In the face of the imminent arrival of Javier Milei to San Miguel de Tucumán to participate in the event on July 9the Municipality tried to evict a historic used book fair that has been operating for 33 years on a property adjacent to the Historic House for aesthetic reasons.: so that the president sees the “clean” corner.
“They broke the lock of two kiosksthey took out the books and threw them into a truck”, he tells Time Alberto Aguirre, one of the historical fairground workers. The eviction was stopped by the intervention of the stallholders themselves, who had not been warned in advance. When the private garbage collection company 9 de Julio, on orders from the Municipality, began to throw the books into the trash, the workers contacted a lawyer and filed a police report..
“The lawyer told us that what they were doing was damage and theft, having broken into kiosks and breaking locks since It is private property and also that whoever was doing it was an outsourced company.“, account.
A few hours later, the events spread to the local media, then the municipal authorities contacted the fairgrounds, who this Friday will be received by the president of the Deliberative Council, through efforts carried out by councilor Gastón Gómez (Libres del Sur).
The photographs that circulated of the event form a sad landscape of the political moment that the country is experiencing: dozens of books carelessly thrown into the bed of a truck by the outsourced company 9 de Julio that collects urban waste in the city. A discard of books in the name of Independence.
Booksellers for over 40 years
Aguirre says that the Used book fair has been around for over 40 years“it was created in 1976, the hard times” and it was moved several times until In 1991, when Tucumán was under federal intervention, they were granted authorization to operate on the property adjacent to the Historic House. that belongs to the nation.
“The controller Chiche Aráoz and the Minister of Government Troncoso told us ‘find a property and we will see how we fix it’ and This was all mountain. “When we took possession, we took out 15 containers with garbage, we cleaned the property and we have been operating here for 33 years,” remember.
Later, the mayor asked them to accept that the fair be extended to other types of ventures. “The then mayor Amaya told us that he knew that we had possession and told us that these people wanted to work on the premises, we are also workers, humble, booksellers and We agreed to have the entrepreneurs fair in the south plaza, where the area was divided in two.”, he expresses.
The booksellers of the Historical House are 14 andsays Alberto, not only can you find any type of book there, but also They act as tour guides for the place where they are locatedBut they also have to find a way to live because it is not enough.
“About ten books are sold a day, so if I sell some, other colleagues don’t sell anything and have to go out and find something. because we are sellers. This fair was born from those of us who work selling on the street, none of us were lucky enough to work in the state or in a company.“We are workers who live from day to day,” he comments. In addition to books, Alberto sells hats and ponchos at folklore festivals in the north.
Working aesthetics is not enough
The influx of tourists, especially retirees, in the area of the Historic House, makes the fair one of the most visited destinations for them.especially when the tourist offices close. That is why, explains Alberto, They have arranged tables and chairs to display the books, lend them and sell them. It is these customs that are not consistent with the aesthetics that the Municipality hopes to give to the president of the Nation.
“They always come, with a month or 20 days left until July 9 and from no government we had help, improvement, we are willing to pay for the improvements, we don’t want them to give us anything, we want dialogue,” he says. Aguirre clarifies that the fairmen are hard-working, humble people, “but we also have culture.”
“They told us that they had to change the aesthetic part, that we couldn’t have tables and chairs but tourists come here, older people, and we put the books for them and let them sit, tourists have to be treated wellalso to retirees who come to see Tucumán and sometimes can’t afford to buy a book,” he says.
“The books were not wet or exposed to the elements”
From the Municipality, Carolina Oliver, Undersecretary of Institutional Relationsdeclared to The Gazette that it was not an attempted eviction. “What was done is part of a work that began two months ago, whose The objective is to highlight the square next to the Historical House and the Plaza de los Congresales”. Likewise, he stated that the operation included a registration process for merchants and artisans who operate in the area.
“We started the registration two months ago, and to date we have registered three booksellers, who were the only ones in conditions to operate legally. The rest were abandoned and dilapidated stalls, with accumulated material, wet and broken books.and garbage scattered everywhere,” he stated.
Regarding books, he said that “They were wet, broken and exposed to the elements. “Anyone who considers that they are their property and that they have some value can claim them without problems.”
Asked about these sayings, Aguirre emphasized “it is not as the undersecretary says, there are images of how they threw the books on top of a truck. Books cannot be trash, they are culture and they were not wet or exposed to the elements.. ¿How does the Municipality hire a private company to do this?”.
He adds that the vendors do not want to confront each other. He says that they have presented successive ordinance projects to improve the premises in previous administrations, and that they do not want anything given to them. All they want is to work.
