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–God, we’ve done it wrong! – sighs psychologist Paulo Egenau (64), national social director of Hogar de Cristo, alluding to the country’s responsibility for decades of “archaic, disjointed, inconsistent, underfunded public policies that they manage to guarantee the inclusion trajectories of the poorest and most vulnerable people in Chile ”.
He says so about the launch of the document “Poverty and Pandemic: Diagnosis and Proposals for a More Dignified and Just Chile”, which was presented this Thursday at a seminar online and in which the technical teams of TECHO-Chile, INFOCAP, Esperanza Fund, Jesuit Migrant Service, Súmate Foundation, Employee Foundation, Lican de Tirúa Foundation, Mandela Space, the Fernando Vives Center for Ethics and Social Reflection of the Alberto University worked. Hurtado and Hogar de Cristo. “This was an intense exercise done in record time, from experience and evidence. It is not an academic text: it is developed by the field teams of institutions that do direct work with the people and the realities of which they speak, which also includes evidence, both international and national, of social aid policies that are being applied in this crisis ”.
All the participating organizations generated a diagnosis based on their territorial work from Arica to Punta Arenas with the population groups most affected by the pandemic, and developed a series of specific protection proposals to face and overcome the emergency. Older adults, women heads of households, people living on the street, men and women with mental disabilities, prisoners, the Mapuche people, those who live in camps, children and adolescents, appear as the hardest groups hit by the crisis, but what is most moving is an annex that describes region by region how the pandemic and quarantine have altered the lives of the most unprotected Chileans.
-This annex with what happens throughout the country in the poorest and most vulnerable territories is very graphic. What of everything related there is what impacts you the most?
-Perhaps that part is the most valuable. It is also clearly the least academic and the one that has more perception than evidence, but it collects what the territorial social leaders see. The sum shows that Chile is not a homogeneous country, it is very diverse, even in its inequalities. Thus, in the Norte Grande there is the migratory phenomenon, the scarcity of water and drinking water, the proliferation of homeless people and of camps and precarious settlements. In La Araucanía, unemployment has increased greatly in a region marked since before the pandemic by informal work, by the rurality of the elderly, who are uninformed and isolated, by the impossibility of marketing food, both due to the health crisis and for the violence present in the area. In short, Chile is many Chiles, our reality is very heterogeneous and a historical error has been to approach social problems with a centralist perspective, taking measures from the capital. Today we have the opportunity to apply regional sensitivity to reality and generate good support policies, differentiated and tailored to each territory.
-In that annex, within how bad everything seems, the general impoverishment, the neighborhood organization, which translates into common pots, appears as something positive and common to all regions. Is hunger the most homogeneous feature in this crisis?
-The document at the beginning talks about humanitarian crises, which is when the satisfaction of basic needs is put at risk. And of them, the main one is food, what keeps you alive. Vulnerability or food insecurity is a very important concept, because it measures the psychological and emotional impact that a threat has and that translates into serious consequences on mental health. That threat, that of hunger, is something that we had archived in our historical memory and this crisis has made older generations relive experiences and recover practices from the 80s, when Chile was a country with 40 percent poverty. Those skills and practices have been re-articulated, awakening something very beautiful. The threat of hunger awakens the community, the solidarity. A dramatic concept that speaks to a very human need is relational vulnerability. It means lacking significant social ties, that you do not have people who take care of you, value you and love you. It is a form of social capital and we have seen this lack in a pandemic in the elderly who live alone, who are not self-sufficient and are isolated in rural locations, for example.
A change of consciousness
Paulo Egenau states that, like any resource, the relational is also unevenly distributed. And he notes that for this reason civic friendship, the idea of neighborhood, neighborhood, coexistence, mutual care, must be paths that must be articulated and supported with great force. “There is a very necessary and important social ethic there, because the organizations of organized civil society and all those who are close to the needs of the territories will never have the necessary capillarity to know where Jaime is, the man in the chair. wheels that lives in the block and has not been seen for three days. The owner of the corner store knows that, the one who distributes gas, the next door neighbor… Empowering those neighbors, from this social ethic of co-responsibility, is what is required and what is happening in the territories ”, comments the psychologist.
-Does the State believe in people? Why don’t you listen to them to decide social policies?
-As a country, we had moved away a bit from the need to meet such pressing needs. I think the time has come to revisit, to look back at the people and families who have lived their entire lives in exclusion and abandonment. What can we learn from international experience? That countries that have good social protection systems are more resilient in the face of crises, because when an emergency occurs they have programs capable of being expanded in coverage and volume. They have the ability to identify the most affected people and they do not go around looking for someone who does not qualify for the benefit. The basis of everything is the promotion of social dialogue and more collaborative policies, as well as the empowerment of neighborhood and community organizations. Doing this is essential to avoid prolonging the suffering and difficulties of the most vulnerable people. More than ever, trust in them is required.
– And the Chilean society in general, in what has failed?
-We have lived in the midst of selfishness for years, in the lack of community, in the empire of individualism. As a society, we have even tolerated inequality, insecurity and the mistreatment of our own public policies, accepting their mediocrity, inadequacy and lack of respect for the dignity of people. Today we must take charge of the absolute deprioritization in which we have had the poorest, most vulnerable and excluded people. The missing social agreement is to put them first on the list. And this is not advertising rhetoric. For me, the way out of this crisis is there, although doing so requires a total transformation of consciences … A profound ethical change, which has nothing to do with adjusting the ministries. The social outbreak demonstrated something that the pandemic has clearly demonstrated: people no longer want abuse, indignity, abandonment. He wants to leave behind the permanent feeling of vulnerability, the lack of certainty and have a good and peaceful life on solid foundations, so let’s not go crazy anymore.
-Within the specific proposals of the document “Poverty and Pandemic”, which ones would you highlight?
-I am very interested in TECHO’s proposal for the “neighborhood quarantines”. They say that in segregated neighborhoods with high vulnerability, where, as we know, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to comply with mandatory confinement, because health conflicts with subsistence and the need to generate income for the day, they should be established solidarity and self-management networks to organize, prevent infections and take care of themselves. Community quarantine is a strategy that adapts to the reality of the most vulnerable communities.
-And in more global terms?
-Many of the issues addressed in the document contain an approach that guides all the work of Hogar de Cristo: the right of everyone to be heard, particularly those who are not and have never been. In comprehensive terms, this work understands that poverty is a violation of Human Rights and that, being so, this crisis is an opportunity to generate a more just and supportive system, starting from minimum levels of social protection. It is starting to be in the world in a different way, with a critical look at the exacerbated individualism that has been installed in our country. The social outbreak and now the pandemic force us to make an ethical judgment and realize by God we have done it wrong! Think of the situation of children under the protection of the State, in Sename, where it has not been possible to guarantee the inclusion trajectories of these children and adolescents. Where, instead of repairing, they are damaged more, with iatrogenic policies. Today it seems to me that it is imperative to review that minimum floor of social protection and begin to have a completely different attitude towards poverty and inequality.
-To conclude, what impact expectations do the 8 institutions that are behind this document have?
-All of us who participate in this document are 80 percent with our hearts and minds placed on the protection of the people for whom we work, in the operation of our daily services, but it seemed vital to us to carry out this conceptualization exercise in record time, to account for how inequality is also expressed in the pandemic. We do not have a plan, but we will do what corresponds, which is to disseminate and distribute it among the authorities, decision makers, the media, the business world … Each of the eight institutions must generate their own spaces for advocacy, because The eight of us have the same mission: to work to overcome poverty. Today, what corresponds to us is to contribute to public policies, in this COVID-19 context and in the one to come, post-pandemic, facing the harsh consequences that it will leave in terms of poverty and inequality.
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