Just a short time after the Government announced the removal of transportation subsidies, two of the governors of the affected provinces came out to criticize the decision.
Alfredo Cornejo
from Mendoza
maintained that the measure
"fails to comply with the 2017 Fiscal Pact"
, while
Maximiliano Pullaro
from Santa Fe stated that his province
"has always been discriminated against"
.
"The elimination of transportation subsidies for the interior of the country, maintaining those of the AMBA, fails to comply with the 2017 Fiscal Pact.
Strong asymmetries remain between the Buenos Aires suburbs and the rest of the country
. The fiscal order is welcome, but it must be equitable," Cornejo wrote in his official X platform account.
The governor of the UCR also shared the link to the full text of the agreement by which "the provinces committed to gradually lowering some distorting taxes on the economy."
Pullaro, meanwhile, highlighted that "they always discriminated against the province of Santa Fe" and that they never believed "that subsidies were going to be cut."
"Now
1.5 billion pesos are taken away per month
, which was a small part of the subsidies that the Nation gave to support transportation subsidies," he said in statements made in San Javier.
The Santa Fe governor questioned that “again” they are “left alone” and noted: “
There is always discrimination against Santa Fe
in particular and within the interior of the Argentine Republic in terms of subsidies.”
In that sense, he recalled that since the previous government, 85% of transportation subsidies were allocated to AMBA -Federal Capital and the suburbs-, "and that is why the difference is so significant and important in the cost of the ticket."
Pullaro also maintained that they will maintain the subsidy that the province of Santa Fe has with transportation, "which is around 2,000 million," and will update "because clearly the costs of living have increased throughout the province," although they cannot take charge. of what the Nation does not command, with a province that has been left to us with a very, very large deficit".
Finally, he stressed that “what we are not going to allow is for them to come to dominate or mess with the productive system of the province of Santa Fe. We
are not going to allow any national government to come for more withholdings from the countryside and industry
. because that threatens the generation of employment and the economic growth of many regions of the Argentine Republic, but mainly of my province, the province of Santa Fe.”
The Ministry of Transportation reported this Thursday that it will reduce the subsidy to companies providing passenger transportation services under national jurisdiction, to concentrate help on users who need it most directly, channeling said assistance through the Single Ticket System. Electronic (SUBE).
To this end, it was decided to end the freezing of fares that had been inherited from the previous administration on trains and buses in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (AMBA) for lines under national jurisdiction and eliminate the Interior Compensation Fund, whose sums were also received by companies providing services from the rest of the country, that is, outside the AMBA, as reported in a statement.
Transportation stressed that "these decisions are consistent with the Fiscal Pact that provincial governors and the national government signed in 2017 and 2018" and along the same lines was the presidential spokesperson Manuel Adorni, who assured that "this decision is related to the fiscal pact that the governors and the national government signed, where they committed to progressively eliminate differential subsidies in transportation for the Metropolitan Area and established that the provinces would define the different compensations that each public transportation company would need."
"The objective of all this is equity throughout the country and to stop benefiting some to the detriment of benefiting others," Adorni also said, in contrast to what Cornejo proposes.
"Act of violent emotion", the former Minister of Transportation questioned the elimination of subsidies to the Interior
Diego Giuliano, former Minister of Transportation of the Alberto Fernández government, today questioned the government's decision to remove all subsidies from the provinces.
"Eliminating the Federal Transportation Compensation Fund cannot be an act of violent emotion. That Fund is established in the Budget Law and it was the task of Sergio Massa and ours to recover it to balance what they had destroyed in the Macri government," he said. .
The announcement, which was interpreted as a blow to the governors after the failure of the Omnibus Law, "is not reasonable," said the now national representative for Santa Fe.
"The governors defended their provinces against the #OmnibusLaw. Taking revenge against them affects millions of users. It is not federal. It is not reasonable," he wrote.