MIDES knew about the conditions of the hotel that caught fire, says a close friend of the deceased woman

“The information we have is what was transmitted to me from the Coexistence Directorate of the IMM, to tell me that the commercial license was up to date and that it requires that the Fire Department license be started, that it was not finished, but it was started, and that the firefighters were all up to date”, the director of Social Protection of MIDES, María Fernanda Auersperg, told the press, transferring responsibility for this to the IM. Auersperg also responded to public complaints of alleged overcrowding. “When we started there were 210 people living for MIDES, today we were less than 100. In this process of changing the model, that hotels are far from being what we want for women with children, we had been reducing the capacity of the Aramaya hotel. We were going downhill so that number would go down and we could close the hotel, ”she said.

“It is an old hotel. We had many meetings with the owners and the management. Many things have been improved. We paid for the cleaning of the hotel and carried out supervision”, he assured. “We have a team of two coordinators and four service duos who toured the hotel and were in contact,” continued the hierarch.

repeated complaints

Nicolás Baz, a friend of the woman who died in the fire and a former beneficiary of MIDES services, lived in the hotel in question and affirms that he and other people had made repeated complaints.

“This was something that could undoubtedly be prevented, I know that MIDES was aware of the hotel’s conditions due to complaints made both by me and by other users,” he argued in statements collected by Underlined.

“We are devastated because we really did not expect something like this to happen,” he added, indicating that he knew that the conditions of the hotel were not the best, but that even so, a tragedy was never expected to happen.

On Friday there will be a march from the Plaza de Bomberos to the MIDES, and later to the hotel where they will leave an offering in memory of the deceased woman.