Barrio 31 "Padre Carlos Mugica", a shanty town inhabited by 70 thousand people in BA, has shown in recent weeks how in Argentina the prevention of the pandemic is a privilege of those who are above a certain life standard.

For others, living in these neighbourhoods now called "socially-vulnerable", the pandemic hits harder as there is no access to water, jobs are scarce and precarious and homes are overcrowded, with full families of up to eleven people sharing a single room. These households’ economies were hit hard by the pandemic as they rely on cash brought daily by people working in cleaning, construction or selling stuff in the streets of Buenos Aires.

Milcíades Peña, head of Urbana TV, Argentina's first community channel, spoke about this situation. Urbana TV is in Villa 31, one of the 20 poor settlements in the city of Buenos Aires.

Of the total number of cases in the Argentine capital, four out of ten were detected in the poorest neighborhoods.

//// This population was caught by the pandemic and was already going through a very hard situation after four years under a neoliberal government that was particularly harsh on the poor and worsening problems of health, food, habitat and education. It came as no surprise that this pandemic, which caught humanity by surprise, would create a very serious problem if it entered into poor neighborhoods. And this, which was a chronicle of a death foretold, finally came to pass. ///

Interview and production: Laureana Rubinetti

Web Production: Julián Cortez

General Production: Silvana Avellaneda

Report and view of the area of Barrio 31 (2017) - AFP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgm8GMDFzBI

Link to Urbana TV: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTnbbQUGmWEKeCq9wWoyN0g