Written by Alejandro Meitin, artist, lawyer, social innovator, founder of the art collective Ala Plastica (1991-2016) and Casa Río Power to do Lab. Translated by Claire Campbell, LACIS Communications and Social Media Intern.
The arrival of COVID-19 in Argentina was, as in all of America, predicted. It did not come as a surprise. The national government took rapid measures to contain the initial spread of the virus and prevent the rate of contagion from evolving exponentially so that cases could be treated with the available response capacity of our national health system. Right now, the overwhelming and relentless insistence on private power that has been and is exercised in Argentina has left aside the country’s fundamental principles of education and public health, thus proving very unpopular, and the facts have helped to demonstrate correctly the importance of stubbornness in the collective struggle for the preservation of the values of public defense.
In any case, despite the efforts made and the great demonstrations of solidarity, the situation is not easy, and we are still in an early stage of spreading the virus. The greatest of our worries is focused on how long this could last and we are distressed by the situation of the many who are living in this confinement with overcrowding and violence, primarily in the poorest sectors of our society, like those found in the bigger suburban areas of Buenos Aires and other cities of larger and medium scale.