There are no natural disasters: human or material losses occur when due precautions are not taken against possible floods, landslides or earthquakes and, for example, buildings are built next to a river, hills are deforested or construction is done without respecting the rules . In the same sense, the train crash on Line 3 of the capital’s Metro is not a mere “accident.” It is an announced catastrophe. Despite multiple warnings, complaints from users and staff, the authorities have disdained to allocate the necessary resources to supervise, correct, repair, maintain elements as crucial for the safety of the Metro as the communication system, the lighting in the tunnels, the state of the trains, not to mention failures that hurt many, but do not put their lives at risk, such as the recurring immobility of the escalators.
The train crash this Saturday is not just another “accident” nor even less an “incident”, as those who are part of the same apparatus that twenty years ago transformed floods into “waterlogging” have wanted to minimize. The Metro, I have reiterated in this column, is not a priority for the current authorities who prefer to waste resources on an expensive “Chapultepec Cultural Center” and on a predatory train that will ruin the paradise of the southeast. If arbitrariness and corruption outrage, criminal negligence, which even in the face of the loss of human life does not stop its excesses, hurts and infuriates.
It is anger and desolation that neither the fire at the Control Center nor the collapse of Line 12 (con)moved or forced the head of government, the officials responsible for mobility and the CDMX Congress, to recognize the urgency of restore and guarantee a public service that 5 million people depend on every day, to go to work, study, stock up, leave their neighborhood. Each of them, whatever their occupation or social class, has the right to have safe and reliable public transportation. Reducing the Metro budget or increasing it meagerly denotes institutional discrimination and criminal indifference: does the mourning of dozens of families not matter? Doesn’t hundreds of injured and traumatized people matter?
Why have the authorities ignored the evidence of deterioration exhibited by all the lines? Why do “those who use it have no political power”? Why does this audience “have no choice”? Why in this bloody Mexico “life is worth nothing”? Why can silence be imposed with scholarships, pensions or threats? Why is the capital just a stepping stone to later destroy the country?
Why does the ruling party want power? Not to improve people’s lives, as she promised herself. If that were the case, the Metro budget would have increased, not decreased, which is still less than that of 2018. If the “well-being of the people” mattered to him, there would be no kilometer-long queues at the Balderas Metrobús and bus stop, where it ends now Line 1, under repair. Since it doesn’t matter to them, they also reduced the RTP budget for 2023. Thus, Congress and the executive authorities of CDMX are co-responsible for the deaths, injuries and physical traumas that Metro users have suffered under their government. They also bear the burden of fatigue, stress and loss of mental and physical health for those who spend valuable hours of their lives in crowded and unsafe modes of transport and, in the absence of real alternatives, will have to sleep less or spend more.
Blaming past administrations (not so alien) or insulting society and the “opposition” for pointing out their negligence and responsibility corroborates the total contempt of the capital’s government (and allies) towards the true direct and indirect victims of the catastrophic state of the Metro: those Millions of people who are left with no choice but to risk traveling in fear, fear of arriving late, being left without payment, of not arriving, of losing their lives.
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