In an oven-hot slum beside idle factories, a hungry Julio Fernandez, 38, said he told his children Father Christmas was too frightened to visit this year.
Standing in an impoverished street of low brick shacks, dogs lying nearby in the shade of a rusting, corrugated tin awning, he listed his four children's ages, six, eight, 14 and 15.
"I do not have anything to give them," Fernandez said.
He lifted up his shirt to show his empty stomach.
"I have nothing."
On Christmas Eve, the traditional time for Roman Catholics to celebrate with a midnight meal and presents, his children asked about Father Christmas.
"We had to tell them that because of the problems, Father Christmas was too scared to come," he said.
His father, 64-year-old Juan Fernandez, surveyed the empty hulks of nearby factories.
"There used to be 100 workers right there," he said, pointing at a factory across the street that processed leather for export and provided him with work until it closed in 1997.
Further away, the towering steel vats of a cooking oil factory once employed 1,000, he said. Now it lies idle, likely a victim of the peso's one-to-one link with the dollar, which has squeezed exporters.
"They used to call you to come and do more work," the grandfather said. But when the factory closed, Juan Fernandez was left destitute, one year away from qualifying for a pension.
"We eat what we can find," he said.
Residents advised against venturing further into the slum, which lies like an island of poverty in the middle of the working and middle-class town of Avellaneda, home to 346,000 people south of the capital.
The economic meltdown that has left one third of Argentina's 36 million people in poverty and 18.3 percent of the workforce out of a job, crushed the country's middle class.
But it left many of the poorest people without even food. While protests engulfed the richer center of Buenos Aires last week, a desperate people turned to looting in the suburbs.
"I am proud of what my people did," Julio Fernandez said of the looters. "Here the government policy is to rob. The politicians take everything," he added.
Next door, Daniel Aguirre, 50, leaned in the shade against the outside wall of his home.
"Some people have something to eat, those who do not go hungry," he said. "We had a dinner."
Just a few blocks from the slum, many of Argentina's middle class were feeling the pressure of new poverty.
"This life is not good," said 81-year-old pensioner Esther Alvarez, who fretted about the new government's plans to start paying pensioners with a new quasi-currency, the argentino, instead of pesos.
Her grandson helped her survive, Alvarez said.
"My pension does not cover it. I have to get medicines, go to the doctor."
Former teacher Griselda Restano, 68, said she was angry at the government's imposition of stiff rules this month preventing people getting money out of the bank.
"But they won't beat me," she said.
RSS