At the start of the long Easter weekend, the airport of Argentina’s capital is eerily quiet before dawn, hours before it will fill with travelers. About 100 people sleeping in the facility get ready to start their day.
One of them is Angel Gomez, who has been living at the Jorge Newbery International Airport for two years and has seen the number of people joining him skyrocket.
“After the pandemic, this became a total invasion,” Gomez said early Thursday as he sat next to a sign advertising the Perito Moreno Glacier, an iconic tourist attraction in the Patagonia region.
As passengers and staff arrive early in the morning, dozens of people are still sleeping, some on chairs and others on the floor. Some have blankets, but many sleep directly on the floor, scattered around the airport with their few belongings nearby.
The airport, popularly called Aeroparque, has practically become a homeless shelter at night. Once the passengers arrive, some of the overnight guests head out to spend the day at soup kitchens, while others hang around the airport grounds begging for change at traffic lights and some stay in seats and mingle with the travelers.
It is a sharp reflection of the growing poverty in a country where one of the highest inflation rates in the world makes it difficult for many to make ends meet.
“When I pay rent, I don’t eat. And if I pay for food, I’m on the street,” says Roxana Silva, who has lived at the airport for two years with her husband, Gustavo Andres Corrales.
Silva receives a government pension of about 45,000 pesos, equivalent to about $213 at the official exchange rate and about half of that on the black market.
“I don’t have enough to live on,” Silva complains. She said that she and her husband take turns sleeping so that someone is always looking after their belongings.
More and more Argentines are in Silva’s predicament as inflation worsens, rising to 102.5 percent year-on-year in February.
Although Argentina has been accustomed to double-digit inflation for years, that was the first time since 1991 that annual consumer price increases had reached triple digits.
The high inflation is especially pronounced for basic food products and hits the poor hardest.
The poverty rate rose to 39.2 percent of the population in the second half of 2022, up three percentage points from the first six months of the year, according to Argentina’s national statistics office, INDEC.
Among children under the age of 15, the poverty rate increased by more than three percentage points to 54.2 percent.
Horacio Avila, who leads an organization dedicated to helping the homeless, estimated that the number of people without a home in Argentina’s capital has risen 30 percent since 2019, when he and others took an unofficial count of 7,251 people in this city of Argentina. about 3.1 million exported. .
Amid the rising cost of living and declining purchasing power, more people began to look to the airport as a possible place of refuge.
Laura Cardoso has experienced this increase firsthand in the year she has been living at the airport, ‘sleeping while seated’ in her wheelchair.
“More people just came in,” Cardoso said as she was accompanied by her two dogs who would make it difficult for her to find a place to live because no one wants to rent her out. “It’s full of people.”
Mirta Lanuara is newly arrived and has only been living at the airport for about a week. She chose the airport because it is clean.
Teresa Malbernat, 68, has lived at the airport for two months and said it’s safer than one of the city’s bomb shelters, where she says she was robbed twice.
The Argentine company that operates the airport, AA2000, has said it “lacks the police force” and “has the power to expel these people”, while also saying it has an obligation to ensure “non-discrimination in the use of airport facilities”.
For Elizabet Barraza, 58, the large number of homeless people living at the airport illustrated why she chose to emigrate to France, where one of her daughters has lived for five years.
“I’m going there because the situation here is tough,” Barraza said as she waited to board her flight. “My salary is not enough to rent. Even if they raise salaries, inflation is too high, so sometimes it’s not enough to rent and survive.”
“I don’t want to come back,” Barraza said.