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URUGUAY:
Former Sugar Cane
Workers Look to Future With Hope
Raúl Pierri
BELLA UNION, Uruguay, (IPS) - In
the Las Láminas slum in this
town in northern Uruguay, former
sugar cane workers barely eke
out a living making hand-made
bricks and scavenging garbage.
The malnutrition and poverty
levels in Bella Unión are among
the highest in this South
American country of 3.3 million,
which is just pulling out of a
severe economic crisis that
peaked in 2002.
A visitor to Las Láminas, which
is located near the town, sees
lines of bricks drying under the
fierce sun in this dusty,
treeless shantytown that is home
to 180 families.
Bella Unión and Las Láminas are
located in the northern
Uruguayan department (state) of
Artigas, near the Brazilian
border, and 615 km north of
Montevideo, the capital.
The slum emerged around 14 years
ago, when the local sugar
industry -- the main employer --
began to collapse after the
creation of the Mercosur
(Southern Common Market) free
trade bloc, in which Uruguay is
a partner with Argentina, Brazil
and Paraguay. Local production
found it impossible to compete
with the flood of cheap sugar
from just across the border in
Brazil.
The great majority of the
residents of Las Láminas were
”cañeros” or sugar cane workers
who now scrape by producing
bricks, collecting and sorting
trash, or finding seasonal work
in bean and cornfields or orange
plantations.
The soil in the area where the
slum neighbourhood has cropped
up is relatively infertile.
There is no street lighting, or
sanitation or running water in
the ramshackle homes made of
cast-off corrugated metal
sheeting, cardboard, and
plastic.
Children are the first to lead
thirsty visitors to one of the
eight public faucets scattered
throughout the slum.
Only a few of the more fortunate
residents have bicycles. Others
have horse-drawn carts. But many
of the people who live in Las
Láminas must get around by foot,
even when the rains flood the
dirt tracks.
Sixty-six percent of the adult
residents are unemployed, 30
percent have casual work, and
only four percent have steady
jobs.
Bella Unión, a town of less than
15,000, and the surrounding
district has the highest infant
mortality rate in Uruguay: 55.1
per 1,000 live births, compared
to the national ratio of 15 per
1,000.
Basically all of the residents
of the Las Láminas slum have
intestinal parasites.
Ninety percent of children are
or have been malnourished, 99
percent have anaemia, and 90
percent have either repeated
grades, dropped out of school,
or had to attend special
education centres for the
mentally disabled.
And among those who do finish
primary school, many are 15 by
the time they complete sixth
grade.
Las Láminas also has high rates
of teen pregnancy as well as
premature births, and newborns
tend to be low birth weight,
with an average similar to that
found in some African nations.
Problems like cerebral palsy,
visual and hearing impairments,
and speech and development
problems are all much more
common here than in the
population at large.
Needless to say, this
neighbourhood appears to be
light years away from reaching
the eight Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) that were adopted
by the international community
-- including Uruguay -- at the
United Nations Millennium Summit
in 2000.
The number one MDG is to halve
the proportion of the world's
population living on less than
one dollar a day and suffering
from hunger by the year 2015.
The irony is that Bella Unión
drew heavy investment in
agriculture in the last few
decades before the 1990s,
especially in cooperatives
growing sugar cane and fresh
produce.
By 1989, 60,000 tons of sugar a
year, meeting 60 percent of
Uruguay's total sugar
consumption, were produced on
some 10,000 hectares of land
around Bella Unión.
But the market was thrown open
starting in the early 1990s. In
addition, Brazil's local
currency, the real, was devalued
in 1999. As a result, local
sugar production found it
impossible to compete with cheap
imports. Today only 18,000 tons
of sugar are produced on just
3,000 hectares of land. Rural
workers also lost jobs in
vegetable production, which
shrank as well.
One of the first steps taken by
Uruguay's new leftist Broad
Front government, headed by
socialist President Tabaré
Vázquez, after the Mar. 1
inauguration was to send a
high-level delegation to Las
Láminas to assess the dire
social situation here and offer
assistance in the face of an
outbreak of hepatitis that has
affected around 300 people so
far.
”Welcome, ministers of hope”
read a sign put up at the
entrance to the neighbourhood,
while another warned that ”We
hope the government of today
will not forget tomorrow”.
Health Minister María Julia
Muñoz, Minister of Industry
Jorge Lepra, and Deputy Minister
of Livestock, Agriculture and
Fishing, Ernesto Agazzi, met
with local residents in the
centre of Las Láminas.
The new government has promised
to draw up a ”reconversion plan”
for agricultural producers in
northern Uruguay, and to help
increase the land planted in
sugar cane from 3,000 hectares
to perhaps 10,000 once again.
The Vázquez administration has
also launched a 200 million
dollar National Social Emergency
Plan which is to provide
comprehensive assistance to
around 200,000 poor Uruguayans
nationwide over the next two
years, half of whom are
considered ”indigent” or living
in extreme poverty, like the
people of Las Láminas.
In the meantime, people like
activist Walter 'El Cholo'
González, a former guerrilla
fighter, and his paediatrician
wife María Elena Curbelo
struggle day to day on behalf of
Las Láminas.
”This is my impregnable
stronghold,” González jokes with
local residents, who hug him as
he arrives. The 63-year-old
cañero has a long history of
fighting for his ideals, which
he has not abandoned.
”The biggest problem here, worse
than any other, is the huge lack
of work. Ninety-four percent of
the residents of Las Laminas
were cañeros, and now many of
them are garbage scavengers,” he
told IPS.
”People here have a lot of hope
with the new government, but
they know things take time, that
the changes won't happen
overnight,” he added.
González began to harvest sugar
cane in the northwestern
department of Salto in the
1950s, where he met Raúl Sendic,
a socialist leader who had come
from Montevideo to provide legal
and labour advice and assistance
to the sugar cane workers.
González took part in the
creation of the Union of Sugar
Cane Workers of Artigas and in a
historic protest march from
northern Uruguay to the capital
by cañeros who were demanding an
eight-hour workday.
Later he joined the Tupamaros
National Liberation Movement, an
urban guerrilla group led by
Sendic that was active in the
1960s and early 1970s, but was
crushed before the 1973 coup
d'etat that ushered in a 12-year
dictatorship.
González was arrested, but he
participated in a famous 1971
jailbreak from a Montevideo
prison. He was thrown into jail
again in 1975 and was not
released until 10 years later,
under an amnesty law enacted
after Uruguay returned to
democracy in 1985.
Since 1995 he has been helping
his fellow cañeros in Bella
Unión, organising several
employment-generating projects:
a community farm, a plan for
recycling plastic bottles, and a
rehabilitation programme for
injured horses (many
garbage-pickers rely on
horse-drawn carts to ply their
trade).
His wife, Dr. Curbelo, runs a
clinic in Las Láminas, despite a
severe health problem that
forces her to get around on
crutches. She not only takes
care of the physical problems of
the local residents, but
provides assistance for their
worries and anxieties as well.
It was Curbelo's tenacity that
enabled her to overcome her
life-long health problems,
political persecution during the
1973-1985 de facto military
regime, and several years in
exile.
”I have worked in Las Láminas
for 10 years, and I can say that
people really struggle hard
here,” Curbelo said in an
interview with IPS. ”We try to
help them, but while respecting
their desire to stay here. They
don't want to be relocated,
because this is their home.”
But although the new
government's promises have
awakened hope in Las Láminas, no
one is expecting a miracle or a
free ride. The impoverished
residents are only hoping for a
chance for their hard work to
translate into a better life.
One of their requests is for the
materials to build cinder block
houses, for which they would
provide the labour, and which
they would pay off slowly over
the coming years.
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