In a speech broadcast live on television and radio, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner inaugurated the new cars of the San Martín train service as part of a 1.6 billion dollar investment in Argentina’s railway system. The alliance between the private and the public sector is “strategic,” CFK assured.
Business leaders and the government
Escorted by Industry Minister Débora Giorgi, Interior and Transport Minister Florencio Randazzo and Buenos Aires province Governor Daniel Scioli, Ms. Kirchner defied what she called “media creation.”
“I am going to distort what they want to install that businessmen are on the warpath against the government. It is a creation of media,” the president affirmed alluding to the presence of the head of the Argentine Industrial Union (UIA) Héctor Méndez – an opponent to the Kirchnerite administration – and other business leaders at the rally.
“The presence of businessmen is another show of the strategic alliance there has to be between the private and the public sectors so that the country prospers and progresses and people get to live better. Despite all the spokes in the wheel they want to put, that is what we will keep on doing,” the head of state warned the same week that a group of business organizations released a document questioning the government’s economic agenda, hitting news headlines.
After announcing a bi-level truck program to improve the freight system performance, CFK explained the upgrade in the San Martín train service accounted for a 150-million dollar investment by the national treasure while rebuilding the tracks cost 300 million pesos.
“What we had, we have build in Argentine workshops, with Argentine workers. That was destroyed; that is why we had to buy (the cars) abroad. I hope that we will soon have the workshops back to increase the volume of productions and the development of the national industry,” Fernández de Kirchner said as she criticized what she considered pro-privatizing speeches that question the intervention of the state.
It takes time and patience
“Things take time. It is difficult to rule a country – a beautiful, complex country- that has a lot of contradictions,” Cristina Fernández stated and presented the cover of a 1993 newspaper edition that reported the closure of trains in 13 provinces across the country.
Speaking of herself as a «train engine» – «the engine can not go by itself if the cars and those up there put spokes in the wheel” -, the president called to rebuild Argentina’s national industry.
“What happened with the thriving Argentina that produced trains, engines, planes; that got to produce sophisticated missiles, trucks? It was devastated with mirrors and beads, with speeches,” the two-time president of Argentina assured.
“Let’s understand that things are not easy, that nothing is for free and let’s discern the real thing from siren calls. Sirens do not exist,” the leader added and finally dedicated today’s message to youngsters “who have lived a different Argentina where we proved that things could be done in a different way and better than what they have been done.”