The Guardian ·
‘It’s beautiful when it’s clean’: the Argentine neighbourhood saving a contaminated river
Sewage, dog carcasses and industrial waste clog Argentina’s second most-polluted river. Meet the activists cleaning it up
Twenty-three years ago, María Monges looked around her flooded neighbourhood and knew something had to be done.
Founded in 1998 in Buenos Aires province’s San Martín district, the community of Costa Esperanza sits on the banks of the Reconquista, Argentina’s second most-polluted river and owes its name to the fictional location of a hit Argentine youth telenovela of the time, Verano del 98. But the real place is very different from the idyllic coastal city where the protagonists of Argentina’s answer to Dawson’s Creek met their first loves or sang around bonfires.
“You don’t know what it was like – when we started cleaning up, all the streams were blocked up everywhere: rubbish, dead dogs … a bit of everything. It was unsanitary, but we carried on working anyway,” says Monges, now 61. She started knocking on doors, getting people out to work with her, and in 2005 got the provincial administration to give them tools, uniforms and training. Now Monges leads 9 de julio, a workers’ cooperative that, from Monday to Friday, cleans up streams flowing from the river. “Every day, we will find rubbish,” says Monges. “It’s like people don’t understand.”
