Nicolas Wiñazki
05/30/2020 - 21:53
- Clarín.com
- Politics
Last May 21, national officials met with their peers from the province of Buenos Aires and the Federal Capital at the Casa Rosada. The Buenos Aires Minister of Health, Daniel Gollán, had started a political dispute with the Jefatura Porteña after describing that district as the "highest risk" because it was, according to him, the main focus of "irradiation" of the coronavirus throughout the country. According to sources present at that meeting, Gollán took the floor and said that his administration had carried out 28,000 tests to detect those infected with the coronavirus. The deputy chief of Buenos Aires, Diego Santilli, was surprised by the number: "Did they do 28,000 tests?" Gollán: "Yes", and kept talking. Santilli returned with his question: "Did you manage to buy 28 thousand test kits?" Gollán then thought for a moment: "Sorry, we didn't do 28 thousand tests. We did 53". Officials from the three governments were silent. Only 53 tests in the most populated and uneven district of Argentina? Gollán explained that this was the correct figure but insisted: "We are looking with great conscience at 28 thousand suspects of having been infected by the virus." He is a minister who tends to surprise and generate controversy even within "Christianity", the most radicalized sector of the ruling party for his statements to the media, his tweets, and for how he carries out the tactic to try to beat Covid-19.
Today the situation changed. The Ministry of Health of the Nation began testing thousands of residents of Buenos Aires identified by their symptoms as potential coronavirus patients. They are, for the most part, inhabitants of some of the 1800 slums that are precarious and pitiful in the most populated metropolis in Argentina. The plan will be deepened in the coming days. The teams of specialists will go to the deprived neighborhoods of Lomas de Zamora, Malvinas Argentinas, Tigre and Escobar. Some of those municipalities have already received the "Detectar" but the houses to auscultate are thousands upon thousands. The Villa Azul case, a focus of infection that grows in patients with Covid-19, under the jurisdiction of Quilmes and Avellaneda, scared the hardly scary mayor of the suburbs. And they fear it will reach Maciel Island.
Villa Azul was surrounded by the Buenos Aires Police.
Since Friday afternoon, another Buenos Aires town was confined by the security forces. It is the "José Luis Cabezas" neighborhood , baptized in this way to honor in a unique way the photographer from the Noticias Magazine who was assassinated in the summer of 1997. It is located in the town of Ensenada. The mayor of the area is called Mario Secco, one of the most radicalized "christinists" of those identified in this official political space.
Clarín anticipated yesterday this novelty that makes the rest of the Buenos Aires mayors tremble.
The communal chiefs of the Buenos Aires suburbs are afraid , according to the testimony of several of them who were consulted for this note. Fear is a feeling to which they are usually elusive. With few exceptions such as those caused by a cursed rival: the plague of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus, begins to show itself effective in its penetration into the slums of Buenos Aires. Through oral reports he heard from various mayors, Governor Axel Kiciloff changed his mind about the pandemic and the mandatory isolation.
Kiciloff, until 15 days ago, said privately that he believed in a slow opening of the confinement of Buenos Aires due to the economic crisis. No longer. The plague disturbs him. He took extreme measures, such as closing two previously named neighborhoods to control the positives of the Covid-19.
That happened just when officials like Gollán, and mayors like Mayra Mendoza, from Quilmes; the named Secco; or Jorge Ferraresi, from Avellaneda, had started an attack against the Buenosairean chief Horacio Rodríguez Larreta due to the growth of cases of coronavirus in the Federal Capital.
The scenario is complex. The social and health problems of the towns of the suburbs ended up prevailing over the political fights that were encouraged by the Kirchner family, as accepted by several PJ-K mayors in anonymous statements.
An example: according to qualified official sources, the Buenosairean governor Kiciloff could end his constant criticism against the management of his predecessor in office, María Eugenia Vidal.
The president of the Chamber of Deputies, Sergio Massa, works to seek conciliation between the two.
She acts as an interlocutor between the governor and the former governor, speaking to each of them on the phone, sending chats via WhatsApp or text messages.
Kiciloff would look for in the next days that the Buenosairean Legislature approves the possibility to him to request credits by multimillionaire amounts. Vidal's votes count.
Also the levels of boredom that the sayings of Kiciloff against Vidal would cause among the Buenosaireans informed about the political future.
The economic crack that generates an isolation from society frightens Buenos Aires mayors as well as more, as well as the national civil servant, despite public statements to the contrary.
The mayor of La Plata, Julio Garro, used a sample of reality to describe the anguish that people from La Plata live, and he himself, as he admitted to Clarín : "The municipality authorized a telephone number, 142, as the Unique Attention Service Neighborhood In the midst of the confinement, we began to receive more and more calls from people asking for food, what alerts us is that they are professionals, monotributistas, who are not used to receiving state aid , but who due to the crisis do not have enough to eat. They call with great shame to ask us for food bags. It is terrible. "
The National Government, it was said, will test more and more Buenos Aires citizens to know if they contracted coronaviruses . But covering all the inhabitants who live at risk due to the precariousness of their homes, the lack of drinking water, the poverty that affects them for years, is an impossible task of fulfillment.
The Covid-19 is the main enemy that now has the ruling party: the focus that grew from infection in Villa Azul, Avellaneda and Quilmes, worries the officials. The sanitarians of power are now looking at a city that grew devoid of everything within another city: Villa Itatí, also in Quilmes, bordering Villa Azul, but with a much larger population, estimated at between 60,000 and 80,000 inhabitants. It will have more positive of Covid-19, assured qualified sources of the Pink House and of intendencies K. Nothing to be alarmed, yet.
Paradoxes or coincidences of History.
The Quilmes party is called that because in that part of the country they were confined to compulsory jobs to pay taxes to the authorities to the "Kilme" aborigines, who arrived on foot after being defeated in the Calchaquí Valleys by the Spanish.
The Kilme were forced to settle in what was called the "Reduction of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross of the Kilme Indians ." Today, it is the municipality of Quilmes. Before the Colony, those lands, and much further, had three owners.
The founder of Buenos Aires, Juan de Garay, had "given" them as a prize to a trio of explorers who accompanied him on his initiatory journey in several ways. One of them had a last name that is very current today: Quirós . The same as that of the Buenos Aires Minister of Health, Fernán Quirós. They are not relatives.
The Kilme, with K, were locked in the reduction of the Santa Cruz, although they managed to break that norm and populated the bordering geography. Random matches.
Like the one that could be found in the man who for the first time postulated a microbiological theory, and who also saw in a microscope, although without identifying what it really was, the bacteria that caused the longest pandemic that the human being recorded: that of the bubonic plague.
He died in the year 1680.
A science genius: the German Athanasius Kircher .