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quality standard that permits 50µg/L of lead, or five times that allowed by the WHO. 11
A
1996 newspaper story documents that OSE officials were aware of the problem but made a
calculated choice of not lowering the permitted lead levels. As engineer Castagnino stated to
the La República daily (January 9, 1996): “If the OSE Directorate decides to lower the lead
level norm, we have to make an investment of 40 million dollars.”
Growing impoverishment and unemployment fueled a housing crisis compounded by
IMF-mandated reforms of the heavily indebted Uruguayan Mortgage Bank (BHU). The
reforms drastically reduced housing credits and helped push unprecedented numbers of people
from formal housing into makeshift squatter settlements, called asentamientos in Uruguay
(Apezteguía 2007). Many of these settlements were built on marginal lands long
contaminated by industrial waste, particularly from the battery and metallurgic industries. 12
In La Teja, industrial waste was used as landfill primarily from 1969-1980, when the area’s
population expanded and workers settled near industries. 13
The housing from this period was
more formal, made of solid material and integrated into the urban infrastructure, and the
landfill was necessary due to the gaping holes left from an earlier period (late 19 th and early
20 th centuries) in which local quarries provided the raw material for the geographic expansion
of Montevideo. The squatter settlements, on the other hand, were built more recently on
remaining empty lots of landfill, along flood-prone riverbanks, or in the case of one La Teja
settlement, on the grounds of an abandoned scrap metals smelter. 14
11 OSE and the MSP lead regulations date to the same year (1982), suggesting a coordinated, government-level
decision. I do not have further information regarding the origins of these regulations, however.
12 See Chapter 3 for personal histories of battery waste dumping in an area that later became a large squatter
settlement.
13 Interview with Luis Lazo, IMM-DDA, February 3, 2004. The IMM and MVOTMA estimated the dates using
satellite imagery and Geographic Information System (GIS) technology.
14 See Chapter 5 for further discussion.
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