According to the National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey, 10.8 percent of Chileans currently live in poverty, which means more than two million people, although social organizations say the real proportion is much higher.
Chile, with a population of 19 million people, is considered one of the most unequal countries in the world, as reflected by the fact that the 10 percent of households with the highest incomes earn 251.3 times more than the 10 percent with the lowest income.
As Chile's hotly contested election approaches, it is reported that camps made up of thousands of tents and shacks have mushroomed in Chile due to the failure of housing policies and official subsidies for the sector, aggravated by the rise in poverty, the covid-19 pandemic and a rise in immigrants, such as those from Venezuela. Hundreds of homeless tents now line the main avenues of Santiago de Chile
Senda 23 is one of the five camps that bring together 300 families who occupied public land in Cerro 18, in the municipality of Lo Barnechea, on the east side of Santiago. They have been building shacks with wood and other materials within their reach, which they are gradually trying to improve.
The threat of eviction ceased at the start of the covid pandemic, but the shadow still hangs.
“This used to be a garbage dump and now it is clean and there are houses,” said Salas. “Mine gets a little wet inside when it rains because it is made of wood and because of the strong wind. But I have drinking water, electricity and sewerage thanks to my mother-in-law who lives further up. The neighboring family has neither water nor sewage. They are a couple with three children and one of them, Colomba, was born a week ago.” She explains that her neighbors “use the bathroom at their brother’s place who lives nearby.
In the last two years, the number of families living in 969 of these camps with almost no access to water, energy and sanitation services has increased to 81,643, a survey by the Fundación Techo Chile found.
In Chile, the term “campamentos” or camps has also come to refer to slums or shantytowns known traditionally as “callampas”, such as the one where Salas lives, which are built on occupied land and consist of houses made of light materials, although the neighborhoods are sometimes later improved and upgraded, but still lack basic services. These slums are mainly in Santiago and Valparaíso, 120 kilometers north of the capital, in central Chile. But they are also found in the northern cities of Arica and Parinacota and the southern city of Araucanía.
Celia “Charito” Durán lives in the Mesana camp on Mariposas hill in the port city of Valparaíso, along with 165 other families, and counting. The municipality delivers 3,000 liters of water per week to each house, using tanker trucks.
Durán said, however, that the priority is access “because if there is no road, we are cut off from everything: firefighters, water, ambulances.”
In Mesana there is no sewage system, only “cesspools, septic toilets and pipes through which people dump everything into the creek,” she said
They are home to 57,384 children under the age of 14 and some 25,000 immigrants, mostly Colombians, Venezuelans and Haitians.
Fundación Techo Chile’s executive director, Sebastián Bowen, explained, “The 81,000 families living in camps are the most visible part of the problem, but the housing deficit, covering all the families who do not have access to decent housing, exceeds 600,000.”
Benito Baranda, founder of the Fundación Techo, an organization that now operates in several Latin American countries, believes that the housing policy failed because it focuses on “market-based eradication, forming housing ghettos on land where people continue to live in a segregated manner.”
This policy is also based on a structure of subsidies “born during the dictatorship and which has remained in place because housing is not a right recognized in the constitution,”
The decision of where people are going to live was handed over to the market. Not only the construction of housing. And the land began to run out and the available and cheap places were in the ghettos,” he explained.
Baranda criticized the policy of “eradication”, “which created ghettos and generated much greater harm for people,” referring to the forced expulsions of slumdwellers and their relocation to social housing built on the outskirts of the cities, a policy initiated during the Pinochet dictatorship and which crystallized social segregation in the capital.
According to Baranda, “in the last four governments there has been the least construction of housing for the poorest families.”
Isabel Serra, an academic at the Diego Portales University Faculty of Architecture, criticized the subsidy policy because these “are transferred to the private sector and what they do is drive up housing prices… and most of them are not used because they are not in line with the price of land and housing.”
“A highly financialized private market has made housing a tool for economic speculation…investors have decided to put their funds into the real estate market,” she said.
Homeless Camps, a Reflection of Growing Inequality in Chile | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)
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