Buenos Aires Herald editorial

Earlier this month, a video emerged of a young man staggering down a street in Rosario, trembling, his body charred black. Ezequiel Francisco Curaba, 21, had been trying to steal cables. He didn’t realize the wires were live. After agonizing for days in the hospital, he died on February 13.

Ezequiel’s teacher would later describe him as “very sweet,” adding that he’d resorted to scavenging to make ends meet. “I don’t want him to be remembered like that,” she said of the video.

Ezequiel’s story made headlines, both for its dramatic nature and because of how it split Argentine society: while some reacted with horror, others voiced the opinion that he’d got his just desert, as if stealing to survive deserved the death penalty. However, he is far from the only recent example of how the Milei administration’s measures ultimately criminalize poverty.

In General Pico, La Pampa, a storeholder called the police on a 12-year-old girl for trying to steal marker pens and pencils. Her mother, a single parent of six, told local media that her daughter said she’d done it to help her out with back-to-school costs.

There are more quotidian examples, too: videos in Buenos Aires train stations such as Constitución show people hopping the turnstiles to avoid paying ballooning train fares they can barely afford. Some of these people, surely, get caught.

Is this what the government means when they say that “what goes around comes around”?

Criminalizing people who break the law to survive certainly didn’t start with the Milei administration. But as these examples show, soaring poverty and inflation mean many are facing an increasingly stark choice.

Recent poverty statistics show that the situation is growing worse every day. A recent report by the Argentine Catholic University’s respected Social Debt Observatory found that Argentina’s poverty rate reached 57.4% in January, the highest since the observatory started keeping tabs in 2004. 

A Di Tella University report in January likewise showed that poverty worsened in 2023: it hit 46.3% in the last trimester of the year, up almost 8 percentage points from 38.4% last September. The document estimated that poverty would reach 46.8% by February 2024. 

Criminalizing poverty means the violent reinforcement of the class system, with lasting and traumatic consequences for the marginalized people who end up entangled in the judicial system. But even for those who can still keep their heads above the water, rising inequality and violence hurt. It degrades community life, pitting those who are barely getting by against those who have hit rock bottom in a struggle that turns every chance to get ahead into a battle of life and death. 

Asked what she thought was the first sign of a civilized society, anthropologist Margaret Mead once said it was the finding of a healed femur, the bone that connects the hip to the knee. In the wilderness, she reasoned, an animal cannot survive a broken bone. A healed femur means somebody had to care for that person and protect them when they seemingly had nothing to offer.

Economic and social crises like the one Argentina is facing are challenges to a community’s backbone. How it will choose to deal with its most vulnerable is a testament to its strength, something that was on full display during the 2001 crisis, when Argentine society came to the aid of those in dire need. The response to Ezequiel’s injuries, however, hints at a vastly different societal reaction to this race to the bottom.  

Ultimately, the question is what the government hopes to achieve by pairing biting austerity with an iron-fisted approach to security. As more people sink into poverty, more will inevitably resort to petty theft to survive. The police cannot arrest them all.

Milei was elected on the campaign promise that his austerity measures would be reserved for the elites and that, with a little “effort” and a few months of patience, the Argentine people would reap the rewards. But far from the wealthiest, it is the poor who are paying the most — and the price, it turns out, is unconscionably dear.