Viviana Rodríguez feels powerless. The lines in the soup kitchen she manages in Villa 31 are getting increasingly longer after poverty in Argentina hit 55% in the first three months of the year according to official figures. The government, meanwhile, continues to fight a court-mandated order to deliver food stashed in warehouses and has stopped sending goods to soup kitchens like hers due to its war with social organizations, which President Javier Milei calls “poverty managers.”
According to Rodríguez, the soup kitchen she has been in charge of for more than six years only receives some food from the city government and nothing from the national administration. She said that in the latest months, more people — especially retirees and homeless people — are coming to eat, but there is never enough food.
“I have been diagnosed with severe stress — this place is impossible to sustain,” Rodríguez told the Herald.
One in five Argentines were destitute and over half were poor in the first quarter of 2024, according........