The Government’s decision to distribute through the Child Nutrition Cooperating Foundation (Conin) a small part of the six thousand tons of food collected by Minister Sandra Pettovello once again puts the NGO and its owner, the doctor Abel Albino, who in 2018 scandalized half the country when he assured Congress that condoms are not useful to prevent AIDS, since the virus passes through porcelain. Far from being an isolated episode, that statement becomes central to explaining the Government’s choice, given that selecting the Foundation to distribute food does not seem to be related to anything other than ideology.
The choice of Conin is impossible to explain when looking at the territorial deployment of the Foundation, which barely has 100 centers in 18 provinces. Conin does not have representation in some of the districts where the hunger situation, according to Cáritas, is critical, such as Formosa, Misiones and Jujuy. On the other hand, only because of the great deployment of the Foundation in Mendoza, Pettovello decided to send a large part of the milk to expire to that province. The organization itself admitted yesterday through its executive director, Diego Álvarez Rivero, and its medical care director, Gabriela Sabio, that their rushed action in response to a need from the national government put them in a situation of extreme tension and they do not have the operational capacity to distribute all the food collected in the Villa Martelli and Tafí Viejo warehouses.
The decision also goes against the anti-intermediary discourse that President Javier Milei insists on every time he talks about food. Conin will replace other intermediaries, the social movements, who displease the Government; but like them he will be acting, effectively, between the State and the poor; and also, like them, it demands from those assisted a commitment, a compensation, which in this case has nothing to do with community life (as can be understood the Polo Obrero’s demand that some of its beneficiaries support themselves with their work and their contribution economically the dining rooms where the food is distributed – excluding, if there had been, cases of extortion -) but with moral decisions that govern the lives of the women who approach Conin.
To understand in depth how Conin works and how it delivers food to those who need it, the graduate thesis by sociologist Camila Stimbaum is revealing. She worked in one of the Foundation’s centers in La Plata and, with that privileged access added to her scientific knowledge, she was able to give a perspective of the compensation required from the beneficiaries of the assistance. The use of the feminine is appropriate when talking about those who are the object of Conin’s policies because, as Stimbaum defines, the Foundation is a social intervention device, but it is also a “gender device” that, through a comprehensive approach, seeks to reproduce a lifestyle that confines the woman to the house, with the family, taking care of the children, and places the man in the role of a non-communicative provider who performs hard work.
The model for this intervention is given to children and their mothers, and to young pregnant women. These people are received in one of the Foundation’s centers and, after a series of interviews, admitted to a program called Nutrir, which lasts between one and three years and has weekly activities that those who want to receive food aid must complete.
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The program is far from the simplicity of delivering a plate of hot food to whoever approaches. People may be rejected during the admission process or disengaged if they fail to comply with some of its tenets or resist some of the values that Conin tries to instill in them. At Stimbaum’s work, a social worker says: “When we do the admission interview, there is a contract that explains what it consists of and what it is going to do, and you have to agree. This includes the performance of certain tasks by women, not stealing, respecting others for their condition, respect human life from conception, In other words, it has a lot of requirements.”
That same perspective is encouraged during the “Health Workshops” in which women who enter the program have to participate. The most important is “Natural Family Planning” which, as its name indicates, “aims to teach women to control their fertility through the teaching of a method in accordance with the religious ideology of Nurture, the Method of Billings Ovulation.” Stimbaum relates in her thesis that she participated in one of those workshops, in which an obstetrician explained that “sexual intercourse is penis and vagina” and that “if there is other sexual behavior it is not normal”; that “the family is made up of the mother, the father and the children” and that “couples join together for life”; and that, again, “life begins at conception.”
For those who comply there are rewards, which have to do with the frequency of delivery of clothing, footwear, bedding or diapers. Women who demonstrate commitment usually have priority. Those who do not comply may receive fewer items and also less food in the weekly bag. A nutritionist relates at Stimbaum’s work: “If there is a mother who always arrives at 10:30, 11:00, she is given a wake-up call and they are not given the entire bag. You give them only the milk or you see. He or she can’t go to the closet. She sets them as guidelines.”
Stimbaum’s work, which Soledad Vallejos highlighted in Página/12 in 2018, shows other aspects of the ideological alignment between Conin and the libertarians. The Foundation, for example, postulates as its mission “to achieve a country with equal opportunities where individuals can deploy their genetic potential”. This communion of views and interests cannot make up for the management shortcomings of a Ministry that took more than six months to deliver food to vulnerable sectors. However, he explains why Javier Milei’s government decides to keep the intermediaries, even when they are not able to cover the entire country.
