Market No. 4 is a virtually uncontrollable mutant
An interview with the director of the Municipal Market No. 4, published last Friday in EI, reveals the degree of uncontrolled growth that this commercial microcosm has reached, nestled in a nucleus of extremely high turnover in the city.
The dialectic used by the municipal official makes it clear that the 4th Market has long since surpassed the Frankensteinian stage of fitting parts together and becoming an autonomous, self-sufficient superorganism completely outside any management regime, be it national, departmental or municipal. A mutant of these dimensions is not supervised, it is watched from afar. “They don’t let us work in peace” revealed some vendors in the face of the municipality’s unusual claim to inspect the electricity connections. “We do these inspections to prevent fires” alleges the administrator. “No, it’s an excuse to take away our stalls and resell them,” the stallholders reply. It is clear, as the official said, that “they do not like these controls because there are shortcomings that come to light.”
Shortcomings? The internal framework of Market No. 4 is a permanent nightmare for ANDE, not to mention the firefighters who live by the bush every time an alarm sounds on the market side. Maybe they both have a basic map of where the main cables run. But, how to know how many kilometers of low-quality wiring have been vascularized through the place in the form of clandestine connections, how many devices are connected to the same socket, what load weighs on the transformers of the place, basic things like that.
Bringing order to this pandemonium is impossible. First, because the administrators expect the mutant to “approach” to negotiate something, for example, the payment of bills, fees and the like. The mutant is not interested in fixing anything because he has been living adding new organs in the most absolute informality for more than 70 years.
Market 4 covers every scale of business imaginable, from a lettuce stand to the bilges of loan sharks with their 20%. In between, everything else, not excluding drugs. Mercado 4 is first a business and then, if there is space and will, a service to the citizen through clean, illuminated, safe or entertaining spaces. Not much is asked, but something easily verifiable in any provincial city in the regional environment.
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The entrance Asuncion Frankenstein was first published in The Independent.
