A cold wave with an unusual rigor in Argentina, even for the southern winter, has dropped temperature records and caused the death of at least nine people across the country for 10 days, while the population of the homeless has been increasing, according to a specialized NGO.
The cold wave has intensified since the start of the week, the thermometer reaching -1.9 ° C Wednesday at dawn in Buenos Aires, a record for 34 years, according to the national weather service.
In the large suburb of the capital, -7.4 ° C were recorded in El Palomar, 25 km, a record for 58 years, and the second lower temperature since 1935.
Atlantic beaches, like that of Miramar (450 km from Buenos Aires), have been covered with snow earlier this week, an unprecedented fact for 12 years.
The country’s coldest city in recent days was Maquinchao, a small Patagonian town of 3,000 inhabitants, 1,400 km south of Buenos Aires, where the temperature has oscillated since Monday between -12 and -18 ° C. Far from the ”record of -35 ° C dating from 1991.
NGOs specializing in homeless assistance, Proyecto 7 said nine people have died because of the cold across the country in ten days since the start of winter, a figure not confirmed by the authorities for lack of an official global statement.
The NGO has notably mentioned cases reported by provincial media in recent days: a sixty -something man found dead on Monday on the step of a garage in Mar del Plata (south), another Tuesday on a public bench in Parana (North).
“There are many more families and mothers in the street, grandparents, many more children,” said Radio El Destape Horacio Avila, Proyecto 7 coordinator, qualifying the past year as “fatal and disastrous” under the combined effect of loss of use and deregulated rents and pointing the economic policy of the ultra -liberal president Javier Milei Milei.
According to the latest official figures available for Buenos Aires, some 4,050 people were on the street in November 2024 in the capital, a leap of 23% compared to November 2023.
Posted on July 3 at 8:18 a.m., AFP
