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Villa 31 - an Argentine shanty town

   

         

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Four-fifths of Latin Americans live in cities. But almost every big city is encircled by slums, which house 120m people, or 20% of the region’s population. They go by different names: villa (short for villa miseria) in Argentina, favela in Brazil and barrio bajo in Mexico. Governments have long tried to improve them.

A visitor walking down Arroyo, a street in Retiro, one of the most exclusive areas in Buenos Aires, Argentina, can buy a bag of coffee beans for $22 and order a kale pesto salad at a hip restaurant. But a few streets away is the city’s oldest slum, known as Villa 31. It has a surface of 72 hectares and is home to over 40,000 people. A three-bedroom apartment on Arroyo will rent for around $3,000 a month but, in contrast, a family in Villa 31 might pay $150-250 for their lodging.

Villa 31 is gradually improving. Since 2016 the city government, with funds from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), has spent more than $300m on paved roads, sewage pipes and electricity cables.

The slum had only one asphalt road. But today, all streets are paved. In 2016 there were no public schools. Now it has three. Since 2019 buses go to Villa 31 and a bank has opened there. And it has reduced crime because of an increased police presence.

The city government built blocks of apartments to house 1,200 families that once lived under a highway. But in two recent surveys of the new apartments a majority of residents complained of leaks and poor insulation. Higher rents are a source of concern.

Slum integration is a rare point of consistency in Argentina’s fractured politics. In 2009 a law promoted by Mauricio Macri, then a liberal mayor of Buenos Aires, aimed to improve Villa 31’s infrastructure. In 2017, when Mr Macri was president, upgrading shantytowns became a national priority. This has continued under a government led by the Peronists, a leftist populist movement.

Buenos Aires mayor, Mr Horacio Rodriguez Larreta, a Harvard-trained technocrat, is hoping the publicity from Villa 31 can help him win the presidency next year. Billboards across Buenos Aires push his slogan: “The transformation doesn’t stop.”

Adapted from The Economist