Villa miseria

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Homes in a villa miseria in Rosario.

A villa miseria is a form of shanty town or slum found in Argentina, mostly around the largest urban settlements. The term is a compound noun made of the Spanish words villa "village, small town" and miseria "abject poverty"; a direct translation to English would be "Miseryville". The name was adopted from Bernardo Verbitsky's 1957 novel Villa Miseria también es América ("Villa Miseria is also [a part of] America").

These settlements consist of small houses or shacks made of tin, wood, and/or other materials (whatever can be found). The streets are usually not paved — narrow internal passages may communicate the different parts. The villas miseria have no sanitation system, though there may be water pipes passing through the settlement. Electric power is sometimes taken directly from the grid using illegal connections (which are perforce tolerated by the power companies).

The villas range from small groups of precarious houses, well inside the urban grid, to larger, more organised communities with thousands of residents. In rural areas, villas miserias might be made of mud and wood.

Villas miseria are found around and inside the large cities of Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba and Mendoza, among others. At the turn of the millennium they already comprised a relatively large part of the total population of their respective cities.

These shantytowns are also euphemistically called asentamientos irregulares ("irregular settlements") or villas de emergencia ("emergency villages"). In most of Argentina, the unqualified word villa usually refers to a villa miseria.

The villas draw people from several backgrounds. Many of them are migrants, coming from poorer provinces or from impoverished rural areas near the cities, especially during Perón's first government, and a smaller number are recent immigrants from neighbouring countries (especially Paraguay and more recently Bolivia). Others are local citizens who have fallen from an already precarious economic position. In most cases, of course, the villa miseria is populated by the children and grandchildren of the original settlers, who have been unable to raise their economic status.

Even though criminality in the villas is significantly higher than in wealthier neighborhoods, it is not comparable to that of Brazilian favelas^{[citation needed]}. There is little, if any, organized gang warfare. Villas miseria are considered by most citizens as havens for criminals from minor thieves to drug dealers.

Argentine painter Antonio Berni dealt with the hardships of living in a villas miseria through his series Juanito Laguna, a slum child, and Ramona Montiel, a prostitute.

[edit] Statistics

The 2001 census and the ARRAIGO government program provide revealing figures: over a population of almost 36 million, about 13.6 million had difficulties in their access to land. Of these (approximately 2.7 million households), 37% correspond to homes in irregular settlements. The ARRAIGO program estimates that, in 2004, a number of homes between 500,000 and one million were located in irregular settlements, with 100,000 on government property.

According to July 2004 estimates, there are about 640 "precarious neighborhoods" in suburban Buenos Aires, comprising 690,000 residents and 111,000 households. The population of the villas miseria doubled during the 1990s, reaching about 120,000 as of 2005.