Yesterday, TAP Online contributor Jonathan Goldberg previewed this Sunday's presidential election in Argentina. Today, he examines how electoral politics shapes the lives of Argentina's poor -- and how the legacy of one woman shapes Argentina's politics. The second in a three-part series.
LANÚS, ARGENTINA -- In a shantytown called Hope, in a municipality that borders Argentina's capital city, armed teenagers stand on street corners, charging "tolls" to passersby and dealing drugs. It is a scene out of the movie City of God. The shantytown's name aside, hope here is elusive.
But Marta Belisan, a Peronist broker in the shantytown, provides an oasis of optimism from her expansive, sturdy shack, which serves as both her home and a soup kitchen. On the day I visited Belisan, three large trucks -- which together make up the mobile hospital of Lanús -- were parked outside her residence. A long line of mothers and screaming children were waiting to be seen.
Belisan is part of the mayor's network of neighborhood problem solvers. She provides help to the most desperate, and if, in return, Hope residents have to attend a few rallies for presidential candidate Néstor Kirchner -- one of four major contenders in this Sunday's presidential election -- they are often eager to do so.
This practice -- exchanging state resources for political support -- is called clientelism, and it defines Argentine democracy. Two months ago, I set out to document clientelism in the once-industrial municipalities outside Buenos Aires -- municipalities where one-quarter of Argentina's population lives on 1 percent of the country's land. After interviewing local officials in eight municipalities, I focused on Lanús, where I interviewed 27 Peronist neighborhood activists, or punteros, during repeated visits to working-class areas and six shantytowns (named Garden, Faith, Hope, Little Frog, Diamond and El Ceibo, Argentina's national tree).
Clientelism is sometimes crudely coercive -- for instance, explicitly requiring the poor to attend rallies to keep receiving workfare subsidies. But it is also often employed by well-intentioned shantytown leaders desperate to meet the basic needs of their communities. They are following the example set by Eva "Evita" Perón, their heroine and patron saint.
But even when the practice of clientelism is not cynical, it is corrosive to democracy. Belisan and her clients speak and vote as they choose, but they are required to attend Kirchner's rallies and barred from any political involvement with the campaigns of other candidates.
No shantytown leader can avoid the degrading choice imposed by clientelism: food or freedom. Keeping one's hands clean, for shantytown leaders and ordinary residents alike, means renouncing state resources and surviving, instead, through a constant struggle for largely unavailable odd jobs. Even the World Bank is not exempt from surrendering its beneficiaries' freedom in order to help feed them.
Many in poor communities do not view clientelism as an evil imposed by outsiders or elites but rather as a way of surviving an economic crisis that has left virtually all shantytown residents without formal employment. Residents of shantytowns have a lot of problems: They need to find food for themselves and their children; they need free medication or burial services; they need plastic sheets to build a new shack because a kerosene stove exploded, burning down the shack they worked years to assemble from wood scraps. There are also a lot of things they would like to have, such as pipes to install a sewer system (so their children stop getting parasitic infections, which are endemic especially where shantytowns have been built over swamps).
A neighborhood puntero, or broker, listens to these requests and tries to fulfill them. Brokers have an important advantage in solving problems: a monopoly on state resources. The more political support a broker passes up the pyramid of clientelism, the more state resources are made available to the broker and his clients.
The Peronist brokers hold increasing power here as the poor, rising in number, scramble for a diminishing amount of social aid. Though poverty rates in greater Buenos Aires, which includes Lanús, have risen from 30 percent to 54 percent since 2000, state social spending is down 38 percent during that same period, according to government statistics.
Brokers don't often have to force their clients to paint walls with the mayor's name or attend rallies. Instead, shantytown residents frequently maximize their own access to state resources by supporting the best-connected broker -- or freely participate in political events out of genuine gratitude for the state resources the broker provides.
That gratitude comes out of a double discourse inherent to the way clientelism is practiced in Argentina, a discourse that at once dissociates and links state resources and politics. Brokers seem to tell their clients, "You do not incur a political obligation by accessing the state resources I provide," while also saying, "My political patron and I provide these resources as party activists." The double discourse means that when brokers ask their clients to attend a rally as a favor, their clients often do so without being explicitly obliged.
Often the double discourse is implicit, as in the case of Belisan, who categorically denies that the state services she provides are related to her political activities for the mayor. "We don't ask people, 'Can you come to the rally?' We tell them, 'Do you want to come to the rally?'" Belisan says. "The mayor doesn't like politics and social action to be mixed."
But as Elsira Ramirez explains, her job -- rounding up Belisan's clients when there is a rally -- is an easy one, seeing as "the people already know us." Everyone in Hope knows Belisan and her inner circle because Belisan provides food in her soup kitchen, arranges for the mobile hospital to visit, distributes food and food vouchers to mothers and the elderly, and gives out toys (made by workfare recipients) to parents who cannot afford any. People in the soup kitchen do not distinguish between Marta the Soup-Kitchen Organizer and Marta the Peronist Activist.
Belisan the broker is available, like most punteros, at any hour of the day or night. Her activities vary from obtaining identification documents from the municipality to throwing a pizza birthday party for a 71-year old man without a family to trucking out the body of a young boy so ravaged by a dog that the municipal health service refused to remove it, according to locals. Many of these are good-faith, apolitical actions, but Hope residents are clear-minded about the price they carry.
One man who eats in Belisan's soup kitchen and also attends rallies with the puntero tells me, "If you see that in your party they give you less than another would give you, you approach the other one."
An elderly woman who plays cards in the afternoon in the soup kitchen explains why she boards Belisan's buses. "She's got the [workfare] plans that are given out here," the woman says. "She's got medication, she's got things for here."
So it was easy for Belisan to pack more than 100 people into the two buses assigned to her for the Kirchner rally. And when the double discourse failed to persuade people to attend, Belisan resorted to the more naked form of clientelism: coercion. Though I was always free to come and go at Belisan's soup kitchen, I was uninvited the day before the Kirchner rally. So I asked Elsira Ramirez, who assists Belisan, what she tells the soup-kitchen clients and workfare recipients who are reluctant to attend the rally. "I tell them, 'We have to go,'" Ramirez said.
Belisan's ability to fill buses has earned her a promotion from municipal maid to "executive health-care adviser," a ñoqui position, as the local lingo has it, that involves receiving a salary without ever showing up for work. And she has been awarded 297 workfare recipients to supervise -- a veritable army that can run her soup kitchen or her municipal vegetable garden.
But a puntero is more than a broker of votes and material goods; she is a cultural actor in the shantytown, the symbol of Evita Perón, as Javier Auyero points out in Poor People's Politics, a study of clientelism in a Lanús shantytown.
Evita passionately supported her husband, the quasi-fascist Juan Perón, in part by distributing bicycles, eyeglasses and school aprons directly from state coffers to poor people during personal audiences with them at the Evita Foundation temple in Buenos Aires. Though clientelism had long existed in Argentina and elsewhere, Evita invented a new way of tying her persona -- and her husband's -- to the favors she granted.
The Peróns institutionalized their populist vision in the Peronist Party, which has retained its essence as a political machine even as it has shifted its base from unions to the poor. With the Radical Party in disarray, the fragmented Peronist Party is today the only national political party in Argentina.
A half-century after Evita's death, Peronist brokers -- mostly women at the neighborhood level -- are still imitating her. Icons of Evita suggesting a religious devotion hang in almost every local political office and soup kitchen, and brokers quote the former first lady's ghostwritten autobiography from memory. They talk about oligarchy, foreign usurers and the humility of the poor, just as Evita did. And they practice clientelism openly, calling it "social politics."
Silvia Cantero, president of the Municipal Board of Family Integration and Development in neighboring Avellaneda, embodies the Evita tradition. "Politics is impassioning. It's a boyfriend, you see, the first love that one has. Politics is my reason for being," Cantero says, explaining that what she most enjoys about her job is being with the poor, including an elderly woman she regularly visits. "When I enter her house, I sit beside her on the bed and I feel like a real woman. She waits for my visit, and not just because I bring her diapers."
A candidate for city council with a following cultivated through years of "social politics," Cantero says her municipal post is unrelated to her social vocation. "It is just a coincidence," she explains. Here again is the double discourse: Cantero denies that her political activities are related to her social role even as she claims they are one and the same.
Cantero and the brokers themselves do not believe that their partisan and social roles are divorced. On the contrary, they believe that blending the two is the only legitimate, compassionate way to do politics. For them Peronism is a movement, not a political party.
Eduardo Romero, a candidate for city council in neighboring Lomas de Zamora, explains, "Politics cannot be separated from the common people, the people of our party. There is nothing that is good for Argentina but not for Peronism, nor vice versa. There are only things that are good for everyone. Social action, or social aid, or social activities, are things that serve society, always."
He says he never coerces anyone, explaining that coercion is unnecessary. "It's easy for us to mobilize people because we worked all year for the people, we don't work just during elections. Basically, we are political militants dedicated to social activities. We are militants of the Peronist national movement, and we don't have a problem mixing one thing with the other."
The problems with this system may be self-evident. But shantytown residents who see "social politics" as disingenuous or depraved lack other means to help themselves or fellow slum dwellers.
Julia Rodríguez preferred to get her hands dirty sorting through the trash than to dirty them working the machinery of clientelism. Inspired by Peronism's ideals, Rodríguez worked in a municipal soup kitchen in Lanús for 19 years, first as a volunteer and then as a salaried municipal employee. But when the economic crisis began, she says, the soup kitchen started putting food aside only for those attending rallies. Rodríguez quit and began working informally as a garbage picker, collecting and selling recyclable refuse. The partisan use of the soup kitchen's food, she said, meant that "the little kids didn't have anything to eat. They went around hungry. That makes one dirty; you have to have a heart, and not use people. I preferred to gather cardboard."
Even a Catholic soup kitchen catering to the disabled in a shantytown called Garden is pressured to send buses to political rallies because the kitchen receives municipal support. Antonia Portilla, the soup-kitchen manager, says she invents excuses when municipal officials call about political rallies. She recounted for me her conversation with a municipal official.
"How many buses should we send?" Portilla says the municipal official asked.
"We didn't know there was a rally," Portilla feigned
"What do you mean, 'You did not know?'" asked the municipal official.
"We didn't know," Portilla responded.
Portilla says that her soup kitchen overflows with the elderly on rally days because municipal soup kitchens close down, sending their workers to the rallies, a practice she condemns and contrasts with the policy in her soup kitchen. "Here we don't ask people what religion they are. We provide food, and that's all," she says. But Portilla admits she has attended rallies -- once even bringing people along -- to stay in the municipality's good graces.
Even the World Bank cannot operate in Argentina and keep its hands clean. The bank finances the workfare program with a $600 million loan, requiring municipal oversight councils and other measures to insure transparency. But, despite these safeguards, the workfare program has become the most widely used tool of clientelism. After all, a municipal-oversight council that includes the mayor is not likely to provide a useful brake on the mayor's partisan designs for the workfare program. There is a toll-free number one can call to denounce abuses of the workfare program -- but no one in the shantytowns seems to know of its existence.
Theresa Jones, the World Bank official administering the workfare program, acknowledged via e-mail that 10 percent of workfare recipients registered with punteros -- but that statistic greatly underestimates the percentage of recipients whose work is supervised by brokers. Marta Belisan's 297 workfare recipients fall into that category. Similarly, Jones indicated that traffic-blocking protest groups -- which also operate using clientelism -- registered only 1 percent of workfare recipients. Yet a study by the think tank Nueva Mayoría estimated that the protest groups actually control 10 percent of the workfare slots.
One problem with the partisan administration of the workfare plan is that some brokers do not require workfare recipients to actually work as long as they attend rallies. Christian Contreras, part of a Menem network in Lanús, explains, "It's better for me for them not to work, and then when I ask them for something, Bam!, they're there for me. For example, when we need guys for security [at a rally], I say, 'Bring me your kid, I know he's big.'" When there is a rally, Contreras says, he asks each of his 30 workfare recipients to attend with a few family members, allowing him to mobilize about 90 people.
As for the World Bank safeguards against clientelism, Contreras provides evidence that they are working, but not well enough. He used to have 130 recipients; then,100 were cut from the rolls, snagged by the rules put in place by the World Bank. But a year and a half after Contreras first obtained his 130 slots via Menem allies in the provincial government, he still controls 30 workfare plans.
This and other vices of clientelism may occur at the level of the shantytown. But clientelism originates with those municipal, provincial and, ultimately, national politicians who benefit from it. The broker-client relationship is repeated at each of those levels, with lower-ranking politicians passing up political support to higher-ranking ones not out of political conviction but in return for greater access to state resources. That chain of obligation is how candidates fill a stadium -- and why this Sunday's election will be far from an exercise in pure democracy.
Tomorrow: How one local politician uses national politics to control his town.
Yesterday: How to fill a stadium with Argentina's poor (and other ways to win the presidency).
Jonathan Goldberg is a writer living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
