Argentines hawk belongings in struggle to make ends meet

A street market in a working-class neighbourhood of Buenos Aires bustles with desperate Argentines who have taken to hawking their belongings to make ends meet as the economy sputters.

The market in Villa Fiorito – the birthplace of football great Diego Maradona – has gotten ever busier with an explosion in the number of so-called "blanket sellers" peddling household objects, items collected from the trash or goods bought with loans and displayed on blankets spread out on the pavement.

As Maradona looks on from several murals that hails him as a rags-to-riches hero, locals spread out used toys and frayed backpacks, ice cube trays, thermos flasks without lids, well-paged magazines, worn clothes, even blister packs of medicine and pills.

As the smell of barbecue fires and grilling meat mix with that of accumulated trash, and the sounds of children at play vie with the microphone of a street pastor, some residents also sell home-made bread.

"Whenever I manage to get clothes, or if I see something that's cheap, I buy it and resell it, which is what the majority of neighbours around here do," said vendor Gladys Gutiérrez. "They buy, resell, and that's how they manage to make a bit of extra money."

Gutiérrez, 46, normally sells cleaning products from her home, but with fewer and fewer locals able to afford them, she took out a loan to buy snacks, drinks and perfumes to sell at the market.

Her husband, a construction worker, has been out of work for a while. "People are tired, they're angry," she said.

In a country accustomed to economic crisis, Argentines are once again tightening their belts after a brief hopeful period as President Javier Milei made good on his promise of slashing inflation.

Prices have been creeping up again, consumption and production numbers are down, and the Central Bank has been battling a run on the peso amid fears of devaluation after midterm elections Sunday.

Some 40 percent of Argentina's income earners work in the informal sector with no social benefits – and many hold several jobs at once.

"It reminds me a lot of 2001," said Juana Sena, a 71-year-old market vendor, referring to the economic crash that saw Argentina default on its debt obligations – the biggest such failure in history – followed by deadly protests and the collapse of a government.

'Deepened and exacerbated'

Economist Guillermo Oliveto told AFP about 70 percent of working-class Argentines cannot make their incomes stretch beyond half a month. Some 200,000 people lost their jobs under Milei's austerity measures.

According to the IETSE economic data centre, nine out of ten Argentine families are in debt – most of it spent on food since Milei took office and slashed social spending.

"The government underestimated the impact that the real economy has on daily life, social sentiment, and consequently on electoral sentiment," said Oliveto. "Reducing inflation was a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient."

On Sunday, the people of Villa Fiorito will vote with the rest of Argentina in elections to determine whether budget-slashing Milei, whose party is in a minority, will wield more power in Congress in the second half of his term.

In Argentina's presidential election of 2023, Milei got 27 percent of the neighbourhood's vote – a tally which dropped to 16 percent in a Buenos Aires Province legislative ballot in September.

Political scientist Matías Mora, a native of Villa Fiorito, said the country's economic woes did not start under Milei, though he "deepened and exacerbated it."

"People are going into debt to eat, and in the best of cases, they go into debt to start a business, but at very high rates," he said, noting that informal lenders in the neighbourhood charge between 40 percent and 50 percent monthly interest.

Mora coined the term "digital vendors" to refer to those who, outside of or in parallel with in-person fairs, offer various items through social media. 

"In this new ecosystem, where social media coexists with fair booths and WhatsApp groups make up for the lack of stable employment, a logic of survival emerges that responds more to popular ingenuity than to an entrepreneurial vocation," he wrote in an article for the RedAcción news agency.

And while Argentines are known for their resilience, it comes "at the cost of mental health, physical health, and being extremely worn out," he said.