A year ago I visited the northern Argentine province of Chaco to report on the death of Rosa Molina. The 56-year-old was the fifteenth Toba person to die of malnutrition in the province in the space of four months. She weighed just 24kg when she died.
Despite her death making international headlines, and raising embarrassing questions for then-president Néstor Kirchner’s government, little has been done to improve the situation, which indirectly led to her death.
And most of the causes of the deaths are down to deforestation and the eviction of the communities from their land. The communities have lived for thousands of years in harmony with the environment around them, quite literally living off the land. When the land is removed, the indigenous communities, with little formal education, have scarce chance of getting a job and end up in shantytowns on the outskirts of the cities, finding it hard to make ends meet become malnourished.
Between July and October 2007, 15 Toba people died of malnutrition in Chaco province alone.
The true toll of people who have died due to malnourishment is perhaps higher: in one small hamlet, Mapic, some 10km outside of Resistencia, the capital of Chaco province in the north of Argentina, two people died between July and October last year.
Viviel, 24, is from Mapic. She explained last October how her grandmother, an 86-year-old Toba woman, was interned three weeks previously in the city’s main hospital due to malnourishment, weighing around 30kg.
According to Viviel, the decision to intern her when her weight dropped to perilously low levels is typical of the reaction of the authorities. Her grandmother had already been interned twice, and each time was fed up to a more healthy weight, only to be returned back to her plastic house in the shantytown, for the entire cycle to start over again.
Some NGO employees said it would perhaps be better if the government faced up to what they were doing, took guns and shot the indigenous, putting them out of their misery, rather than condemning them to the long torturous existence that is currently their reality. Others have called it a ‘silent genocide’.
Rolando Nuñez, of Centro de Estudios de Nelson Mandela explains how the victims are brought back from the brink when they are perilously weak, interned so the government don’t have another indigenous death on their hands, and are returned to their homes when they are well enough, to keep the government’s conscience clear.
Even worse, Chaco is a wealthy province, with soil in which, famously, anything will grow. According to Nuñez, the province has the potential to produce food for 100m people a year, that’s to say four meals a day giving all the necessary proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Even in the present state of the province, using all the land that is currently being cultivated, the province could feed half of Argentina’s population (20m people) four such meals a day per year. But this has not happened and within the province itself, 70% of the population, some 700,000 people, do not eat on a daily basis.
And despite the brief headlines the death of Rosa Molina made, it seems the reality of day-to-day life for many in Chaco has been forgotten. Deforestation continues at an alarming rate, and the government seems indifferent to stop it.
Raúl Vallejos, a local union leader, explains: of the 180 fines for illegal deforestation in the entire province between July 2003 and May 2006, only four were paid. And of the four that actually reached such a level, no plans for reforestation were included. Adding to the irony, in the entire area of El Impenetrable – 4m hectares – there is only one forestry inspector. And, citing a lack of funds, the only form of transport the regional government is able to provide the inspector with is a bicycle.
In such conditions, deforestation, and deaths like that of Rosa Molina, are likely to continue.