When the day ends and sleep begins to overtake me, I like to read or watch something entertaining on television. Those of us who, out of conviction, or moral responsibility or simple obstinacy, manage to keep ourselves informed and to denounce inconvenient facts need an escape valve so as not to lose our sanity after all the struggles, miseries and shameful events that take place before our eyes every day.

Eventually a moment arrives when we harden ourselves, and then only from time to time does one of these news reports manage to kill us a bit more inside.  Today I saw one of these.  Ezequiel Ferreyra has died of a brain tumor at just seven years of age.  There is never enough solace when a child dies, but this case was very special; or rather, shamefully, nothing special at all.  He was something that in theory does not exist anywhere: a child slave.  Nevertheless, he lived –if it can be called that– in a country like so many others, more or less free, with better or worse protection for workers and with a so-called judicial system that defends the rights of its citizens, a category which, as in this case, does not always include children.  

His job was one of those reserved for the poorest of the poor, for those who do not count.  For the parts of the machine, children of other parts of the machine.  His function consisted of removing the blood and excrement of chickens and handling poisons for a company that sells eggs to large supermarkets in Argentina.  His role in life was to work for the machine’s owners, those who in their homes certainly keep excrement and poisons out of the reach of their own children so they do not get sick, because their own children are more important children than the rest; and as a result they have the latest videogames and an I-Phone that Ezequiel paid for with the brain tumor caused by the work he did for those who own the machine and his parents.

Ezequiel was not a child.  He was a slave.  In other words, he was neither a child, nor a person, nor anything.  Only a cog in the machine, and it broke.  Time to throw it out and buy another.