translated from Spanish: Santiago Bachiller, expert in social exclusion: Where to drink, urinate, have sex if you live on the street?

Between 42 and 45 percent of poverty today has Argentina, a country that was the richest in the world at the end of the 19th century, as is always remembered. That represents about 20 million people, more than the entire population of Chile. Of these, the Argentine Santiago Bachiller (47), doctor in social anthropology, expert in social exclusion, inequality and popular habitat, highlights those he calls “pasilleros”. 
-The pasilleros are people who sleep in the corridors, in the alleys, of the shantytowns of greater Buenos Aires, are usually linked to the drug trafficking mafias and present severe problems of drug consumption; people who are not even counted by official censuses. They are people completely invisible by the statistics, but they represent the harshest poverty of these slums of under-housing. 

Bachiller is the international expert invited to comment on the Integral Model of Services (MISE) for the Inclusion of People in Street Situations, a publication presented this week in an online seminar on the Hogar de Cristo. A work that for the specialist of the Argentine Flacso “is very good, it is super serious, made by people who know the subject a lot, because they work in the territories and with people. It’s a true PhD thesis, and what I like most is that it has the merit of self-criticism. You’re never going to find that in governments, because they’re always overwhelmed by urgencies and that leads them to try to show only successes. The urgency of everyday life does not allow us to reflect. That exercise is valuable, honest and very valuable. It certainly has Latin American reach.” 
Bachiller was a researcher of the Red Calle project of Latin American countries for the development of policies of attention to people in street situations, a call of the European Union for South-South cooperation projects, which was developed between 2016 and 2019. I mean, he knows what he’s talking about. And it maintains regular contact with researchers from all countries in the region. 
-You worked on the subject in Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile. Then Argentina joined. What is the reality of street people in each of them? 
There are a number of common problems, but great differences in the history and welfare state of each country. In Paraguay, for example, they did not have a single place for people in street situations, but for children and for the elderly. Comparatively, Chile has a much greater development. But we still do not move from welfare to social policies for the protection of rights, which in countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand began in the 90s, with the Housing First model, created in New York by Sam Tsemberis. Here governments tend to make statements on these issues, but they do not go beyond that. They do not commit to rights-focused programmes.

-How did you see Chile in relation to the other countries in the region you studied?
I believe that in Chile, right-wing governments have done much more to make this reality visible and address. This judgment is probably anti-grass roots and some people do not like to hear it, because what has been done is also insufficient, but in comparison with the other countries there is greater awareness and progress, especially in relation to my country, where we have not even managed to have a national policy for people on the streets. The deficit common to all is the lack of coordination between the different ministries and services, although Argentina is worse off. In every country, there is always a ministry that has to take over and the others look to the side and so you can’t do a good job. In Chile, it has been the Ministry of Social Development and now in a half-timid way the Ministry of Housing and UrbanIsm has begun to approach the issue with regard to Housing First. 
Not to chronicle the street
What has been the impact of the pandemic on the increase in street people in the region?
-It is difficult to quantify, even though we researchers are locked up by quarantines, but these have aggravated poverty, which is already generating an increase in the population in street situations, in particular of some specific profiles, such as women and children who escape domestic violence. In Buenos Aires, there are many evictions of people who cannot pay their rent. And, with the pandemic, the competition for space urban has become older as well. People on the streets are being driven out of leisure spaces, parks, for example. 
Santiago Bachiller insists that the government applies policies in these cases that consist of targeting aid, compartmentalizing the populations to make the problem more addressable. Focus resources on the most visible groups that generate the most public outrage. In this sense, he says: “The street people are just the tip of the iceberg, but there is a mass of hidden ice, which are the hundreds of thousands of people living in shantytowns, who are now even stopping paying for a room inside the villa and ending up in the street, as well as the pasilleros of which I spoke to you. ”
-What institutions similar to the Hogar de Cristo exist in Argentina?
No, we have nothing like it, nothing with the scope of the Hogar de Cristo, which handles an enormous number of places, beds, for people on the street, which is equivalent to that of the care system of the government of Buenos Aires. As I told you: we have no national diagnosis, neither of the State nor of the oenegés. We know a lot less than you do. There is little information, very hidden, with a high presence of women in the streets of families, which with this damn health crisis is probably going to increase.
-According to your experience, what do you recommend to prevent the number of people on the street from continuing to increase? In an interview with “El Mercurio” you talked about the metaphor of the bathtub.
-Those who investigate the issue of the street situation often appeal to that metaphor, to the efforts to prevent it from overflowing with water. We can take a bucket and remove as much water as possible; that would be the function of palliative policies. But if we do not close the tap, our efforts will be permanently overwhelmed: no matter how much we have excellent social inclusion programs, the number of people who leave will be less than those who arrive or even reoffend in the street situation. We must therefore guarantee universal policies that benefit the population as a whole. If we really want to put an end to the street situation, instead of settling for the management of this social scourge, we must regulate markets that expel or make the lives of millions of people precarious, such as housing or work, we must guarantee a quality health and education system that is accessible to all social sectors. , betting on a less regressive tax system…
In short, go to the multiple causes of the problem, as indicated by the Integrated Service Model (MISE), which proposes the Home of Christ, with a focus on people and their singularities. This is how the expert explains it: “There is a tendency to a homogeneous representation of the population in a street situation, when the life trajectories of these people are very heterogeneous. One of the problems that the intervention usually has is that it offers canned products, the same answers to very diverse groups: the time spent on the street is a key factor: the needs of a young person with consumption problems who escaped from a violent home are very different from those of an immigrant; the expectations of overcoming the street situation will be different in a woman who resides on the street with her children compared to a man who turns around the city alone and suffers from a mental health problem. A fundamental aspect is to quickly detect people who have been in a street situation for a short time, offer them a series of services and programs that avoid the generation of networks and subsistence strategies, redirecting their sociability and making the street their vital and daily space, avoiding what is known as the cronification of the street situation”. 
Focusing the intervention on each person and their life stories makes them participate in their process, insists Bachiller, who says: “In short, we need to have a comprehensive policy of programs and services capable of adapting to the different needs and expectations of an absolutely heterogeneous population. ”
Twenty years less life
If, in addition to this, it is so obvious that ministries and services must work in a coordinated manner, why is this joint work not achieved?
Part of the problem is that public policies, such as those aimed at people living on the streets, are government policies, but not state policies. In other words, they depend on political circumstances. Then, in the face of a change of management, fundamental decisions are paralyzed, the operation of programs and devices depend on political support to ensure, for example, the continuity of funding and resources, or even the new geStión repudiates everything done by its predecessors, denying the experiences accumulated and the lessons learned in the past.
-And what about society as a whole, which tends to naturalize people in street situations as part of the landscape, without realizing the tremendous social emergency it represents, or – worse – to stigmatize people?
-The association between the street situation and crime is a prejudice that must be dismantled, because it is not supported by statistics. Statistics show that street people tend to be victims rather than perpetrators of violence. I am not just referring to institutional violence, which they have suffered throughout their lives, and which they often continue to suffer when the security forces (public or private) expel them from the places where they have settled. There are studies that show that life expectancy in people on the streets is shortened by 20 years compared to the population average; in the same way, these social groups are more likely to suffer violent deaths, sexual abuse, beatings, robberies than the rest of the citizenry. What’s more, a significant percentage of street people had a prison experience.
The only thing that this data allows us to infer is the failure of social reintegration institutions, because when a person leaves a prison and has nowhere to go, he will end up on the street. Finally, let us bear in mind that the vast majority of street people arrested are charged with “disturbances on public roads”. I mean things like drinking, urinating, or having sex on the street. So, we condemn someone for doing this type of activity in the public space, omitting a fundamental fact: we have taken away the possibility of having a private space. Where to drink, where to urinate, where to have sex when we do not have that space that our society has allocated to certain practices that we describe as intimate, as private? In order to stop linking these people to crime and to understand that the reality is more complex, we need awareness-raising campaigns; awareness talks in schools. In addition, the security forces and the judiciary end up being key players in the daily lives of people on the streets. Therefore, they are forces that should be involved in public policies that seek to adopt a rights-based approach to the social advancement of street people.
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Original source in Spanish