Argentina: From slavery to food sovereignty
Photo: Pablo E. Piovano
Maxi Goldschmidt – Living Earth Agency1
In the town of Jáuregui, in Luján, Buenos Aires province, more than 80 hectares of a former abandoned institute have been transformed into a thriving and unprecedented agroecological project in the country. Dozens of families have left behind the fumigations, recovered the farming methods of their ancestors, created a primary school, a secondary school, and are planning a rural university.
Today, that place is a snapshot of another possible Argentina: the "April 20th - Darío Santillán" colony, one of the most prosperous and unique agroecological projects in the province of Buenos Aires. There, 31 vegetable-producing families live, work, and study, many of whom, along the way, said, in similar words, that they are "learning to leave slavery behind."
-Now we are almost having a decent life.
Almost.
Mistrust, the first “poison” against agroecology
A white, faded gate; thirty meters further on, the first house. A brick house, a weary yellow, with a wire fence in the yard, where chickens roam freely. A tall eucalyptus tree stands behind the house, next to which another brick entrance and gate are visible. Chickens are everywhere. One yellow, one mustard, one white, and one black, perched atop a water tank. The house is inhabited by Rosalía Castillo and Miguel Reyes, who arrives by bicycle, wearing a green cap, and who will soon proudly show off his seedling tray.
-They told me I was crazy.
Miguel recalls his first steps with agroecology. He remembers his own distrust, and that of most producers, upon hearing that it was possible to produce without "curing," as they still call what they stopped doing here: "adding remedies" to vegetables. Adding chemicals, adding poison.
“There, I was constantly being treated. My head was always aching. And in the long run, that takes its toll,” says Miguel, recalling his time in La Plata. “I felt like I was suffocating, and not just from the poison. Besides breathing it in, I couldn't stop thinking for a single second about how the money wasn't enough, about how I was going to pay the rent,” says Rosalía as she places a decorated sponge cake on the table. Today, at the Marketing meeting, they're celebrating a colleague's birthday.
“One would think it couldn’t be done. But now it’s the opposite, I don’t even know how many of us there are anymore. More and more producers are turning to agroecology because everything is so expensive, the seeds, the medicines, everything is priced in dollars.”
Upon encountering a skeptic, Miguel repeats:
-You have to try it. Try three or four grooves. And you'll be convinced.
A living land: families, birds, insects
If you continue along the dirt road, a deep forest of acacias, carob trees, and eucalyptus stretches out to the left and right. Another small house with an overhanging roof appears. A cream-colored house, faded and peeling. Peacocks gather around a disused cistern, which serves as a giant flowerpot. Birds are everywhere.
Franz Ortega guides us on the first tour. Franz is 41 years old, with clear eyes, a red hat, a black sweater, and corduroy pants. Hanging from his left shoulder blade is a small hoe, a kind of tiny tool that seems like an extension of his body.
Franz was born in Tarija and, like several of his companions in the colony, is part of a generation of Bolivians who arrived in the country as very young children; in his case, at the age of 12. He arrived with his 15-year-old brother, whom his uncle had brought to Argentina. Later, Franz brought a younger brother. And that brother brought another brother.
In the transcripts of the interviews, the first and most prominent sounds are birds. The background noise of the Luján agroecological colony consists of sparrows, thrushes, parakeets, cardinals, goldfinches, seedeaters, parrots, southern lapwings, pigeons, and hawks.
A couple in their thirties cover a raised bed of earth where strawberry leaves are sprouting with a long piece of plastic sheeting. Their son, about six or seven years old, plays with a toy truck a few meters away, next to two dogs resting in the sun.
Next to the row of strawberries there's a whole line of fennel. "It's a biological corridor, it gives off a smell and scares away the bugs," Franz explains.
The idea is not to kill them, but to scare them away. They are life too.
Contrary to the trend of transgenic monoculture, the aim here is to plant a wide variety of crops. This is another way to prevent pests. Within a few meters, you can see rows cultivated with red cabbage, white cabbage, kale, broccoli, chard, leeks, onions, celery, and beets.
Although some producers are still finding it difficult to get used to it, another key is "not to weed," explains Franz.
"If you peel everything around the vegetables, it's easier for them to be attacked, but if there are other plants and weeds, the bugs will eat from there too."
Is agroecology not a business?
A car, a basketball, a flat soccer ball. Two children playing with a cane in the backyard. To the right, you can see a vegetable garden, the first hectare of the thirty-odd hectares that have already been cultivated. They plan to plant twenty more, which will mean twenty families will no longer have to rent and will have their own piece of land.
There are the furrows. There are fifteen of them, each about a hundred meters long, with a divider in the middle to facilitate irrigation. The first three are just mounds of earth. From the fourth onward, shoots appear, and then you start to recognize the young chard, artichokes, beets, and arugula. One artichoke stands out, green and purple, its large leaves open to the sun. Beyond that are three more beds of chard, and then the forest stretches out again.
Each family produces what they want, although every week they meet in assembly to define issues of collective organization and coexistence (making or extending the water and electricity network, managing missing services such as gas or internet, dividing the days and times of use of the colony's only tractor, helping to prepare the land or house of a new family, etc.) and also to find, together, the best way to market what they produce.
Two or three times a week, bags of produce are sent to the UTT warehouses and sold in the area. Twelve pesos are set aside from each bag sold for community projects. This money, along with more than ten days of volunteer work, was used to build the warehouse. It's a huge step forward for these families: they will now sell not only their own vegetables but also products from other cooperatives and producers, who in turn will be able to buy wholesale for their own consumption.
The path towards agroecological transition
Between the cistern house and the first vegetable garden, a rusty, decorative wire fence. Another gate, usually left open, leads to a path to the entrance of a large, old, pretentious, and dilapidated building: the Ramayón itself. To the left of the fence surrounding the building is a house with a large pile of firewood. A light blue, abandoned, one-eyed bus bears the inscription: National Council for Children and Families. And next to the shed where the vegetables are washed and sorted is the brand-new general store. This video shows the moment of its inauguration and, through the voices of those involved, provides further insight into the history of the settlement.
Virgilio is the same age as Franz but looks older. The handle of his hoe has just broken, and he's trying to sharpen a stick that's too thick with a machete. He's very thin and has a sad, furrowed face. Beads of perspiration appear beneath his faded gray cap. We greet him, and he introduces himself. "Virgilio Arias," he says. He explains that he's clearing the land, preparing it for his first harvest. His family—his wife and four children—are waiting in La Plata, where they rent a plot of land they can no longer afford. That's why Virgilio has to hurry. He comes to Luján for a few days to work all day. He sleeps at the homes of other workers. When his family arrives, after the first harvest, he'll start building his house. Right now, he's going through the hardest part: clearing weeds, pulling up roots, escaping this life of hard labor.
-You have to floc the discs first. And only then the plow.
Franz, digging his hoe into the ground, asks him how far his hectare extends. Virgil points a few meters ahead. They start talking about prices.
In La Plata, Virgilio pays 15.000 pesos per month for one hectare, 10.000 for chemicals, and 2.000 per hour for tractor time. He paid another 15.000 pesos for two packets of pear tomato seeds plus the corresponding pesticide package.
– What you earn you have to reinvest. And on top of that, you poison yourself.
Virgilio says, and explains, that a product comes out for whiteflies, you buy it to kill them, and then they tell you that the real problem is the eggs, and you have to buy another one for the eggs. It's like that all the time. There's always a new pest, and another, more expensive product to combat it.
“The system itself controls you,” Franz says. “You want to keep going, but you don’t realize you’ll never get ahead. You can’t escape. You only see it when you come here. Over there, the middleman is the one who profits. Here, a year’s production is worth, at most, 50.000 pesos. Over there, it’s 600.000.”
A land of our own, free from poisons
-The frost ruined us. The hail turned the vegetables into mush.
Olga Guerrero, 54, from Jujuy, wearing a denim hat, is kneeling, planting radishes in one of the rows of a brand-new greenhouse. Cardon cacti are everywhere among the crops. “I like them a lot; they remind me of my homeland,” says Olga, who until two years ago dreamed of returning to San Salvador someday. “I never thought I could have my own land. Now we're doing well here, although the frost ruined three rows of tomatoes yesterday.”
“Each row costs 4.000 pesos, so we lost 12.000,” says Roberto Mercado, her husband, wearing a plaid shirt, beach hat, radio in hand, and black Nike sneakers.
Two years ago, they both lived in La Plata. He has a respiratory illness that affects him less in Luján. “There, we worked to pay the rent. Here, I'm more at peace, without thinking so much about the debts. That's all the money was for. And on top of that, my husband was a real pain reliever. He was practically bathing in medicine. His backpack was dripping down his back, and he was constantly sneezing and vomiting. Now he feels better,” says Olga, who adds that she's started eating bell peppers again. “There, they were hard to digest; they put him on so much medicine.”
“Nobody here knows how to read and write”
Gustavo Manfredi is "the teacher." That's what people call him when they run into him in the neighborhood. They tease him, they smile at him. The respectful camaraderie one has for a beloved teacher. One afternoon four years ago, Gustavo arrived to buy vegetables. He was greeted by Franz, who, while harvesting chard and leeks from his own garden, asked him:
-What do you do for a living?
-I am a teacher.
-Ah, nobody here knows how to read and write.
A few seconds of silence and Franz's hesitant question:
-Would you be up for it?
-Yes of course.
-But how much are you going to charge us?
– No, nothing. I'm starting a vegetable garden; if you give me a hand, we can exchange knowledge.
From then on, for months Gustavo went door-to-door, surveying each family's educational situation. Finally, one Friday at seven in the evening, the literacy workshop began.
“I had been active in the Frente (Darío Santillán) and had given workshops in shantytowns, so I was surprised when I arrived and saw 15 people, very punctual, waiting for me. In the neighborhoods it's not usually like that; you have to go looking for people house by house. And on top of that, when that first class ended, several of them told me: give me homework,” says Gustavo, who at the end of that year prepared a ceremony in which he handed out the certificates he had printed at home.
Grateful, the students—among them 70-year-old Don Velázquez—not only wanted to continue their studies, but also a valid diploma. Thus, in 2017, an agreement was signed with the municipality of Luján and the Ministry of Education of the Province of Buenos Aires to establish a primary school extension. A teacher (Lucía Navarro) was appointed, and she and Gustavo taught almost the entire community to read and write. Yeli Navarro was the first graduate.
The high school opened in 2019. After another long bureaucratic struggle, last year it was recognized as one of the few schools in the entire country with vocational training specializing in agroecological agriculture.
“Now our next dream is a rural university,” says Franz, one of the more than 20 people who arrived in this settlement illiterate and who continue their studies today. “Before, it was harder to defend our rights; someone would come with a signed document, and we had to bow our heads.”
My children will not be slaves
Yeli Navarro steps a few meters away from the shed where Yofre is welding a barn-style gate. The warehouse will open there in a few days. She'll be one of the managers, as part of the Marketing team, which also includes Professor Gustavo. Everyone remembers Yeli's diploma ceremony; the Bolivian national anthem played, and a Wiphala flag flew alongside an Argentine flag.
Yeli speaks softly and smiles a lot. Kiara, her five-year-old daughter, clings to her and whispers for her to fix her hair. Yeli braids it, and the little girl runs off.
A few weeks ago Kiara celebrated for the second time what her mother never could: her birthday.
-My children are not going to be slaves like I was.
Yeli says that it wasn't until she arrived at the colony that she realized the life she had been living. She was born in Tarija, Bolivia. She has eleven siblings. Her parents couldn't support them, and she started working in the fields at the age of six. She walked an hour to get to school. She left school at 14, when she came to Argentina to pick strawberries with her 21-year-old sister. They shared a room with her brother-in-law. Later, she moved to La Plata, got married, and she and her husband worked as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or day laborers. The months of her pregnancy were the worst. “I was sick all the time from the chemicals we used. Headaches, dizziness, vomiting, and on hot days we'd go into the greenhouses, but after just a few minutes we had to get out because it was unbearable.”
Many days when she couldn't leave Kiara with anyone, she had to take her to work with her. She recounts this with pain, her gaze fixed on those days of more than 12 hours in the fields, each paid at 60 pesos, or at most a monthly contract of three thousand "that barely covered diapers and milk." Yeli has another son, Baltazar, 4 years old, who practically grew up in the colony.
“Now I have more time with them, more freedom. Here everyone works the hours they want, there’s no boss. We have our plot of land, the kids go to school and can play anywhere. Before I was a slave and I didn’t even realize it,” repeats Yeli, who finished her house a few weeks ago.
“I spent all day fumigating”
Hanging from a young tree in the sun are two pairs of slip-on sneakers, a pair of pink boots, and two pairs of black Crocs. Next to them, in another tree, a boy of about 10 years old hangs like a monkey. Kevin Perales Torres sees the camera and climbs down. He's wearing a Spider-Man t-shirt and black Crocs. He says he likes living here because there are lots of trees, a small soccer field, and he can ride his bike.
Isaiah Reyes is 29 years old and Kevin's cousin. He walks by pushing a wheelbarrow overflowing with spinach and arugula. He parks it in front of a water tap. Isaiah arrived in the neighborhood two years ago with his pregnant wife. Today, his son is just over a year old.
“The issue of time” is what he enjoys most about his new life. “Over there, if you want to earn any money, you have to work 12 hours a day.” “Over there” refers to the farms in City Bell, where he worked with flowers, pulling buds or weeds. He wore a full-body raincoat and a mask. Even so, he always had a headache.
-I spent all day spraying. I'd take off my raincoat and my whole arm would be covered in poison.
She says this while cleaning spinach with a hose. Today is packing the bags. This morning she planted corn and zucchini. She's getting the hang of it, but learning agroecology was difficult. Since she was twelve, she'd worked as a healer.
The biofactory, the laboratory of agroecology
In one of the abandoned buildings that still stands, the trees growing inside were removed in a couple of days of collective work, and a black plastic sheet was put up as a roof. The biofactory operates there, in a shed without doors or windows, where, lacking a blackboard, a cardboard box is improvised and nailed to the wall, and writing is done with the tip of a burnt piece of wood.
-Two more are arriving to work.
Mauro says, his cheek puffed out from coca leaves, wearing a blue t-shirt and espadrilles, his cell phone peeking out of his pants pocket. Mauro Fernández is in charge of leading the workshop at COTEPO, the UTT's community-based technical clinic that passes on agroecological knowledge through word of mouth and daily practice.
At the Luján biofactory, there are workshops every Thursday. And today they're bagging bocashi and, for the first time, filtering slurry.
Bokashi is an organic fertilizer produced by mixing soil, a layer of cow, chicken or goat manure, molasses, ash, yeast, forest leaves, rice husks and water.
“The smell you’re getting is goat manure,” says Don Flores, a wrinkled old man in a worn vest, turquoise t-shirt, and blue cap. “That’s what gives it minerals,” he explains, sticking his hands in the soil. It’s warm, and he invites the others to test the temperature.
Don Flores' name is Primitivo, and he's the oldest in the class. He's 62 years old. Next to him, at the same height as the shovel he uses as a horse, plays Kiara, who is 5. Among them, watching attentively and learning by doing are Jessica (20), Daniela (21), Ivan (21), Fernando (14), Gabriel (24), Luciana (36), and Margarita (22), who watches everything from a distance with a white poodle in her arms.
-Who has onion bags? To filter the slurry.
-Would tulle work?
-Yes, also
In a blue vat, 200 liters of water have been mixing with about 20 kilos of finely chopped onions for the past 15 days. The mixture is stirred every day. And today it's time to filter and bottle it.
“This would replace a repellent. It’s to repel them, not to kill them, because everything is part of nature and we have to find a balance and see how to work with the little critters without them harming us. If there are critters, it’s a healthy crop. It means there’s health in the soil. Living soil is the foundation of agroecology; it’s where foods with vitamins and nutrients come from,” says Mauro, pointing to the buckets of nettle and paradiso manure, which are also in the fermentation stage and serve as compost, fertilizer, and natural repellent.
Kevin, says the name in India ink on the forearm of the young man pouring the contents of a jerrycan into a white bucket. His partner, also young, shy, and quiet, holds the funnel made from a soda bottle. Kevin's eyes, barely taller than the jerrycan, follow everything from very close by.
-This is agroecology. The tree can't just dry up. Involving children and families is very important. Without that, it's not agroecology.
A hose attached to a Coca-Cola bottle emerges from a blue container. “It’s a Biol, for roots and plant growth,” says Mauro, detailing the preparation, which includes calcium chloride and magnesium sulfate. He explains the procedure, though it's not entirely clear to those present.
Another way to explain it, with apologies to the journalists, is to imagine the bucket as the belly and the bottle as the butt. The concoction farts through the hose.
Mauro smiles and asks Daniela to bring a bag of onions to filter the manure if she goes to his house, and if she can, to stop by his house and grab a bucket he left next to the chicken coop. The girl runs off and returns two seconds later.
-I'll take the bike.
And he gets lost in the forest of acacias, eucalyptus trees and…
-What is this green called?
-Privet
Don Flores answers Jessica, while Mauro asks aloud: “Who wants to film a little video and send it to Cotepo?”
The activities are shared in a WhatsApp group so that producers from the rest of the country can see live how their colleagues carry out the tasks and thus learn and correct each other.
“For so long we were so blind, doing things wrong, failing to follow the traditions of our parents and grandparents. The beautiful thing now is that we remember our culture, we share the teachings of our elders; knowledge comes from there. Before, there were no chemicals. And we have to tell the producers that it is possible. We can go back to the old days, to everything being natural. To having time, to stop wasting our lives so that others can make money,” says Mauro, who is 37 years old and has worked fumigating since he was eleven: “It treated my whole body; they forced you to do it. You were a kid, and you had to do it.”
Mauro dreams of more farming communities across the country and of receiving support for the various projects they're presenting. Like many of his colleagues, he insists he doesn't want the land for free, but he does want access to affordable loans to produce. “You felt enslaved to work because of the constant demands of the job. At night, I couldn't sleep. You'd say you were going to rest, but it was a lie because you'd close your eyes and think, 'How am I going to cover this? How am I going to cover that?' It was physical and mental exploitation. It's very stressful, and so many producers are living like this. That's why we're promoting agroecology, to rescue more of our fellow farmers from this kind of slavery.”
“I saw many colleagues die from poisoning”
The entrance to her house is between two giant roots. "The tree is called 'Evergreen,'" says Yufra, who's wearing a white t-shirt with a picture of Dylan and Emanuel, her smiling grandsons dressed as soccer players. A black ant is crawling across the white t-shirt, which is bulging at the waist, right where the cleats in the photo would be. Yufra, who either doesn't notice or doesn't care, says, "Come in, come in." Two puppies are sleeping on burlap sacks filled with corn. Another is gnawing on an ear of corn. Another is scratching itself. Francesca, the mother, a black and white dog, is trying to escape from two other puppies she's dragging along, clinging to her teats.
Emeldo Yufra, 64 years old, slow-moving, with an uneven beard, is the most sought-after person in the neighborhood. He knows how to do everything: carpentry, blacksmithing, electrical work, mechanics, plumbing. “I learned by watching and helping,” he says, proudly showing off some of his homemade inventions: a hoe, a rake, and a ridger, used to make furrows in the soil, which he fashioned from a piece of iron welded to a baby carriage wheel. “Any scrap metal is useful,” he says, while his wife makes a face of disapproval. Half the front of the house is covered in piles of rusty iron of all shapes and sizes.
Yufra started working at 14. He traveled the country as a fruit packer, seasonal laborer, sharecropper, and later worked on a farm. In between, he worked for 20 years as a tractor driver for “a gringo who one day rented out his farm and left me high and dry.” One afternoon, while driving the tractor, Yufra was poisoned.
-A mosquito was fumigating to keep the worm out, and the wind brought the smoke to where I was.
Yufra fainted, spent a few days hospitalized unable to breathe, and since then, he barely feels any "healing" before his lips go numb. He says that at first they only used Manzanate and Cisne Azul, and one small bottle would last for years, but then more and more chemicals appeared.
-I saw many colleagues die from poisoning.
Agroecology, that freedom
A young man in his early twenties puts up an awning. Beneath it, immaculate, lies his dream: a red Fiat 600 with tinted windows. He bought it with the last harvest, the one that allowed others in the settlement to finally afford a pickup truck or build their first greenhouse. The young man starts the car and drives off slowly. His dog follows him. He disappears down the road through the forest of makeshift houses, some made of wood and nylon, others dilapidated, without door or window frames, with leaky or nonexistent roofs, with trees and weeds growing inside.
Some houses can be restored, and they are being restored. Others are abandoned and new ones are built. But slowly, and they're made of wood. The housing problem remains serious in the neighborhood, where six families have been living for five years in the old, cold building of the former Ramayón Institute. The rest build their homes as best they can. A few weeks ago, an agreement was signed with various ministries for a housing plan.
“My dream is to live here, die here, and see my children here, that is, that they don't take us away, that we never have to go back to how we were before,” says Rosalía, who five years ago stopped being part of the 80% of food producers for human consumption in Argentina who have to rent the land.
“We built a first shed with a roll of nylon, with poles, with everything. We came to stay. We came to claim the land and cultivate it. That was our purpose. We arrived and just started turning the land over, clearing it because there were a lot of trees,” Franz recounts about that April 20, 2015, when they decided to move onto these abandoned public lands that had been promised to them for years by the Ministry of Development and Agriculture of the province of Buenos Aires. “There was always some document missing, a signature, and so the years went by. Until one day we couldn't take it anymore, we couldn't endure the slavery and the empty promises any longer. We've been here ever since.”
Learn to leave slavery behind
"What happened here?" Franz asks, and moves a hole next to one of the furrows with his tool.
-Anthill.
Nora Castillo answers, squatting under a wide-brimmed hat. She's wearing muddy blue sneakers with red laces, and when she stands up she says she threw rice and orange peel to make the ants go somewhere else. She recounts that she arrived at the colony three years ago with her husband, as did two of her daughters who also work a hectare with their partners.
“Vegetables grown with chemicals are more fragile. They grow up quickly. Those grown without chemicals are more robust, but you can taste the flavor they had before,” says Nora, who recently returned to La Plata to visit acquaintances and was served a lettuce and tomato salad that she couldn't eat.
“Before, I didn’t realize it. I was breathing, touching, and eating poison; I was picking vegetables that looked nicer but were full of poison. Now we take care of our health and the health of those who consume our products. And the environment. People who buy here no longer want to go to the greengrocers.”
Nora kneels and plunges her hands into the soil, turning it over. An earthworm emerges, its movements electric. “Where there are earthworms, there is life; the soil is alive, and there are no pesticides.” Nora says that learning agroecology wasn't difficult for her because it's what her parents and grandparents practiced. Speaking about it was difficult, though. “Before, I would see people and walk away, but with the UTT (Union of Land Workers) I learned so much. We had many workshops and training sessions. We learned to defend our rights as immigrants. We learned to read. We learned, or are learning, to stop being slaves.”
1-Tierra Viva Agency, a media outlet created to tell what happens in the countryside from the perspective of those who produce food: peasant families, small producers, indigenous communities, cooperatives.
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