we are all contaminated - Sistema de Bibliotecas de la Universidad ...

1.0 Introduction
A six-year old boy living on Gowland Street in the western Montevideo working class
neighborhood of La Teja suffered from years of puzzling health problems such as anemia,
bone and joint pain, and severe migraines. Unable to establish a clear diagnosis, a
pediatrician at a local health clinic conducted x-rays of his bones and discovered the presence
of lead. Follow up blood tests in August 2000 confirmed the child had lead poisoning. The
rest of the family and their dog were tested, and all had elevated blood lead levels. By
October 2000 the word had spread to the family’s neighbors. They recognized the same
symptoms in their own children and that the source was most likely an environmental one.
The alarm spread throughout the neighborhood as more children and families were discovered
with lead poisoning. Municipal officials of the decentralized Communal Zone Center 14 that
encompasses La Teja (see Figure 1) tried to keep the cases quiet to avoid a public panic.
National public health officials were informed but sat still. With no officially coordinated
response, Carlos Pilo, longtime La Teja resident and activist, notified his friend, Brecha
journalist Carlos Amorín. In February 2001, Amorín became the first to “break” the story
nationally, and the lead issue soon blanketed the media. La Teja residents organized
neighborhood assemblies that grew into the hundreds. Lead contamination was on everyone’s
minds, and officials, surprised by the public pressure, hurriedly formulated a response.
Creeping up silently and taking surprising directions, lead became Uruguay’s first
acknowledged massive contamination event.
Lead contamination in Uruguay occurred in a context of widening social inequality
and the dismantling of a welfare state once hailed as an “exceptional” model of development
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