While the director of the Yacyreta Binational Entity was making a speech in front of several authorities, Axel’s father, a boy who died two months ago, Axel, who suffered from SMA, addressed the authorities, especially Nicanor Duarte and Mario Abdo, demanding more health care in the interior of the country.
Mario Abdo Benítez apologized this Thursday to a man who interrupted an act he was leading to denounce that his little son died due to the lack of a pediatric intensive care unit in his city.
“I apologize, not only to him, (but) for much of what we politicians have not done in his time and in his moment,” said Abdo Benítez, in a speech in the city of Coronel Oviedo (some 140 kilometers to the southeast of the Paraguayan capital).
He assumed his responsibility “as part of a political class” from which he considered that “much more must be demanded, because much more can be done.”
The president spoke after Aníbal Rojas interrupted the speech of an official during the inauguration of some health units at the Coronel de Oviedo hospital.
Rojas told the president and the other attendees that his son Axel, a little over a year old, recently died after being diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).
“In our hospital there is no intensive care unit for children,” the man grieved. “When Axel went into crisis,” he added, with a broken voice, “the doctors here got desperate because there was nothing they could do for him.”
In response, the president assured that this complaint uncovered “the historical debt” that exists with the health system in the country and that he assured is impossible to correct in five years of mandate.
“And maybe I and any of us would have done the same,” confessed the president.
He acknowledged that there was no pediatric intensive care “anywhere” in the interior of the country when he began his administration, in August 2018.
In this context, he stated that today there are two intensive care units for children outside of Asunción, in the towns of Ciudad del Este and Encarnación, and that another is planned for Ciudad Oviedo.
He also defended that he has governed in one of the “worst moments in the history of humanity” and of his country, alluding to the pandemic, which he considered the “worst unconventional war” that Paraguay has faced after the armed conflicts of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) and the Chaco (1932-1935).
