families will occupy an empty lot and build their own housing if their needs are not met by the government. Héctor Gómez of the Tupac Amaru Movement of Landless Unemployed Workers in Chaco said that the organization has already carried out 18 occupations of public land throughout the province, on which families have built makeshift housing with wood, sheet metal and plastic bags. "We condemn police actions and the lack of mediation and toleration," Gómez told IPS. "We live in a province that is one of the poorest in the country, and there is a large majority of people here who need a roof over their heads," he added.