waste-for-life (basura-por-vida)

Any doubts we harbored that it was back to business as usual in Buenos Aires were quickly dispelled during the past week. The volatile mixture of garbage, recycling, cartoneros, local government, national government, private enterprise, and the Zero Garbage Law have been cunningly politicized by all parties way beyond what we encountered before we left a year ago, and the search for a stable or consistent description/evaluation of what’s really going on here is more elusive than ever. Thankfully, this trip is short, we have a lot to accomplish, and there’s less downtime for what can easily slide into debilitating speculation. We do know that there is now a strong rift between the cartonero cooperatives and former informal urban recyclers who have managed to make beneficial deals with the Macri government, and those who have been left out of or excluded from those agreements. Whether by design or circumstance, the solidarity that existed and was pretty evident last year between the garbage recycling groups, is being effectively chipped away at in what looks like a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy by local authorities. And, if that weren’t disheartening enough, Greenpeace, which has always been a powerful force in framing the recycling issue, shaping legislation, and supporting the rights and legitimacy of the cartoneros, is now publicaly at odds with positions being taken by some of its strongest former allies. If this sounds confusing, it is, and we turned once again to our most reliable source to help straighten the picture out for us – the people who worked for the DGPRU, but who left a year ago when the new government took power and effectively handcuffed their ability to continue their research and policy recommendations, to move into other positions in and outside the government.

On Wednesday morning we took a trip out to the edges of Buenos Aires (I’m being purposefully vague here) to visit one of the cooperatives that figured into the government’s ‘green point’ plans. We had spent a lot of time with them last year, when their future teetered precipitously on the whims of their neighbors, the steadfastness of their supporters (Greenpeace, being a major one of these), and the perseverance of the government to follow through with their promises. The picture has now dramatically changed. The group is being housed in new facilities, recipients of a constant supply of trucks hauling in recyclables from private companies and public waste. Uniforms identified the cooperative, and the haulers had their own logos emblazoned on their new trucks and uniformed backs. Things looked as though they were going very well indeed. How had things turned around so quickly? At the end of the day we met with Antonella Rossi, a former DGPRU employee who we had  interviewed 3 or 4 times last year. We told her where we had been that morning, and her first question to us was, ‘what kind of changes do you see in X (the cooperative’s public face and voice) this year from last.’ We immediately understand that embedded in this question was the story of what had happened over the past year – the shifting of alliances and allegiances, the deal-making, the tacit and explicit support of the governmnt for the benefit of one group over another, the rifts and rivalries. We got the whole ugly scoop, but luckily we were too busy to let it bring us down.

We’ve been quiet on these pages for almost one year – the time that has passed since we left BsAs and returned to North America – but this doesn’t mean that we’ve been quiet. Much and little has happened in the interim between December 2007 and December 2008. Caroline and I have spoken frequently about Waste-for-Life in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. We’ve manged to excite people with the vision of the work we’ve been doing with our collaborators here in Argentina and have picked up many fellow travelers along the way. The depth and enthusiasm with which people have responded to our work has been heartening, as we envision ways to build out a virtual network connecting social justice activists to each other, to funders, and to projects. We always believed that Waste-for-Life could become a model for similar work in other parts of the world, and have received inquiries from as far afield as Rochester, NY, Nairobi, Kenya and Port-aux-Prince, Haiti. But it’s been difficult and frustrating to keep up with life on the ground in BsAs from afar. We left just as Macri was coming into power as mayor of Buenos Aires. The prognostications for the cartoneros were not good, but up until now we’ve been unable get a handle on what was really happening. Our most reliable contacts, those responsible for setting policies and supporting the cartoneros from within the DGPRU (Dirección General de Políticas de Reciclado Urbano), were either fired or left. We took this as a portent of things to come.

Continue reading ‘Back in Buenos Aires’

While waiting for the final tweaks to the hotpress – by the way, Tomas has tweaked it and is delivering it to INTI this Thursday, December 13 – the remarkable Erika Loritz has helped us conduct street interviews with cartoneros. (I met Erika in October on a side trip to Iruya in Northwest Argentina where she was studying the impact of tourism on indigenous communities. Her in situ mentor was Victor Bretscher whose Finca Potrero cultural ecotourism project had received World Bank Indigenous Community Development funds http://www.fincapotrero.org.ar/_english.html. Coincidently, I learned that Victor had previously worked in Lesotho’s Malealea Valley where I participated in a 2006 Theatre for Development Project. Lesotho, of course, is where Caroline began her work with local cooperatives and where, if we have to choose a place, the idea of Waste-for-Life began to germinate.)

We have spent most of our time in BA working with cartonero recycling cooperatives. They have the structures in place to successfully incorporate a small manufacturing channel to their mostly collection, sorting, processing and distribution operations. But equally important to us is a common political and social outlook that stresses equity and human interdependence, and we have been the privileged witnesses of these ideas in motion, particularly their commitment to wage equality, non-hierarchical participatory decision making practices, and to ’socializing’ their knowledge. We did not come to Buenos Aires to be community organizers, and so the individual or small family groups – the informal cartoneros who do much of BA’s recycling – have been, for the most part, a closed book to us. We realized early on that we were not hearing their voices, although we did hear many opinions about them from other people, but we didn’t have either the language skills or the confidence to simply go up to these people on the street and start talking. I spoke about this with Erika in Iruya, and she immediately offered to help us take up this challenge.

(cartoneros taking a special train into Buenos Aires on the Tigre line)

We have done 4 interviews so far and have others to do, so we are not working with a large dataset, however, there is a strong leitmotiv that we can point to, that we’ve been aware of ever since attending The Workers’ Economy: Self Management and the Distribution of Wealth conference in July, and that can be summed up with the phrase, ’sin patrón.’ This phrase, which means ‘without a boss’ or ‘without an overseer,’ gained currency during the recovered factory movement that began with the 2001 economic crisis, but we heard it used over and over again by the cartoneros we interviewed to describe the essential quality of their lives in very positive terms. They did not want to work for anyone, they did not want to be subject to the collective decision-making processes of a collective, they did not want to bother anyone, and they did not want to be bothered. It is still much too early to sum up the content of the interviews, and we have a lot of transcribing and thinking to do, and loads to read up on about informal work, but with Erika’s help we have a special opportunity to learn something about this previously unavailable population of urban recyclers.