Annie Kelly

Argentina’s “paco” children

Annie Kelly — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:44:14 +0000

The 10p cocaine byproduct turning Argentina’s slum children into the living dead

Annie Kelly — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:18:53 +0000

Nina Chamorro runs her finger across the montage of photos of neighbourhood children tacked to the wall of her community soup kitchen in Villa Itatí, a sprawling urban slum on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

“He is dead now. And him. And him,” says the 75-year-old grandmother, her eyes drifting sadly over grinning faces. She points to another photograph. “He was shot by the police last month. That girl disappeared. We have lost so many of our beautiful children. We knew them since they were born. They had their whole lives to live.”

Villa Itatí is only a few minutes’ drive from the more upmarket parts of Buenos Aires. Ask most people here to explain the cause of the grisly gallery in Chamorro’s kitchen and the answer will be a single word: “paco”. A toxic and highly addictive mixture of raw cocaine base cut with chemicals, glue, crushed glass and rat poison, paco is the curse of Argentina’s urban poor. And consumption of this bastardised, low-grade drug is eating away at the vitality and hope of the most deprived neighbourhood areas of the capital.

Essentially a chemical waste product, paco is what remains from the narco-kitchens producing cocaine bound for US and European markets. Since its appearance on the streets of Buenos Aires in the late 1990s, the drug has taken a deadly grip in slums such as Itatí. Levels of addiction rose by more than 200% in the first part of the decade and more than 400,000 doses are now being consumed daily.

Users are witheringly referred to as the muertos vivientes – the living dead – of Buenos Aires. Addictive after one or two hits, the drug systematically destroys the nervous system. Users quickly become skeletal and ravaged, resorting to crime, violence and prostitution to feed their habits. Enormous numbers die in short order.

Villa Itatí runs on paco: an economy that is an endless, grim cycle of illicit profit, addiction-fuelled crime and wasted lives, all witnessed by a despairing generation of parents.

According to urban myth, the first paco in Argentina was sold here. Residents say narco-traffickers started flooding the neighbourhood with paco in 2005, selling hits for little more than 10p each. According to provincial government reports, an astonishing 50% of Villa Itatí’s 60,000 residents have used or are currently addicted to the drug. Across the country, 2008 government figures show that 64.9% of under-18s in addiction and treatment services are there because of paco.

Virtually no one owns a car in Villa Itatí. But in a place where there is only one source of wealth, there are stark signs of big money being made by some. Shiny black four-wheel-drives with darkened windows are parked in the unpaved street near Chamorro’s kitchen. “Paco,” says one woman, pointing to the trucks. “Those cars are what they buy with our children’s blood.”

“The dealers came here and first they targeted kids,” says one resident running a community project who didn’t want to be named. “They sold these kids hits of paco for one peso and got them hooked and now they work for them selling it in the streets. If they lose one dose, they shoot them in the legs or kill them. Families are cooking paco in their houses because it is the only way they can make money.

“This place used to be a real neighbourhood, people had work. We were poor but we were a community; now it is all crime and drugs and sewage,” says Chamorro. “There is no work, the factories all closed. Some of the women go into the city to clean rich people’s houses and a few of the men collect cardboard. But there is nothing for the young people.”

Sonia Andrade, Chamorro’s daughter who helps her run the soup kitchen, describes how she lies awake at night hearing the children of her friends scrambling across the roof “like rats” looking for things to steal.

“They are so desperate they rob everything from their families to get another hit, and when there is nothing left to take they steal from their neighbours,” says Andrade. “They didn’t have much of a chance before paco, and now they don’t have any at all.”

The scourge of paco may be the final act in the tragedy of decline in what is one of the city’s oldest and largest slums. When Chamorro started her soup kitchen more than 20 years ago she used to feed 20 or 30 people a day; now it is closer to 200. Her simple two-room soup kitchen is at the heart of the urban shanty town. It is only midday, but already the smell from “La Cava”, the huge open pit filled with household rubbish and sewage at the heart of the slum, is overpowering.

Andrade points to the high embankments of the highway. When it rains, she explains, water pours down the slopes and floods into the pit. The slum’s poorest families living closest to the pit find themselves knee-deep in putrid water in under an hour.

“All the children here have scabs all over their bodies, they don’t eat outside of what we give them here, they all have breathing problems,” she says. “The kindergarten used to give them milk and breakfast, but now the money from the government has stopped and the teachers don’t come any more.”

But however appalling the poverty, it is the growth in drug abuse that has turned the place into an urban hell.

Dr Carlos Vizzotti, director of national assistance and prevention programmes at Sedronar, the government’s agency for drug treatment, prevention and enforcement, admits the government is struggling to contain the problem of serious drug addiction in the city’s poorest neighbourhoods.

“We can’t compete with the dealers who are paying kids and families 200 pesos a day to sell and traffic paco and cocaine. We try to get them off drugs, but then we just send them back to the same problems which brought them to paco in the first place.”

The accounts of those working on the front line are unremittingly grim. Father Pepe, a missionary priest, runs addiction and poverty alleviation projects from his small, whitewashed church in another slum, Villa 21-24, close to the heart of Buenos Aires.

“Paco is a manifestation of everything that is rotten in Argentina,” he says. “It exposes the systematic and growing failure of the whole system, health, education, basic services – they are all falling to ruin. It isn’t that paco is a drug of the poor; it is that it feeds off the poverty and exclusion that was always here. Paco just shows us what lies at the heart of our country today.”

Outside the heat is searing, but inside the church is dark and cool, the walls covered in murals depicting the harsh reality of life in Argentina’s slums. The largest shows a child paco-user protected from the grave by angels. “Paco is a tsunami that has hit the most vulnerable. If we weren’t working here, then there would be nobody to help families fight against this. The state and wider society have washed their hands of us,” says Pepe.

Rising crime has made Villa 21-24 a byword for violence in Buenos Aires with many areas of this vast urban settlement being controlled entirely by narco-gangs. Last year Pepe was forced to ask for official protection and faced death threats after he spoke out against the traffickers and rising crime in the neighbourhood. “In the last few years we have seen many more problems with crime, with violence and guns linked to a more co-ordinated narcotics operation here in the slums. It’s an increasingly big business,” he says. “Yet the capacity of the people to prevail, to want something better, lives on, and this is what we should be supporting.”

But as Argentina gains a new unwanted status as a premier narco-trafficking route, the outlook for campaigners such as Pepe is bleak. Traditionally used mainly as a transit route to get cocaine out of Latin America to Europe, Argentina is increasingly used as a producer and consumer of cocaine and cocaine byproducts in Latin America.

Drug Enforcement Argentina, an anti-drugs pressure group, claims cocaine kitchens like those first discovered in the slums in 2006 are booming and that there are more than 1,500 clandestine airstrips bringing cocaine base into the north of the country.

Sedronar admits that porous borders, limited resources and expertise, and a lack of effective co-ordination between regional and national agencies means that Argentina is losing the battle to contain the rise of narco-trafficking into the country.

In Villa Itatí, Nina Chamorro and thousands of others like her are desperate that paco should disappear and their children be given the chance of a way out of the spiral of poverty and drug addiction that is destroying their future.

“We have been abandoned by the government, by everybody. They are all terrified of our children coming to their houses and taking their things, but they need hope for something better. There has to be more for them that this,” says Chamorro as she heads inside the soup kitchen.

This article originally appeared in The Observer on the 21st February 2010. Click here to read the article and watch the video on the Guardian’s website

A Fight for Rape Survivors

Annie Kelly — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:36:40 +0000

When Mandy was raped, it was in her own home, by a man she had invited in and who she thought was her friend. During the attack, all she could think about was that her children were asleep upstairs and that she must not wake them. Afterwards, she couldn’t stay in the house. What had been a safe place, a home for her family, was now a crime scene.

“The next day I tried to push it to the back of my mind like it was all a dream,” she says. “I was telling myself it’s fine, it didn’t happen, it wouldn’t happen to me, but then I just fell to pieces. Before I was raped, I felt as though my life was perfect. I had my kids, the house, I was working, I was happy – and all of that got taken away from me.”

Five days after the rape, Mandy (not her real name) packed up her house and took a train to Cornwall, where she moved in with her parents and tried to start again.

“We ran away like we were criminals,” she says. “All the time I feel like I’ve done something wrong – for disrupting everyone’s lives, for moving my children – but I couldn’t stay in that house a minute longer or I’d have lost my mind. And all the time I have felt completely, utterly alone.”

The isolation of rape is continually alluded to in the conversations between the group of rape survivors sitting around a kitchen table at the Women’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre (Wrasac) in Bodmin, Cornwall. Mandy is not alone when she talks of how the centre brought her back to life after rape had stripped everything else away.

“If I hadn’t found this place I wouldn’t be here – it’s as simple as that,” she says. “Even now, when I’m getting support and things are getting better, it’s still hard because I just feel destroyed. I have panic attacks, high anxiety, I can’t sleep, I can’t be a proper mother to my children.

“Sometimes, I think I see him here in the street – someone reminds me of how he stands, or leans out of a car window – and I think he’s found me. Then I’m right back there on that night again. And I wonder if he knows what he did to me, because in some ways I don’t think I’ll ever be who I was ever again. Hopefully, with the help of this place, I can get to a place where I’m partially put back together again.”

Next to Mandy, Katherine Xulu tells of how she was raped by two men after she was given a drink spiked with drugs in a nightclub in 2008.

“It’s difficult to describe what [rape] does to you,” she says. “For months afterwards, I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d wake up in cold sweats because I was worried they would be breaking into my house after I’d reported it to the police. When my case didn’t go to court I felt angry at the whole system, at the police who I didn’t feel believed me. When I finally found help from the women here, it changed everything. ”

Wrasac has fewer than 10 full-time staff and operates from three modest rooms in a faceless business park in Bodmin, but it is still one of the country’s largest rape crisis and sexual abuse support centres. A decade ago, the UK had nearly 80 rape crisis centres, but now Wrasac is one of only 39 still operating and offering specialist support services to women who have survived sexual violence.

The decline in rape crisis centres has mirrored the downward trajectory of the UK’s rape conviction rate – currently at an all-time low of 5%. However, there are signs that justice and services for victims of rape and sexual abuse have finally started moving up the government’s agenda, with the expected report next month from Lady Stern following a review into the way rape complaints are handled by the police and other public authorities in England and Wales.

Yet despite the anticipated report, nobody at Wrasac is expecting things to improve. Maggie Parks, the centre’s director, says she lies awake at night going over and over her available funds, fretting about how she is going to keep the doors open. She says that while it is encouraging that the focus on rape is shifting to the victims and not just the crime, it is meaningless without firm promises of money to back it up.

“What we need is money, plain and simple,” Parks says. “More money for services for women who have experienced rape and sexual assault. And I’m not sure we’re going to get that.”

Without central government, local authority or primary care trust funding for sexual violence services, rape crisis centres are closing because they cannot find the money to cover their core costs, Parks says.

Apart from one-year project funding from the Victims Fund, Wrasac receives no central government funding. And if this source of funding is axed in 2010, as has been rumoured, Parks says the centre would lose two counsellors.

One reason why Parks is lukewarm about the Stern report is that any mention of future sustainable funding for rape crisis centres was absent from the government’s strategy tackling violence against women and girls, published in November.

Parks is concerned that many of the recommendations highlighted within the strategy will lead to an increase in referrals to rape crisis centres — and that, without adequate resources to meet that extra demand, centres will continue to struggle to survive.

“Despite the fact that we support more than 350 women a year through our outreach services, and take 1,200 calls every year on our helpline, we have never received a penny of funding from our local authority,” she says.

Last summer, after more than a year of fierce lobbying from the women’s organisations and Rape Crisis, the umbrella body for rape crisis services, the government announced a £1.6m special emergency fund intended to help sexual violence services teetering on the brink of closure. Wrasac was granted £70,000, but Parks says it is no more than a stopgap. To date, the centre has received only £50,000 of the money promised and faces a £32,000 shortfall. Eventual closure is a grinding daily pressure.

In Wrasac’s main office, Parks sweeps her finger up a map of Cornwall tacked to the wall to show the large distances her volunteer support workers travel to reach some of the country’s most secluded and impoverished rural areas. “There are huge gaps in service provision for women who are victims of sexual violence, and the south-west is particularly bad,” says Parks. “Women in Devon have no sexual violence services available to them at all.

Appalling links

“Here in Cornwall, which is a massive county with appalling transport links and lots of households living in poverty, we are the only women-only service. Our volunteer support workers can drive 120-mile, five-hour round trips to get to women at the other end of the county. We have a policy not to turn anyone away, but it’s a struggle. We know there are many women out there who desperately need our help, but we simply don’t have the capacity to get to them.

“I think one thing we struggle with is the idea that rape doesn’t happen in a place like Cornwall. Many of the women we help have the mental and physical isolation of being a rape survivor, the geographical isolation of living in a place cut off from public transport or easy access to support services, and the social isolation that often follows a woman from a small community disclosing sexual violence.”

The centre relies on its team of specially-trained volunteer support workers, some of whom have experienced sexual violence themselves.

One of Wrasac’s longest serving volunteers, and a support worker to Xulu, is Nicole Castle. She spends much of her time criss-crossing Bodmin Moor in her car to reach women in small villages scattered across the county. Many of the women who come to Wrasac and receive help from support workers have not reported their rape to the police through fear or shame, and Castle says that a “huge majority” of the women they help end up disclosing childhood sexual abuse.

Just being there

“I think the biggest thing we do initially is just believe women, because many aren’t believed by whoever it is they initially tell,” Castle explains. “But it’s not just being there to talk about what has happened, it’s offering practical support when they go to the police, or to a clinic, or if their case goes to the Criminal Prosecution Service. It’s being there with them the whole way.”

Parks adds: “The majority of women who use our services have already been through generic services. They may well have reported to the police, been within the mental health system, and had counselling at GP services – and none of that has helped or changed anything in their lives.

“What is surprising is that, despite the reams of evidence presented to the government about the impact that sexual violence services have on the lives of desperate and traumatised women, there is a continuing failure to acknowledge the vital nature of the specialist
work that we do.”

This article originally appeared in The Guardian on 6 January 2010.

Peru’s Mountain People Fight for Survival

Annie Kelly — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:11:09 +0000

For alpaca farmer Ignacio Beneto Huamani and his young family, life in the Peruvian Andes, at almost 4,700m above sea level, has always been a struggle against the elements. His village of Pichccahuasi, in Peru’s Huancavelica region, is little more than a collection of small thatched shelters and herds of alpaca surrounded by beautiful, yet bleakly inhospitable, mountain terrain.

The few hundred people who live here are hardened to poverty and months of sub-zero temperatures during the long winter. But, for the fourth year running, the cold came early. First their animals and now their children are dying and in such escalating numbers that many fear that life in the village may be rapidly approaching an end.

Quechua-speaking farmers and their families, who have managed to subsist for centuries at high altitude, believe they may not make it through the next southern winter.

There have been warnings from meteorologists in Peru that this month will see the Huancavelica region hit by the worst weather conditions in years with plunging temperatures, floods and high winds. The weather is already claiming lives; last month seven people died and scores were treated in hospital after torrential rain caused flash flooding in Ayacucho, the capital of the neighbouring region.

The cold is tipping Pichccahuasi into a spiralling decline brought on by pneumonia, bronchitis and hunger.

Although designed to withstand the cold, Huamani’s house is crumbling and his roof, half-collapsed from the snowstorms that battered the village last June and July, offers scant protection from the freezing wind and rain.

His family, including four young children, sleep on wet ground night after night. His children have not yet recovered from illnesses from this year’s winter and he is terrified that they won’t be resilient enough to endure further freezing weather.

He points to his youngest son, aged two, who trails after him, soaking wet and racked with bouts of coughing, as he goes about his work

“All the children here are sick, they all have breathing problems,” he says. “The problem is there is too much cold, too much rain. We have had no time to recover from last winter before it has begun again. There is nothing I can do.”

Enduring prolonged sub-zero temperatures is a matter of course for Peru’s indigenous mountain people, many of whom live at more than 3,000m above sea level. Scores die every year from the cold, but in recent years the number of people succumbing to the freezing temperatures has triggered talk of a national crisis.

This year the neighbouring district of Puno saw a severe spike in child mortality as the winter brought months of high winds and relentless ice storms. Government figures record that more than 300 children died in Puno in May last year from the cold; NGOs say that the figure was probably much higher.

Local government officers in Huancavelica could not provide figures for how many children died here last year, but admit that child mortality is rising in the region.

“There have been many dead children. I don’t know how many, but there are more and more and mainly the deaths have been from pneumonia,” says Rafael Rojas Huanqui, regional director for the Defensa Civil, the national disaster protection agency. “They have no resilience of any kind to deal with the weather getting colder.”

Huancavelica has always been one of Peru’s most deprived regions, with 80% of families, largely indigenous farmers living at heights of up to 5,000m, subsisting below the poverty line.

The changing weather has come on top of a lack of basic health services, animal diseases, rising food prices and a declining availability of water.

Since 2007, children’s acute respiratory infections have increased by 30% and staple food production has fallen by 44%. Latest figures show that one in 10 children do not live to see their first birthday.

Ignacio Huamani says that the main problem his village faces is a lack of water, as more extreme temperatures mean there is no grass or drinking water for the alpaca that people breed for wool and meat. “If the alpaca die, then we all die,” he says. He works with his neighbours to build shelters for the alpaca to give some protection from the elements, but he is fighting a losing battle.

Since 2007, alpaca mortality in Huancavelica has more than doubled, with pregnant animals aborting their calves, a huge psychological as well as economic blow to people who rely on their ability to keep their herds alive.

Any money the village has is spent on trying to keep their animals from dying. NGOs and children’s groups working in the area warn that in such desperate situations, the lives of alpaca become more valuable than those of children.

“The welfare of children is sidelined because the situation is so bad that everything has become about the survival of the animals, both for the families themselves and the agencies who are trying to support them,” says Teresa Carpio, director of Save the Children Peru. She expects to see child mortality in the region rise this year.

“In the west we tend to think that children take priority above all else, but when there is this level of desperation, children can be the last to get the attention they so badly need – until it is too late.”

Four hours’ drive away in the larger community of Incahuasi, a health clinic is full of women and children waiting to see a visiting nurse. Helen dos Santos trained in nearby Ayacucho, but unlike most other locally trained health workers has stayed to work in the region. Now she spends her week travelling on foot between villages, walking for up to five hours a day.

“It’s always been poor here, but now the situation is getting critical,” she says. She points to the 20 or so children lined up in the waiting room. “All of these children are malnourished, some very dangerously so, and winter is still five months away.

“I don’t have any strong antibiotics to give them, only aspirin. I can’t even refer them to the hospital in Huancavelica because nobody has enough money to pay for transport there and the men here are reluctant to spend on anything but the animals.”

Rojas Huanqui says the regional government is working hard to strengthen health systems with more doctors and nurses in “most” of the villages, but admits that the state has been unable to deliver the basic services required.

“I’m not going to deny that it’s really hard to supply the great amount of villages there are, and they are used to getting everything for free, so the progress that the government makes is limited, but we do need to implement stronger medicines up in the villages that need it most,” he says.

There is anger among Huancavelica’s mountain people at what they see as the inaction of regional and central government. Although aid packages and clothing bundles arrive with the onset of winter, it does not compensate for what these people believe is the ambivalence of the authorities to their fate.

“We can only put ourselves in God’s hands, because nobody else is helping us,” says Carolina Flores, a mother of six whose six-month-old daughter is dangerously ill with pneumonia. “Our men have gone and talked to people in the government and told them what is happening to us, but they do nothing. We are not important to them, so we die up here and nobody helps us.”

For how long the mountain people are prepared to wait for action remains to be seen. After hundreds of years of systematic discrimination, there are signs that indigenous people across Peru are prepared to fight what they consider to be threats to their survival.

Last July, dozens of indigenous protesters were killed and scores injured when riots broke out in Bagua Grande in the Amazonas region over claims that the government was giving away land to oil and gas drilling. The relationship between Peru’s indigenous people and the government of the president, Alan García remains tense.

Those working with indigenous populations in Huancavelica are warning that governments cannot expect people in threatened villages to accept their fate lying down.

“The conduct of the authorities in relation to Peru’s Quechua mountain communities is similar to the one they take to indigenous communities throughout the country, which is to ignore their problems because they don’t believe that they are a priority,” says Dr Enrique Moya, the former dean of Huamanga University, who now works with local NGOs which are running support programmes in the region.

“Religion is still a strong sedative in these communities, but although the first reaction to what they are facing might be fatalism – the feeling that they are in God’s hands – we are starting to see a change.

“The difficulty is that the government only reacts when things turn violent, so I think what we have here is potentially an area of great conflict, because no matter how used to poverty they are, these people won’t be left to die.”

This is a version of this story which first appeared in The Observer on 3 January 2010. Click here to read it in full.

Gay Argentine couple’s wedding plans divide an entire continent

Annie Kelly — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:08:14 +0000

The Beruti register office in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires will never have witnessed a marriage like it. On Tuesday, Alex Freyre and José María Di Bello, who met three years ago at a conference on HIV, will make history and divide a continent as they become Latin America’s first gay married couple.

The ceremony will be a tribute to their determination as well as their love for each other, after a bitter three-year campaign which has divided a city, outraged Argentina’s powerful Roman Catholic church and overturned the constitution.

Freyre and Di Bello’s forthcoming nuptials have been debated on television, in churches and on the street. Hostile posters can be found on billboards across the city. But, in Di Bello’s words, nothing can now prevent him and his partner becoming “husband and husband”.

Not surprisingly, the marriage is already being hailed by equality activists as a significant triumph against the odds in a traditionally macho society. Argentina – and Latin America in general – is not known for a tolerance of sexual diversity, and violence against gays is an everyday occurrence.

This article was published in The Observer on 29 November 2009. To read it in full click here

N.B TWO DAYS AFTER THIS PIECE WAS PUBLISHED THE MARRIAGE WAS BLOCKED. TO READ MORE CLICK HERE

Lesbian women in South Africa face a rising tide of violence and “corrective rape”

Annie Kelly — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:12:14 +0000