Chaqueños are fed up with ANDE’s inefficiency. It’s not the first time we’ve touched on this topic and it won’t be the last. The antitrust charges are too many to ignore.
The Chaco has been left aside by a public company overcrowded with civil servants, with hierarchical salaries from the first world and a service from the third. Frequent service outages, voltage drops and oscillations with abrupt rises that burn appliances are the day-to-day problems that the growing technification of production and industry that do not stop expanding in the Western region. The maintenance service of the networks practically does not exist and the little that is provided is very expensive.
To put an end to this state of affairs, deputy Edwin Reimer presented a bill in 2020 aimed at granting concessions to three cooperatives in the central Chaco for the distribution and marketing of electricity supplied by ANDE. The law seeks to provide a legal framework for the articulated cooperation between the entity and the Chortitzer, Fernheim and Neuland cooperatives in order to guarantee the provision of electrical energy, allowing said cooperatives to channel it through their own networks with controlled quality, as well as updating and insured maintenance.
But in the opinion of deputy Enrique Mineur, that would mean a privatization of the service, also giving way to “a dangerous segregation” (?), ensuring that from now on the same could be done with health, education, etc. It is not uncommon for a legislator to exhibit such conceptual confusion. What is surprising is his misinformation.
The controversy over the provision of a public service by a private company was settled with Law 287 of 1955, which granted the Municipality of Villarrica the power to contract with the Compañía de Luz y Fuerza Sociedad Anónima (CLYFSA) to provide the service of electrical energy through the production and/or purchase, transportation, distribution and sale of electrical energy within the Municipality of Villarrica. Sixty-seven years later, the APP works perfectly, now, in partnership with ANDE. The Mennonite colonies themselves buy blocks of energy from the state monopoly and distribute it through networks that they have built and maintain.
There is something worse than ignorance and it is foolishness, a dangerous cocktail that some honorable people like to intoxicate themselves with.
