The first stone of what, according to what was announced yesterday by the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), will start on Monday as the new Regional General Hospital No. 2, was placed almost a decade ago, in December 2014, less than two years before the end of César Duarte’s administration.
At an official event, the former president, now prosecuted for embezzlement, posed for a photograph in which he appears under a metal structure alongside his Health Secretary, Pedro Hernández, and the then PRI mayor of Juárez, Enrique Serrano.
The project was part of the National Development Plan of Enrique Peña Nieto’s government, also a source of funding, and by 2015, Hernández reported that it was 60 to 70 percent complete.
On a second visit with Duarte, however, Serrano said yesterday, he saw that “there were still many things missing, it was in the rough, it only had, for example, the finish on the floor, on the first level; the elevators were missing.”
The newspaper adds that in August 2016, the then Undersecretary of Public Works of the Border, Everardo Medina, reported that they would not finish the work and, in October of that year, at the beginning of his administration, the government of Javier Corral declared it abandoned, “a sign of official indolence” and announced that it would try to “recover the works started at the lowest possible cost.”
Unkept promises
It was not until August 2018 that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, then president-elect, visited the facility and, through a video with Corral, also said that he would resume construction and give it “priority,” just like other unfinished buildings he had found around the country. By 2020, Corral continued to announce that “before our administration ends, they (in López Obrador’s cabinet) are looking to finish the unfinished hospitals.”
The work, however, did not start during that state government but in September 2022, after López Obrador apologized “to the people of Juárez” in December 2021, when he also said that the director of the IMSS, Zoé Robledo, had informed him that it would start the following January and that, “in short, the specialty hospital will be completed by the end of 2023.”
This announcement was also unfulfilled, and was one more of those recorded in the history of this facility, which, until last week, was 85 percent built, according to the report by Jorge Bermúdez, a member of the citizen monitoring council.
As recently as July 30, during his morning press conference at the National Palace, López Obrador stated that “we are going to inaugurate it on August 9 (…) it is already finished”; but last Tuesday, he said that he had come “to basically supervise.”
Abandonment
Since January 2022, Andrés Carbajal Casas – who succeeded Medina in the Undersecretariat of Public Works on the Border in the first part of the Corral government – informed this media that, first, in October 2016, he refused to receive the installation by the contracting company due to shortages such as waterproofing and equipment in the cancerology unit.
Then, he said, the leaks caused a fungus problem and, over the months, vandalism and lack of maintenance worsened the deterioration.
“There was really no commitment to surveillance; the government ordered (the then representative of Corral in Juárez, Mario) Dena to put up security, to hire a company and, until the last day that I was there (in 2018), it was never put up; and that is a negligent act, that vandalism is the result of carelessness, of not paying attention to surveillance,” said Carbajal.
The physical work of the Cancerology department, he added, “lacked very little”, except for the area or bunker where the reactor would be located, but it still ended up abandoned and without resources.
“But the work was progressing, the physical work, except for the radiology area, was 98 percent complete. It was practically finished,” said Carbajal.
“There was no investment in the equipment to finish it, and there was also the same neglect, the lack of surveillance, both from the company that was in charge of the building, which was responsible for taking care of the building, and from the government itself, which should have had surveillance,” he added.
The journalistic archive also includes the dissemination of both federal and state audits with reports, among others, of an “arithmetic error” in the bidding of a contract for 208.7 million pesos by the Duarte administration, shortages of more than 14 million and omissions in the management of resources that did not specify that more than one fiscal year would be required to complete it.
Corral, Serrano said yesterday, let time pass. “They abandoned him completely, arguing that there was corruption. I don’t know if there was or wasn’t, but things are not done like that. If the current governor suspects corruption, the correct thing to do is to report it, investigate, but not to abandon the project,” added the former PRI candidate for governor.
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