[News] Argentina: Locals and indigenous groups combat big real estate

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Preserving Culture, Protecting the Environment: 
Locals and indigenous groups combat big real estate in Greater Buenos Aires

Written by Francesca Fiorentini
Wednesday, 14 April 2010 09:40
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/2445-preserving-culture-protecting-the-environment-locals-and-indigenous-groups-combat-big-real-estate-in-greater-buenos-aires- 


El pobre tiene que volar. Ya no hay más campo. 
Todo country, todo country. [The poor man has to 
disappear. There is no more countryside. It’s all 
private neighborhoods. All private neighborhoods.]

These are the words of Sara Espinosa, age 94, who 
lives in Punta Canal in the town of Tigre, just a 
meters away from the waters of Canal Villanueva. 
Though she has lived here for more than half a 
century, in the past few years Espinosa has found 
herself increasingly isolated from the world 
beyond her home thanks to fences and a wall of 
mud built around it by real estate giant EIDICO. 
The company has purchased the area and is 
currently constructing two gated communities on 
either side. While most of her neighbors have 
sold their land and moved away, Espinosa remains, 
perhaps unaware of the profit to be made off the 
land where her humble home stands.

She is talking to Graciela Satalic of the 
Movement for the Pacha or “Mother Earth,” the 
organization of neighbors and indigenous people 
that has been fighting for four years for the 
preservation of Punta Canal. Satalic later tells 
me that the EIDICO has isolated the elderly 
Espinosa to the point where “she can’t even get 
out.” When I ask her what the company expects the 
old woman to do she tells me plainly, “They are waiting for her to die.”

“Nuevo Tigre”

In Tigre, located in the province of Buenos Aires 
about an hour up the river from the bustling 
city, the ground begins to break off into a 
series of islands separated by canals and 
streams, giving way to an abundance of marshlands 
rich in vegetation and wildlife. Dotting the tall 
grasses of the wetlands are many poor and 
working-class communities that use the canals for 
fishing, recreation, and transportation. One of 
those communities is that of Punta Canal that 
runs along Canal Villanueva between the unpaved 
Brazil street and the Garín stream. The area has 
long been used by locals and considered public as 
it holds a portion of an old railway line also 
known as Punta Canal that belongs to the state.

“When I came to this place that we’re defending 
now, it was a paradise. A marshland with a lot of 
native vegetation; fauna with birds, water 
animals, otters, partridges,” says Satalic who 
lives in Intendente Maschwitz, the next town 
over. But in the past ten years a new species has 
become the most dominant in the Delta: the 
private neighborhood, which has increasingly 
encroached on the marshlands, displacing 
residents and endangering the ecosystem.

Today upon arriving at Punta Canal, one is 
greeted with a handful of tents, a van that holds 
up a tarp covering a table and chairs, and two 
indigenous rainbow flags that make up the 
encampment of Movement for the Pacha. However it 
is what lies directly in front of the encampment, 
across the still waterway that is the real sight: 
raised embankments covered with palm trees, 
eucalyptus, and pristine lawns in front of large 
modern homes. The scene looks ripped from a 
trendy living magazine and plastered on top of 
the marshland. It is Santa Catalina, the 
exclusive nautical neighborhood that is part of 
EIDICO’s 850 hectare complex Villanueva made up 
of nine other neighborhoods. These neighborhoods, 
along with other urban mega-developments like 
NorDelta (complete with private schools and 
shopping centers) are part of what is becoming known as “Nuevo Tigre.”

Sandwiched between two of EIDICO’s neighborhoods 
under construction, San Benito and San Marcos, 
the movement has been working to protect and 
preserve two precious hectares of Punta Canal for 
what many believe good reason.

Burial grounds and bulldozers

In 2001 after ten years of living away from the 
place that she had grown up, Graciela Satalic 
moved back to the area to find “the entire 
landscape of the marshlands changed” due to new 
developments. Still, she enjoyed taking walks 
along the water by the old railway. During these 
walks she began to discover what seemed like indigenous pieces of pottery.

“I picked them up and some clearly had native 
etchings on them. Then I found some arrowheads, 
needles made of bone, things that were really hand-worked, ” she says.

She began collecting all that she could, 
returning to the shore every day to look, and 
eventually took them to the museum of Escobar 
(the next district over) to be looked at by a 
specialist. From there she was referred to Daniel 
Loponte, an archeologist of the National 
Institute of Latin American Anthropology and 
Thought (INAPL -- an organization of the 
Secretary of Culture) who is responsible for 
sites in the Delta. In 2006 he finally came to 
recognize the area as one that had supposedly 
been previously discovered and then lost. Though 
he didn’t carry out a full excavation at the 
time, Loponte identified the items Satalic had 
found as being more than 1000 to 1500 years old, 
belonging primarily to the Querandí people as 
well as a variety of other indigenous groups such as the Guaraní.

Satalic along with residents of the area and 
members of indigenous organizations began making 
regular trips to Punta Canal (now dubbed Punta 
Querandí), holding traditional prayer circles and 
paying respects to what they consider a sacred 
site. That is until 2007 when EIDICO began to lay 
the groundwork for San Marcos just meters away, 
and it became clear that “Punta Querandí” would be the next to go.

In December 2008, in an attempt to attend to the 
concerns of residents and archeologists, EIDICO 
hired Daniel Loponte to lead small dig on the 
site that uncovered more than 10 thousand 
different pieces, from instruments to tools to 
pottery. Despite no bones having been discovered, 
the movement claims that the site was also once a 
burial ground as in many locations along the 
Delta human remains have been found. In an 
interview with Indymedia Argentina, archeologist 
Loponte explains that “all these sites have 
burial grounds. It’s rare they wouldn’t have them.”

By simply walking around the area one finds 
pieces of pottery in plain sight and it is clear 
that there is an abundance of artifacts. Member 
Alberto Aguirre, a native Toba, shows me around 
the now muddied and deforested area. He pauses 
and asks painfully, “How would they like it if we 
went to a cemetery where they have their loved 
ones buried and built our homes?”

Members of Movement for the Pacha aren’t 
satisfied with what they see as a dig of a few 
square meters on a two-hectare site, claiming 
that there are thousands more pieces to be uncovered.
“EIDICO financed the excavation so that we would 
stop coming here,” says Satalic. “But we keep fighting.”

Encampment ensues

On February 18th of this year the situation 
became elevated when EIDICO bulldozers entered 
Punta Canal and began ripping up trees and 
leveling the land. Satalic and another member of 
the group happened to be nearby, went immediately 
to the site and placed themselves in front of the 
machines. Soon EIDICO lawyers and police came to threaten the two with arrest.

“‘Fine, arrest me if you want,’” says Satalic 
recounting the day. “But the police didn’t do 
anything. So I said, fine, I’m leaving, and the 
next day we were here with tents and all.”

Now over a month into their encampment, the 
100-odd members of the Movement for the Pacha 
take turns spending days and nights along the 
waterway, fearing to leave the area alone for more than a few hours.

“They are continually pressuring us by taking 
different measures,” says Julio Maiz, a native 
Colla. “They put a guard who asked to see our 
identification and where we were going and 
wouldn’t let us enter, until one day we said, 
‘Look this is public space and this is a street, 
and you are going to have a lawsuit on your hands.’ They stopped bothering us.”

The guard, stationed at the end of Brazil street, 
marks the border what EIDICO hopes will become 
part of their developments. Only problem is, 
homes of locals like Sara Espinosa have been 
trapped inside that border. Carlos Arrambide and 
his family’s home is another that has been 
encircled. In 2008 Arrambide filed a lawsuit 
against EIDICO, denouncing the illegality of the 
sale of land on behalf of the state and managed 
to get two precautionary measures against the 
company not to further destroy the land. EIDICO however paid no mind.

A pricetag on nature

During the week the few members able to remain at 
the encampment watch a dredger stationed in Canal 
Villanueva pull mud up from the bottom of the 
river into its tubes and fill in the lower areas 
of the the site, readying the land for construction.

Member Liliana Leiva is a beekeeper from Tigre 
who has been working against pollution in the 
area with the Assembly of the Delta and Río de la 
Plata. She explains the environmental damage of 
dredging and filling, a staple method in the 
construction of private neighborhoods.

“The marshlands serve a very important function. 
They are like the kidneys of nature,” she says. 
She explains that the vegetation and nutrients 
from the marshes filter water that enters the 
canals from upstream, water polluted by industry 
and urban development. “If you fill in the 
marshland, they fail to carry out that function of cleaning the water.”

Discussing the process of dredging, Leiva 
explains that the dredgers take mud from the 
riverbed that is made of saltwater, which when 
disturbed creates a saltwater system inside one 
of freshwater. “They break the riverbed and break 
the equilibrium,” she says, and that ultimately 
“the beautiful indigenous vegetation will die.”

In an area that must strive to combat annual 
flooding, the creation of private neighborhoods 
on raised ground drastically impacts those left 
on low ground who “will suffer floods much more than before,” says Leiva.

“Since the locals are ending up in a ditch 
because they are raising the streets and the 
lands, they are hoping that the next flood, the 
people will grow tired and sell for 20 cents what 
they [EIDICO] will resell for thousands of dollars.”

Shady business

[]


"Don't Destroy the Delta!"
EIDICO, Emprendimientos Inmobiliarios De Interés 
Común or “Common Interest Real Estate 
Undertakings” has become known one of the largest 
land developers in Argentina through its tactic 
of selling ready lots to future residents in 
advance of the neighborhood’s construction that 
then pays the costs of development. In 2007 the 
company declared more than 41 projects throughout 
Argentina worth more than 400 million dollars, 
spanning from the northern province of Salta, 
down to Ushuaia, and even in the exclusive beach 
town of Punta del Este, Uruguay.

To turn a profit, land purchased by the company 
must come cheap. Though EIDICO has never shown 
deeds to the area, it has come up with a receipt. 
The twenty hectares purchased -- of which 
includes Punta Canal -- ran the company one 
million pesos, five pesos per square meter or 1.3 
US dollars. Current price per square meter in the 
neighborhood of San Benito now under 
construction? Forty four dollars per square 
meter. That’s a staggering 3284 percent increase 
in value on land that many say should never have been sold in the first place.

Disturbed by the potentially illegal sale of 
state land in addition to the cultural and 
environmental destruction, national and 
provincial politicians have joined in the 
struggle. In May 2009, the Chamber of 
Representatives of the province of Buenos Aires 
solicited reports from executive powers regarding 
the sale of land and authorization of 
construction. That November the Senate of the 
province led by Daniel Expósito of the Coalición 
Civica, declared an interest in protecting the 
land, declaring that the State should not sell 
the public land belonging to the Administration 
of Railway Infrastructure and should work to 
preserve the archeological sites of aboriginal peoples.

Early this March in a press conference held by 
the Movement for the Pacha, national 
congresswoman Silvia Vázquez talked about the 
“dramatic social impact” of private neighborhoods 
in the Delta and EIDICO’s potentially illegal purchase of Punta Canal.

“It is necessary to be conscious of this 
violation because more than real estate value, 
these fiscal lands have tremendous social value 
and should be utilized to preserve the natural 
and cultural goods, and also ensure the neighbors 
right of passage and free access to the river,” she said.

But perhaps the more troubling still are the 
apparent crossovers that exist between the real 
estate giant and local government. A member of 
Opus Dei, the radically conservative sector of 
the Catholic Church, EIDICO owner Jorge O’Reilly 
has had an intimate relationship with the mayor 
of Tigre, Sergio Massa. According to a January 
2009 article in La Nacion by Gabriel Sued, the 
two met in 2000 at a folklore festival in Tigre, 
soon after which O’Reilly asked Massa to 
“intervene on behalf of EIDICO regarding delays in paperwork.”

When Sergio Massa served a year as Cabinet 
Secretary for President Cristina Kirchner from 
2008 to 2009, he called on O’Reilly to be a 
consultant. Additionally, EIDICO’s former 
director Pablo Dameno is now the current 
sub-secretary of urban planning of Tigre, a 
direct violation of the national Law of Ethics of 
Public Duty that forbids former business 
functionaries from serving on regulatory commissions of the same industry.

“The fight is unequal because we are confronting 
very powerful interests that have relationships 
to those in political power,” says Leiva. “But we know we are right.”

Road ahead

Though up against large moneyed interests, the 
movement holds out hope of winning protection of the site.

“We aren’t asking for all of what they bought. 
They can delegate these two hectares that have 
sufficient reasons for which to be preserved,” 
says Maiz. Rather than a private neighborhood, he 
and the other members dream of a museum to 
educate locals and visitors about indigenous of 
the region and preserve indigenous culture.

“We would try to recuperate and rescue that, and 
construct an open museum. Many people say that in 
Buenos Aires there weren’t indigenous peoples. 
That’s what they made up,” says Aguirre.

There is also concern for other archeological 
sites nearby. No more than two kilometers from 
Punta Canal lies Rancho Largo, a site registered 
by the INAPL in December of 2008 though not yet 
excavated. It too is owned by EIDICO and lots 
have already been sold for the forthcoming 
neighborhood San Rafael. Additionally in the 
neighboring community of Villa La Ñata lies a 
70-hectare stretch of land for sale, under which 
are three excavated sites long recognized by the 
INAPL as La Bellaca 1, 2, and 3. Many suspect 
this will be EIDCO’s next conquest.

“We are trying to spread the word so that people 
become conscious of this, because what we are 
preserving is not only our history as people of 
the area, but for the future of the generations 
to come,” says Levia. “We can’t leave them a 
world in ruins for economic interests.”

Francesca Fiorentini is a freelance journalist 
based in Buenos Aires and an editor with Left 
Turn magazine. She can be reached at 
<mailto:francesca at leftturn.org>francesca at leftturn.org 
This e-mail address is being protected from 
spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .



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