Heavy rains scatter the poor in Asunción, Paraguay.
Three months after the Paraguay River overflowed its banks along Asunción, flooding continues to affect more than 100,000 inhabitants of the impoverished Bañados section of the Paraguayan capital.
Bañado Sur, a large stretch of low-lying land between the city and the river, was home to just a few families until around 30 years ago, “when many people came, to make a living from the garbage dump,” according to longtime area resident Néstor Colman. The area is a huge open-air dump where thousands of garbage pickers or “gancheros” collect recyclable materials on the streets, said Pérez, another of the evacuees interviewed, while the former have to pay nearly 600 dollars for a permit that allows them to sort through the rubbish in the dump.
“The local residents here treat us badly,” complained recycler Edgar Acuña, referring to the middle-class families in the neighhourhood where the shelters for the displaced were set up. “I tell them it’s better for them that I’m working rather than stealing from them,” he joked. One complaint is that he piles cardboard, glass, plastic and metal on the sidewalk, since he doesn’t have the space he had in his house in the Bañado, where he stored the materials before transporting them on his motorcycle cart to sell them.
“What I’m scared of is that more water will come,” Maria Nimia Falcón said, recalling the two floods in which she lost everything she had. She called for more help from the government, which the law already provides for, and “a decent house, in the Bañado if possible, because anywhere else we wouldn’t have work, it would be impossible to make a living.”
Her fear is justified by the continued threat posed by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the cyclical climate phenomenon blamed for the heavy rainfall that led to the overflowing of the river since November.
Meteorologists forecast further flooding “up to late July or early August,” according to David Avendaño, head of operations at the SEN emergency management agency.
The more than 20,000 families (100,000 people) who live in riverbank wetlands in Asunción are split between the Bañado Norte in the north, Chacarita in the centre, and Bañado Sur in the south. Of that total, 13,454 had to leave their homes and take refuge in 143 shelters, the SEN official said. SEN was created in 2005 to manage disasters, and answers to the presidency in this landlocked southern cone country of 7 million people.
Two decades without serious flooding encouraged rural migrants to build homes on even lower-lying land along the river, and prompted long-time residents to improve and expand their homes or buy more expensive household appliances all of which made the losses even worse.
At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/211803/heavy-rains-scatter-the-poor-in-asunci%C3%B3n
