An Ever Widening Gap
By Elda Garcia
Every year in Guatemala, thousands of people move from the countryside to the city to seek out better living conditions or to escape local violence. The number of people hoping to find a “better” life in the city continues to grow; but their dreams are shattered when they are unable to find a decent place to live and they have to start searching for a piece of land.
It is believed that over a hundred million people in Latin America live in informal settlements that lack safe drinking water, electricity, sewers, and drains. Because the settlements are built on unsafe and unstable land, landslides and floods are common. The difficulties don’t stop there. Pollution from nearby landfills causes diseases, which are easily spread in the overcrowded areas. With little or no access to medical services, residents face difficult and tragic situations. The families who live there are truly vulnerable.
These living conditions present more than material or physical difficulties. In most cases, the conditions also create social exclusion: isolation from being involved with or developing relationships with others.
In big cities, these inequalities are more and more prevalent. Although development and progress do happen, they don’t happen for everyone. In many situations, poverty is passed down from generation to generation. The violation of people’s rights is commonplace.
How can the problem of inequality be tackled? We are all members of the same society. We should, in theory, have access to the same rights.
Inequality and exclusion are not the only challenges that residents in these communities face. Life there is not easy, and the fact of living in close proximity to others often causes tensions.
How can people not feel strained when their efforts to survive take all their energy? How do they go on when they are constantly under pressure from school or work, or striving to make sure their family has dinner each night?
People from the informal housing settlements are automatically labelled as violent and problematic. This makes the task of getting a decent job or finding other opportunities arduous, if not impossible.
On the other hand, the proximity of neighbors in the settlements allows strong ties to be built, and the relationships are expressed in different ways in everyday life. Doña M. used to say, “In the settlement, we were there for each other in the good times and the bad.”
The countries that face these challenges always seem to be in Latin America, Africa, or some developing region. It is hard to imagine industrialized countries facing troubles like ours. Many of these localities are not recognized as informal settlements, but it only takes a glance to see the precarious conditions in which families live there, how far they are from integrating into society, and how far society is from opening its doors to them, if only to offer them decent jobs.
It shocks me that these situations can in fact also be seen close to Paris, France, where settlements are made up of small clusters of trailers, scattered in the countryside. Where is our society heading? At what price? And why do some people manage to move forward and others barely survive?
