Workers for a cleaner environment

Being cartonero was never easy. A nights work collecting paper, metal, glass and plastic from the streets leave you with less than a minimum of pesos for a living, in addition to marginalized social status.
Residing in the outskirts of the capital, around 40 000 cartoneros depend on transport to carry them (and their residues) to the recycling stations outside the city limits.
For a few years, the state-run TBA railway company has provided a free morning train, el Tren Blanco, for them to "safely" go home every day. Not so aymore. December 28ht the line was shut down.
A journalist friend of mine took the train with them a couple of times to make an article for a French magazine, and he was relieved when the management decided to stop the service. "If only people and trolleys were put in different compartments! As the practice was, with a sudden brake, people would get crushed between tons of compact paper."
Of course they demand their transport back, claiming they work for a cleaner environment. Which they certainly do.
For two months now, some 40 families (around 90 people, among them about 30 children) have camped under very humble conditions in a better neighourhood in the northern part of town. The neighbours wanted them gone, claiming they were a hazard to health and security (for stealing (?) their garbage)?
So last Thursday, before the sun rose, 100 men; police and soldiers from the infantry, removed them by power, without a judicial order. Nine cartoneros were arrested, several of them wounded, among them a women and two minors. The rest were set on trucks and moved outside the city.
Their humble homes, clothes, food, swaddling cloths and soaps were crushed into the garbage trucks who were summoned to assist. Even their trolleys and two months work of paper collection where brutally carried away and destroyed.
In front of their eyes.
Now they are left with nothing. I get sick. What is so different with their demands for decent working conditions and how they are treated from what happend nearly 100 years ago during the tragic week?
Similar camps are found several places along the old line, and they fear the same treatment. With good cause.
Poor people are again beeing harrassed by those of better means.

Nelly's friend Selva refuse to go to the neighbourhood square were the cartoneros are squatting: "It's all ruined, full of garbage, dogshit - it' a mess!"
Nelly: "Look..the artistic intallation is called "Project Sustainable Plaza" and these scuptures will be shown in the next Venice Biennale."
Selva: "I hope they will not show the cartoneros.."