Breathing in fire smoke is not healthy for anyone, but having a large portion of a country’s population endure such a situation for days is something else entirely.
This happened in Argentina, where millions of residents in two of the country’s three main urban centers, Buenos Aires and Rosario, suffer the effects of uncontrolled fires in the Paraná Delta.
Poor visibility, the smell of burning, and a dense layer of smoke – this situation has prevailed over the Paraná and Rio de la Plata rivers in recent days, particularly affecting allergy and asthma sufferers. The smoke covers large parts of the provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, and Entre Rios.
“Smoke and particulate matter mainly affect people with allergy-related respiratory diseases such as asthma and chronic rhinitis, but can also affect patients with COPD,” pulmonologist Martín Masdeu told Clarín. The sneezing and coughing in the streets prove him right.
The burning of grasslands on the islands of the Paraná Delta was particularly intense between July and August, exacerbated by an unprecedented drought in the area.
The National University of Rosario concludes that the inhabitants of the city where Lionel Messi was born “are exposed to extremely high levels of air pollution that jeopardize the ability of the lungs and heart to recover.”
The situation is not new; it repeats with greater or lesser ferocity almost every year, although this time, favored by the atmospheric situation, the strong presence of smoke in Buenos Aires gave the matter the status of news of national interest.
On Tuesday evening, the Argentine capital was shrouded in thick smoke that gave the streets a ghostly tinge.
The Paraná Delta wetland is one of the country’s most important ecosystems, and this year’s fires have affected more than 130,000 hectares with nearly 10,000 outbreaks.
While citizens blame the Ministry of Environment for its inability to stop the fires, Minister Juan Cabandié blames the judiciary, which he says has not changed “in 50 years.”
Pablo Javkin, the mayor of Rosario, the center of Argentina’s largest agricultural and livestock production center, shows his despair on his social media accounts.
“It is the criminals who set the fire; this is not a fire by producers or something calculated or programmed,” he said a few days ago, alongside a video showing dense columns of smoke rising from islands in the Paraná River.
“The government will not allow the fire to stop,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what else we have to do from Rosario to stop it.
According to the newspaper Página/12, “real estate speculation and the advance of the agricultural and livestock frontier seem to be the main reasons for the ecocide.” The judiciary has so far arrested a handful of beekeepers who appear to have nothing to do with the fires.
In the same newspaper, environmental lawyer and director of the Environmental Observatory of the National University of Rosario, Matías de Bueno, stressed that “repeated inhalation of this air can even cause heart attacks since the particles are very fine and can enter the bloodstream.”
Argentina’s parliament has yet to pass the wetlands bill, which has been on hold for years. De Bueno believes that at this point, we can speak of “environmental terrorism” that can only be stopped by an order from the federal government for the army to intervene.