Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, in the second part of the ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, immortalized an expression that remains valid today: "
Pray to God, Sancho, that it be so, because
there is a long way from saying to doing."
The history of Argentina accumulates a number of sayings that support the phrase written by this great figure of literature.
The return of the train to Mendoza
reminds us of some episodes that occurred with pompous and bubbly presidential announcements of events that were never materialized.
Carlos Menem, in 1996, made an extravagant promise when announcing that
"Argentina would have a space flight system"
, stating that
"soon a flight system will be tendered through which, from a platform, these ships will
leave the atmosphere, they will go up to the stratosphere, and from there they will choose the place where they want to go
, in such a way that in an hour and a half we can be in Japan, Korea or anywhere in the world "
.
The announcement was not accidental, since it pursued the objective of
diverting public attention from the problems that his government was facing,
and it became one of the unforgettable lies of Argentine politics.
It was a staging, in the best style of the successful 1997 film "Lies that kill", of a project that would never be carried out, that is,
a mockery of citizens
at its best.
The President of the Nation Alberto Fernández together with the Minister of Economy and Governor Rodolfo Suárez were present at the second arrival of the passenger train in Palmira.
Néstor Kirchner, in 2006, made one of the great promises of his government: the creation of
a high-speed train, or bullet train,
that would link the cities of Córdoba, Rosario and Buenos Aires in three hours.
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, in January 2008, while being President of the Nation, in the White Room of the Casa Rosada, officially announced the creation of the famous
Argentine High-Speed Train: the Cobra Train.
The initiative promised to generate up to 25,000 jobs just for the construction of the roads that would extend some 710 kilometers.
The train would have a maximum speed of up to 320 kilometers per hour and a transport capacity of 1,018 passengers.
In his speech, he stated:
“It is a leap into modernity.
And modernity is an absolutely strategic matter”,
explaining how the
Cobra Train would work:
“You access a train station in the center of the city, you only have to arrive one minute before it leaves the platform and you also arrive at the center of the city, to which he decides to go, without the need to go to the airports, which are generally always on the outskirts of the city and require half an hour or more to reach an airport and an hour, at least, from check in”.
As is known, this
pharaonic and utopian project came to nothing,
becoming the anecdote of a railway ghost for the country.
This is how the first passenger train in almost 30 years arrived in Mendoza.
Neighbors of San Martín, the passenger train returned to travel through the Mendoza tracks.
After 36 hours of travel from Retiro, a railway formation returned to transit from March 10, 1993.
But not so for Ricardo Jaime, former Secretary of Transportation of Kirchnerism, who was sentenced by the Federal Oral Court to two and a half years in prison suspended in the trial in which he was found guilty of having agreed to a million-dollar bribe with the company
.
which was awarded the tender to build the promised and never carried out
"Bullet Train"
.
Clearly the K corruption could not be absent on this occasion.
The opportunities that are presented cannot be wasted, that seems to be the first law for their representatives.
President Alberto Fernández, in 2023, inaugurates the passenger train to Mendoza, which
is slower than the one that stopped working in 1993
,
that is, 30 years ago.
The first president stated in his speech:
“We are celebrating that the train has arrived in Mendoza and it is an achievement.
Many believed that we were going to sell a lie but here is the train"
and he expressed his agreement saying that
"Palmira will stop being a ghost town where jobless people wander."
In addition, as his address could not miss the historical review to which we are accustomed, he improvised an absurd allusion to the event with the crusade carried out for the freedom of America, expressing that "it is ironic, but this is the train of
the San Martín line, with which – as so many times in history – San Martín once again returns to Mendoza, this time in the name of the train”.
His reasons will have for omitting the pertinent mentions of reality: the frequency will be weekly, to travel around
1,000 kilometers it will take between 26 and 28 hours because there are sections in which the train must go at 40 kilometers
per hour and they will be The new jobs that are produced in the Mendoza town where the train will end its journey, which, on the other hand, is located at a distance of 40 kilometers from the capital of the province, are insignificant.
Seeing where we have started from and where we have arrived, reality itself bears witness to the final result of the lying Peronist story that only confirms that "there is a long way from saying to doing."
Oscar Edgardo Garcia
/ osedgar@yahoo.com
THE EDITOR'S COMMENT
By Cesar Dossi
The pathways to a safe destination
The train route, which will operate from April, will be on a weekly basis.
It will link the Retiro station with the city of Palmira, Mendoza.
Get in, sit down, settle in and relax, sleep if necessary because there are sections in which the convoy travels at
40 kilometers per hour
to cover a distance of 1,025 kilometers
in
28 hours, 8 hours more than the last trip in March 1993.
"We are celebrating that the train has arrived in Mendoza and it is an achievement. They thought
we were going to sell a lie but here is the train”
, said Fernández, in front of K and railway militants.
This time he didn't lie, the train arrived,
as he could, late
.
Perhaps the President made that clarification (
"Many believed that we were going to sell a lie"
) because that is what we are used to with his arrogance and pedantry.
His spokeswoman, Gabriela Cerruti, also uses
the same presidential dictionary
to vociferate the irrational, and launched yesterday during Remembrance Day, that
journalism and Justice must be
"purged" and insisted on
"disarming the foundations of bureaucratic structures and authoritarian”.
In other words, since she is part of the government, does she want to disarm Peronism and trade unionism?
And speaking of "
selling
lies" , as the President said, Kirchnerism also turned March 24 into a launch of the "Cristina 2023
outcry
operation"
.
behind the re-election of the President
.” Already in 2022, on that same day, human rights organizations did not hide their discomfort regarding the course taken by the President.
The train to Mendoza, like the management of Alberto F.,
slow and on the verge of extinction
, is in danger of derailing, and carries in its wagons
the weariness of a society
that does not need a "bullet train", but rather to build tracks to may the country travel fast and robust
towards a safe destination.
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