By Ángel Guerra Cabrera on April 19, 2020
Much is said about the patients without doctors, the hospital chaos and the thousands of unburied corpses in Guayaquil. But not one in the hegemonic media explains the main cause of the tragedy. Sociologist Jonathan Baez does it a study published on the website of the Central University of Ecuador.
He notes that not only did health care spending decrease under the Moreno Administration, so did investment in it, which in 2019 fell 36 percent from the previous year. Worse, according to official bureaucratic jargon, the main investment in that year was in the so-called institutional public management reform program, basically the disincorporation of public health that resulted in the dismissal of thousands of public servants.
More was invested in throwing health sector personnel onto the streets than in infrastructure, equipment and maintenance! It is not difficult to understand why the city contains 70 percent of the cases of Covid-19 in Ecuador, and the highest rate of contagion in Latin America.
A Gift from Macri’s government.
According to the Buenos Aires-based Página 12 newspaper, the Argentine Ministry of Education will distribute 135,000 notebooks and tablets in areas of the country where there are more secondary students without access to a computer. The minister, Nicolás Trotta, explained that the equipment was found in February in a warehouse of the Post Office, where the government of Mauricio Macri had dumped them since 2016 after he abandoned the Conectar Igualdad plan; an initiative by former president Christina Fernandez to equip all students in secondary schools (grades 10, 11, and 12) in the country and connect them to the internet with electronic notebooks.
The Return of Venezuelans to their Homes Continues.
EFE news agency reports the constant flow of Venezuelan migrants who have been returning to their country through Cúcuta, a Colombian city on the Venezuelan border, for the past month continues. The mayor of Cúcuta said that more than 34,000 migrants have returned and up to 500 enter Venezuela every day. Faced with the trade and health paralysis caused by Covid-19, hundreds of Venezuelans living in Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Brazil and Colombia decided to return to Venezuela in search of help. According to Colombia, during January and February, 70,000 Venezuelans returned to their country, a figure that would double by the end of March and April. Many returned on foot to their homeland where despite the criminal sanctions of the US, health care is free.
Source: La Jornada, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau