Eight months have passed since Alberto Fernández defined Gildo Insfrán, governor of Formosa in the last 25 years, as “Of the best politicians and the best human beings that I know.” What came next did not agree with the President. “His greatest obsession is that his neighbors live better and better”, had completed.
If so, the “Dear Gildo” hides it well. At this point there is no doubt that the way his government managed the quarantine was a sum of excesses, human rights violations and authoritarian nonsense. An embarrassment that continues to grow and whose shock wave is already hitting the door of the Casa Rosada.
The sequence is long and included the woman who drove 3,000 km from Chubut to visit her mother suffering from cancer, but as she was held at the provincial border, when she was able to enter her mother had died.
Also to Mauro Ledesma (23), who drowned in the Bermejo River while trying to swim between Chaco and Formosa. In El Colorado his wife and 3-year-old daughter were waiting for him. He had applied to enter on August 25 and his body was found on October 11.
To the drama are added data that certify the scarce vocation of openness. In October, the government of Formosa refused to authorize flights from Buenos Aires, as did the other provinces; and this month he decreed a return to the strict Phase 1 of quarantine, a national exception.
The excess curve added on Thursday the arrests of councilors Gabriela Neme and Celeste Ruiz Díaz, who denounced the isolation of 22 days (the only one in the country) to which those who arrive in the province are forced, and the conditions of the health centers, in which Covid patients coexist with healthy people, there are no beds and they all share a bathroom.
To the factual examples was added the horror story contributed by Jorge González, Minister of Government, Justice, Security and Labor (nothing else?) Of the province. He justified in “the cultural characteristics” of the people of Formosa the need to retain and monitor them for their isolation. “Because if they don’t leave their homes ”, explained.
More classist and repressive is not achieved.
Why has the sum of abuses not found a brake in more than ten months? One possible answer is that the only correction came from the Supreme Court of Justice, which at the end of November ordered the entry of 8,000 people held at the border.
From the National Government, on the other hand, the process was accompanied by the presidential praise at the beginning and a distracted look afterwards. Only Victoria Donda, a voice devalued by her own crisis, described the measures as “Not very nice” and “of emergency”. If until now that strategy did not pose costs, the claim of a federal intervention or of the Judicial Power in the province, the marches in Buenos Aires and in Formosa and the complaints in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights suggest a change of scenery. At this point silence is complicity.
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