What is entering a complete crisis -- according to Massimo Pavarini -- is the myth of economic liberalism: now it seems impossible to believe that the wealth nations enjoy corresponds to the generalized well-being of their citizens. Actually, the industrial revolution had already taught us that an increasing accumulation of wealth came together with an increasing and more generalized accumulation of extreme poverty. Maybe -- back then, like never before -- this poverty that spread throughout the great industrial cities and the inevitable social tension this reality brought about should have deeply worried the vigilant minds of the time. Today, we still stumble on corpses. It is in vain that poets pull the petals off nightingales.

Perhaps, she just wanted to find a promise nobody had ever made for her, not even in her first memories. Maybe, a verb that would make her childhood an essential entity, leaning against the sway of the wheat fields. But death fell down on her body, where thirteen years of neglect nested like fleeting doves.
It happened on November 20, 2007, once the night had already laid out her mourning skirt, when little 13-year-old Aldana -- who lived in Villa Azul (Blue Village), in the area called the Bernal Triangle in the Province of Buenos Aires -- left her home with 9-year-old Ivan heading toward a nearby candy shop. Aldana -- in order to save her little brother from an electric wire fence separating the hungry from the satiated -- received a severe electric shock. She died a few days later.
The news article does not provide the last name of the owner of this lethal house who -- with the whims of an executioner -- drowned Aldana in a cold death well. The chronicles of these Villa Azul kids are this short. With a kind of death that is always evil, but sometimes even more than that. Because it clasps a childhood that is marked by a time of no angels.
Social exclusion is a cave where silence rains. That is why death only reintegrated Aldana into the very same darkness her neglect inaugurated. Surely, in the night’s background, dogs were barking, like futile sounds. There was no ash country needing any girls born into poverty. There is a lump in my throat!
The Spanish language original version of this article can be viewed at the web site www.pelotadetrapo.org.ar.