For 21 months, 74 families have endured municipal abandonment
Visitors come and we have to tidy up the house. Asuncion is hosting a sporting event so you have to sweep everything ugly under the rug. What a novelty. Stroessner also did it by sending beggars and peddlers to guard with each important party in which he strutted from his box on Avenida Mariscal López, which he used to share with some bell character from the surroundings, while the symmetrical phalanxes of the Military School paraded, marines and infantry. Nothing new under the sun.
Are we so shallow that we care more about what people think of us than what we really are? The country received, only in April of this year, some 20,000 tourists who, when entering through Falcón or the International Airport, had Asunción as their obligatory destination. Following this primary way of thinking, all of them must have been quite shocked because the city usually presents an ugly picture of a refugee camp. The curious thing is that -happily- there are no tribal conflicts, earthquakes, serial tornadoes or civil wars here. Even the floods have missed the appointment for some years. However, we still have victims. Where do they come from? More than the fire that occurred in Chacarita 635 days ago, they come from the inability of public management to provide permanent solutions to problems accumulated over decades. Twenty-one months ago, the residents expelled by the incident were occupying Plaza Constitución, with two direct consequences: an inhumane way of life for the 74 families and the physical and aesthetic destruction of one of the most emblematic green spaces in Asunción. Now they are being taken elsewhere, more as an aesthetic urgency than as a definitive urban solution.
Just as the Spanish conquerors were surprised to see Indians who “covered their shame with trusses”, our citizens today try in vain to cover other shame, not the people abandoned to their fate after losing everything in an accident, but the shameful abandonment in which This is a city that does not deserve the misfortune of being governed by those who today sit back in the mayor’s chair and in the seats of the board. In the words of Oliver Cromwell, they have been sitting there too long for no good.
Inept and insensitive, they dishonor the function that they should dignify.
