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The Covid-19 crisis continues to offer enigmatic edges in Argentina: although they are clearly on the rise, the official numbers of those infected remain very low compared to Brazil and Chile, two countries with which it shares a border. Thus, the high level of nervousness of various government officials, with images that refer to nuclear bombs and collisions with the Titanic to graphically show the Argentines what is to come, increasingly attracts attention.
Is Argentina on the verge of an explosion of cases? If you listen to Sergio Berni, Minister of Security of the province of Buenos Aires and a man who goes through the poorest corners of his district in depth, the answer is a resounding yes.
"This is like the Titanic: we have the iceberg in front and we have to decide whether to crash head-on, crash sideways or crash rearward. The crash is inevitable." In case it was not clear, Berni, a military officer by training, appealed to another even stronger image: " This is worse than a nuclear explosion, because in a nuclear explosion one can measure radioactivity in real time. We are here 14 days behind schedule " .
Berni's phrases on Wednesday night generated shock in a country that had, until that day, 13,933 cases and 501 deaths . Brazil, with five times more population than Argentina, exhibits 414,661 cases and 25,697 deaths. Chile, with 40 percent of the Argentine population, totals 86,943 cases and 890 deaths.
To these figures we must add that Chile has already saturated its intensive care beds in the Santiago metropolitan area, while in Argentina the occupation is five percent . Why, then, when it takes almost ten weeks of a strict quarantine as in few countries in the region, is there talk of Titanic and nuclear explosion?
The answer is not clear, although it may have to do with the authorities being aware that far fewer controls have been carried out so far than in neighboring countries . Berni, who is in charge of the province's security, spoke when Ginés González García, the nation's minister in charge of health, was hospitalized. González García was discharged today and assured that he does not have Covid-19.
"Wouldn't you recommend rest if you were your own doctor?" Asked the journalists. "I am very bad as my own doctor," he replied. "Was [the Covid-19 nasal-pharyngeal test] swabbed?" They insisted. "There is no reason or need to do the swabbing," said the minister.
QUARANTINE HARDENING IN BUENOS AIRES
Argentina decided last weekend to go to a dual system. While quarantine restrictions are relaxed in several provinces where there are few cases and none have been reported in days, the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, which includes the capital and the populous neighborhoods that surround it, a conglomerate of more of 15 million people backed down: the quarantine is stricter than a few days ago , because the number of cases began to escalate.
Twenty minutes south of Buenos Aires, the biggest ghost of this crisis is taking shape: that the Covid-19 is primed with the poorest, with the inhabitants of the hundreds and hundreds of slums [shanty towns] that surround the capital. . There are 1,414 in total, and almost 1.4 million people live in them, in many cases without sewers, drinking water or access to other public services .
The focus is today on Villa Itatí and the Blue Neighborhood, two highly degraded areas in the Quilmes and Avellaneda districts. Axel Kicillof, governor of the province of Buenos Aires, spoke days ago that returning "to normal" is a "fantasy", and he finished off the sentence, in case it was not clear, with an ominous warning: "Return to normal it would be a collective suicide . "
Kicillof is the political responsible for those two neighborhoods. Azul, with 4,000 inhabitants, was armored: you cannot leave or enter it after 301 tests carried out on its inhabitants, 174 tested positive for coronavirus. In Itatí, on the other side of the road, you could see rows of neighbors today doing the test to find out if they have the virus.
The armor of the neighborhood generated criticism and many accused the government of having turned it into a 'ghetto' that prevents many residents from earning a living on a daily basis. Meanwhile, the newspaper 'La Nación' focused on another aspect: it was relatively easy to completely close the Blue Neighborhood, but it will not be so easy with its neighbor, Itatí .
"Before, the police must agree with the drug traffickers who dominate La Cava, a succession of boxes installed on a slope that plunges 300 meters to the bottom of the well. There live more than 15,000 inhabitants in houses without party walls, between corridors of no more one meter wide. In that well that was formed in the early 1970s to feed the embankments of the Southeast Access, the drug traffickers found fertile ground to cut and sell drugs. "
"Because of the complexity of the highly sloping terrain and the narrow corridors that separate the fragile houses, the police do not enter. The only vestige of the presence of the force is at the bottom of the well. There, two years ago, it was installed a mobile detachment that worked in a container, which became the target of the constant firing of the drug traffickers. "
That of the Itatí village is one of the two faces of Argentina, which lives another reality in its urban and middle-class areas, with incipient signs of rebellion in the face of social satiety over the confinement at home and the dreadful economic crisis that is already being experienced. . A striking phenomenon has been taking place in the country: supporting the quarantine strictly is progressive, on the left. Questioning it and proposing alternatives is neoliberal and right-wing. Thus, public debate is increasingly rarefied, especially on social networks, which Argentines use with passion.
A QUARANTINE WITHOUT OPPOSITION
The opposition to the Peronist government of Alberto Fernández does not finish articulating, partly because one of its most visible faces, the head of government of the city of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, works side by side with the president and shows himself alongside him in each quarantine extension announcement.
Most of the citizens continue to strictly observe the quarantine and believe in Fernández, but in many sectors the response of the head of state generated confusion when a journalist mentioned to her over the weekend the "anguish" that many people felt.
"I am very struck by this idea that many media and many journalists transmit about the anguish of quarantine. Is it distressing to save yourself? Distressing is getting sick, not saving yourself; no, preserving your health . Distressing is that the State abandons you. (...) We are in a pandemic that kills people, do we understand it? We are in a pandemic of an unknown virus, do we understand it? There is no vaccine, it has no remedy. Do we understand it? (.) sow anguish. "
The response deepened precisely anguish in not a few citizens, who in that same press conference had heard another phrase from the president, who governs with superpowers delegated by Parliament: "What does it matter to me how long the quarantine lasts? It will last as long as it has to last . "
Fernández must announce next week if he prolongs the quarantine that expires on June 7, but it is clear that he will, and for now indefinitely. In a column in 'La Nación', the philosopher Nicolás José Isola, criticized the, in his opinion, little empathy that the president showed: "Fernández should be more careful with the anguish of the people, when the personal psyche and the wallet [ dehydrated portfolio] they are exhausted from being inside, there is no state panopticon to cope. If the response of the population so far was quite responsible, it was not difficult to clap that tiredness on the shoulder. "
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