The coronavirus pandemic and confinement are exposing inequalities and threatening to make them worse: this is happening in Latin America, the region with the largest gap between rich and poor in the world according to the UN, but also in industrialized countries like the United States and Spain, where poverty is measured by rich nations criteria, but in their contexts it is poverty after all.
The impact of confinement on people varies according to the particularity of each situation. For those who live on the margins, however, in neighborhoods and areas with very poor sanitary conditions, overcrowded in precarious buildings, without full access to basic services, confinement functions as a doom.
Brazil’s favelas, which are among the most overpopulated in Latin America, are an example that can be translated in any other country in the region where these marginalized areas of the metropolis exist, whether they are called barrios, villas miserias, campamentos poblacionales, pueblos jóvenes or asentamientos.
The testimony given by Raull Santiago, community activist in Complexo do Alemão in Rio de Janeiro, to Terrence McCoy and Heloísa Traiano of the Washington Post says it all: “Yesterday we didn’t have water. Social isolation is almost impossible. Families of six live in one-room houses… the rich bought all the antibacterial gel. We can’t even implement the most basic measures.”
Only in the favelas of Brazil live about 13 million people. In Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the UN, the percentages of people living in urban slums always exceed two digits per country.
In Brazil, McCoy and Traiano points out, at the beginning people with more resources brought the virus to the country when returning from travelling abroad — the situation is similar in other Latin American countries–. So, people with lower incomes who work for them are exposed to contagion and the spread of the virus in their communities.
The Washington Post reporters tell what social worker Inês Ferreira found when she visited the Borel favela, also in Rio: its endemic problems were worsening. “Poor health, higher rates of disease, limited education, overcrowding and — perhaps most urgently– little understanding of the coronavirus.”
Brazil’s Central Única das Favelas called on the authorities to take measures to lessen the impact of Covid-19 on their territories, including the free distribution of water, soap and alcohol, and the provision of inns and hotels for the elderly and other vulnerable groups with rest areas. “In the slums, in most homes, there is no possibility of isolation, which compromises everyone’s health.”
The Poor in the United States
Human Rights Watch recalls this in a report on the impact of Covid-19 on the most vulnerable communities: in the United States, poverty is highest among Latinos and African Americans.
“While the virus infects people regardless of wealth, the poor will be most affected due to longstanding segregation by income and race, reduced economic mobility, and the high cost of medical care. Low-income communities are more likely to be exposed to the virus, have higher mortality rates, and suffer economically. In times of economic crisis, these vulnerabilities will be more pronounced for marginal groups – identified by race, gender, and immigration status,” the report states.
More than 20% of African Americans and 18% of Hispanics in the United States live in poverty. The Racial Division of Wealth Report concluded that the average African-American family has incomes that represent only 2% of the wealth of the average white Anglo family. For a Latino family, the percentage rises minimally to 4%. This means, the report explains, that an average white family has 41 times the wealth of an African-American family and 22 times that of a Latino family.
Inequality adds up over the years. In 2009 already, Darrick Hamilton wrote for The American Prospect that it would take the average household of these two racial groups to save nearly 100% of its income for three consecutive years to close that gap.
Abby Vesoulis mentions in Time magazine’s article what seems obvious, but which the pandemic highlights: “Many low-income families, who are more likely to live in smaller quarters and share bathrooms and kitchens with multiple people, simply can’t self-quarantine as effectively as, say, a couple living in a four-bedroom, two-bath home.”
Vesoulis recalls that many people are not guaranteed paid sick leaves, in case they present the symptoms of Covid-19. “Only 47% of workers,” he writes, citing figures from the Economic Policy Institute. Also low-income people have a lower chance of accessing a primary care doctor and fear the costs of the medical bill if they go to the hospital.
“When white America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia,” the Urban Institute research associate Steven Brown told CNN’s Chauncye Alcorn.
According to recent news reports, the virus is spreading rapidly among African Americans, “at disproportionate rates,” in states such as Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina, Nevada, Connecticut, Michigan, Wisconsin, Lousiana.
And 34% of the deaths from Covid-19 in New York are Hispanic.
“We are noticing that Latinos are dying more than any other group in the city and this information worries us,” city’s health commisioner, Oxiris Barbot, said at a press conference. Dw Español reproduced her statement. (we translate it into English from that report.)
The Poor in Spain
In Madrid, El País’ Beatriz Lucas reports on the story of a public school principal, Nuria, who receives at least 20 calls a day from families asking her for food, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. According to Lucas, they write her messages like this: “Help us. I am isolated with the virus, my children are with my ex, without food, and we don’t have any income”; “There are 14 of us. In one week we have spent all of our 400 euros [about 434 dollars], and the social worker doesn’t answer.”
“We are a rich city, from the first world, it is intolerable that people go hungry,” the school principal told the reporter.
The coronavirus pandemic and the confinement unveil the inequalities indeed. And it even blurs the human made categories of first and third world.
Although in Spain there is a minimum of guaranteed public social services, provided by the social affairs offices of the autonomous communities, still a significant number of people live in poverty. Following European criteria, they qualify as people “at risk of poverty and social exclusion”, but live below the welfare line: they count to 12.3 million people, 26.1% of the Spanish population, according to the European Anti Poverty Network (EAPN), a coalition of NGOs from several European Union countries that reports annually on the issue.
Jennifer — Marta Borraz publishes only her first name in her story for eldiario.es — lives in a small room with her two children, ages seven and 13, and her husband. The only thing they can afford, she tells the journalist, is that room, inside a 55-meters apartment in Barcelona, where two other people live.
She and her family arrived in the country from Peru a year ago. The moving jobs the husband was doing are now stopped. They are feeding themselves in a soup kitchen and with the help of Caritas. They don’t know how they will continue to pay for their room. “The truth is that it is very difficult.It’s something we didn’t expect to live through and it’s distressing because we’ve always paid, in any way and with a lot of effort, but now we don’t know what will become of us,” she says.
In Seville, Andalusia, in the south of Spain, Javier García Ríos testifies to their situation in a report by Gonzalo Wancha for Sputnik News. He lives in an area called Tres Mil Viviendas, in the Polígono Sur slum, one of the most stigmatized in the city, Wancha reports, because marginalized groups such as poor immigrants and people of the gipsy ethnic group inhabit it.
“There is a lot of hunger here and little help,” García Ríos says. “My son used to eat at school [a public school; the schools are closed because of the pandemic], now I have him at home and my fridge is empty!”
Samuel is Nigerian, and he lives in the area too. He works parking cars “in a nearby middle class neighborhood,” but he hadn’t done it for a week. “We were able to fill up the fridge before the lockdown started, but I haven’t made any money for days. If I can’t get out on the street, I don’t know what I’ll do when my food runs out.”