Lomas de Zamora (Argentina) (AFP) – An old T-shirt for a handful of rice or some eggs: ever more Argentines are relying on barter to survive in a fast-worsening economy dominating the debate ahead of presidential elections Sunday.
On the side of a dusty road in the impoverished Villa Fiorito neighborhood in Buenos Aires province, locals display old clothes, shoes or used household items on blankets spread out on the ground.
Articles of clothing are exchanged for a bag of pasta, some sugar, a few biscuits. Some items sell for a few hundred pesos -- the equivalent of a few dimes.
"Food is very expensive," 25-year-old Luz Lopez told AFP from behind her makeshift stall on the edge of a small square of Villa Fiorito -- celebrated for giving the world Diego Maradona, whose image oversees the bustling trade from numerous large murals in his honor.
In and around the teeming Argentine capital, it is an increasingly common sight for people to knock on doors asking for second-hand clothes to wear, barter or sell.
"Sometimes you're out walking, you find things, you wash them and bring them here" to trade, Lopez, a mother of two small children, said about her frustratingly limited options for making ends meet.
Elsewhere on the square, 28-year-old Maria Fernanda Diaz told AFP she sleeps under a pedestrian bridge and lives mainly on alms. "Let the politicians come here to see how we live!" she exclaimed.
Four in every ten Argentines today live below the poverty line, according to official figures, with year-on-year inflation at 143 percent. Now, in 2023, "in a context of great precarity, the barter is back," said Luzzi. As economy minister, presidential candidate Sergio Massa has overseen Argentina's slide into triple-digit inflation.
He unexpectedly scored the most votes in a first voting round last month, with many seemingly scared off by Massa's rival Javier Milei, a self-described "anarcho-capitalist" who has vowed to "dynamite" the central bank, dollarize the economy and slash public spending.
"Argentines have a strong capacity for resilience," said Elisabet Bacigalupo, an economist at the Abeceb consultancy which expects inflation to reach 190 percent by year-end. But whoever the next president is, she said, the country will likely go through more "months of recession and rising poverty."