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On March 3, the Ministry of Health reported on the first case of COVID-19 in the country. He was a doctor who had traveled throughout Europe and Southeast Asia. 56 days later, the figure has escalated to 13,331 infected nationwide and 189 deaths, according to the latest figures reported by the authorities. But apart from statistics, quarantines, sanitary cords and announcements of economic measures to face the effects of the health crisis, these long and tense weeks have also been marked by a complex handling of La Moneda, due to political and communicational errors. committed by its main protagonists: President Sebastián Piñera and the Minister of Health, Jaime Mañalich.
A complex point, considering that in crises it is when the authority most needs to generate credibility and trust in the citizenry, so that the measures adopted -especially in a pandemic where what is at stake is people’s lives- are supported, respected and enforced en masse. In this scenario, transparency on the information that the authority provides to citizens is a fundamental pillar in a democracy, to cement the strength of that trust and credibility, and that is precisely where the Achilles heel has been.
It is known that the Government and in particular the figure of President Piñera was not on the right foot when the coronavirus pandemic settled in Chile, with support figures in the polls of only one digit. The delay in taking measures, the public conflicts with mayors of all political colors due to the suspension of classes and the closure of shopping centers, the excessive triumphalism of the President and Mañalich, together with the insistence on wanting to remain as the country with the best management of the continent, they have contributed little and nothing to strengthen citizen confidence in the authorities. The string of mistakes, contradictions, and even post-truth-smelling claims have not helped either.
Last week, Minister Mañalich described – in the framework of a special session of the Chamber of Deputies – the suspension of classes that was applied due to the pressure exerted by the mayors of the entire country as a “serious error” and assured that due to this reason that schoolchildren could not be vaccinated against influenza. Beyond the sparks that that statement brought out, the point is that his sayings do not fit the truth: as published The counter In a report on March 31, it was a delay by the Minsal that forced the vaccination of boys and girls to be postponed to prioritize members of the Armed Forces. and Carabineros.
And the mayors reminded him so. “At this point, what is the use of fighting with @jmanalich if the lack of vaccines was due to the breakdown of the stock of responsibility of his ministry? His statements today are so crude that the government’s creative effort to defend him must be great at this time, “Valparaíso Mayor Jorge Sharp tweeted, while his colleague from Independencia, Gonzalo Durán, added that the minister “lies. The only reason that influenza vaccination was NOT continued in schools was because the @ministeriosalud suspended the delivery of vaccines. This process will resume next week ”. Meanwhile, the mayor of Recoleta, Daniel Jadue, released two documents confirming that the arrival of these vaccines was only scheduled for April 24.
Mañalich’s sayings also put him in conflict with his cabinet peers. The first was the Minister of Education, Raúl Figueroa, who stated that “it is always complex to make decisions, and a responsible government takes them. And it does so by having all the cards on the table and listening to all the actors,” then spokeswoman Karla. Rubilar said that the decision to suspend classes “was not a mistake. We made a good decision” and then Interior Minister Gonzalo Blumel called for calm, saying that the decision was “public and known”, to end by calling “avoid unnecessary conflicts”.
The academic and political analyst, Tomás Duvall, specified about these types of episodes that “the biggest problem so far has been the political deficit, which was a characteristic of the current cabinet, an issue that has been revealed in the multiple contradictions between ministers on the concrete actions in the midst of the health crisis “and added that said deficit” has revealed the lack of political pedagogy necessary for citizens, about the measures and their various conceptual variations on them “. They are not minor mistakes. Duvall emphasized that “in crises of this nature, a State is expected to guide and take political action, an issue that MINSAL seems to have done in terms of operations, but this is not enough in the face of the political deficit.”
Typing errors
On Sunday 19, the death toll, as reported during that morning, was 133. That same day, President Piñera carried out a national network in which he took stock of the measures his Government has taken to deal with the coronavirus. But in his speech, he was wrong about the number of fatalities, he said that until that day it was only 113, twenty less than the official figure, to which Minister Rubilar had to go out on social networks to apologize and explain: “Regrettable The mistake in the number of deaths in #CadenaNacional is a typing mistake that we are very sorry for. There are 133 people who have lost their lives and each of them and the feeling of their families deeply hurts us. We apologize for this. “
A mistake that can happen to anyone, but which is more complicated when, since the first weeks of the health crisis, public doubts had already been installed about the veracity of the figures that the Government gives about the advance of the pandemic. The option of dynamic quarantines, the criticism of experts to the resistance of the authorities to listen to different opinions, the inconsistencies detected in official reports, as Public Space noted twice, the objections even from the Council for Transparency on the lack of proactivity of the Executive at this point, are the basis of mistrust and the hard scrutiny that is made of any step of the President.
On Friday, April 17, and after publishing the epidemiological report number 9 corresponding to that day, it had to be erased for presenting clear errors and inconsistencies. It was pointed out that the commune of María Pinto -which until the previous measurement remained one of the three communes in the Metropolitan Region without registering cases of coronavirus- suddenly jumped to 217 positives in just two days, which made it -from these data be true- in one of the communes with the most infections. The report was on the web for 40 minutes, until it was downloaded by order of the Undersecretary of Public Health, Paula Daza: “I have reviewed epidemiological report number nine, which contains errors and have ordered it to be downloaded immediately,” he said that same Friday through from your Twitter account.
One of the problems regarding criticism of government management is that in the palace they have assured that the President is very upset with the questions that the majority of the opposition has asked him and that, for this reason, any criticism is taken from that perspective. That happened with the announcement of the “new normal” that the President made a week ago, which was poorly explained and announced on the sidelines of what will be the peak of contagions of the pandemic, for which he unleashed a wave of public reproaches and forced La Moneda to rectify five days later to change the slogan of “safe return”.
The former undersecretary and analyst, Víctor Maldonado, stated that “the first victim of the Coronavirus does not have to be freedom of expression. I am willing to be a disciplined citizen who follows instructions, but I am not willing to quarantine democracy. No I am going to change the mask for a muzzle. This situation is not going to get ahead leaving free ground to the authoritarians. ” He added that “we are at the confluence of three crises: the political, the social and now the health crisis that shows our weaknesses” and the risk is that the authority and the leaders will fall victim to one, two or all three at the same time.
On the same point, Duvall emphasized that President Piñera has made the “most important bet of his mandate so far with the decision to return to normal or safe return, because this will decisively mark his government regardless of the result.”
The headache of the fans
One of the most sloppy episodes the government has had has been the controversy – last weekend – over the alleged donation of mechanical fans by China, which was never such, an episode in which the Production Confederation later appeared. and Commerce (CPC) as a private manager to access said essential supplies to serve critically ill patients affected by Covid-19. The dates and figures are not yet clear, since Minister Mañalich had stated on March 19 that they had agreed “with the Chinese ambassador (Xu Bu) to acquire and donate, it must be said with all the generosity that corresponds, of a very significant amount, over a thousand additional mechanical fans to eventually prepare us for the worst-case scenarios. ”
But the ambassador had no information about that donation, which he specified in an interview in La Tercera on Sunday, April 19. To get out of trouble, that same day in an interview with Channel 13, Mañalich said that in the war of mechanical fans you have to deal with “absolute secrecy” and added, pointing to the morning in Copesa, that “the work of the press is that, sell things based on inventing lies, what do you want me to tell you “. Phrase that, once again, put the Minister of Health at the epicenter of criticism for his political mismanagement and his tendency to generate weekly conflicts with all actors who do it. question.
The issue of mechanical fans has been a permanent headache for the government. It should not be forgotten that on April 4, Mañalich himself affirmed Third that the Government had asked the Chilean Air Force (FACh) to go find a thousand mechanical fans in China, and then the minister himself rectified, stating that there were only 500.
In late March, President Piñera assured in an interview with CHV that Chile had gone ahead of other countries and bought fans in January: “If you want to buy a respirator today, it doesn’t exist anywhere. Chile bought them in advance (…) Chile is going to have them, because we ordered them in January ”. However, the medium Interference that version was ruined, since it reviewed the public purchases made by the undersecretaries of Public Health, Assistance Networks and Cenabast in January and only one fan had been purchased.
The government had to go out and try to explain the confusion. On March 31, the undersecretary of Assistance Networks, Arturo Zúñiga, said that although “we have been preparing since January,” the fact is that the acquisitions were recently completed this month. “We made the confirmed purchases on March 13,” he acknowledged when consulted in the framework of the daily report of figures provided by the Minsal.
In January, according to sources from the Ministry of Health, there were only approaches and conversations with supplier companies, to “tie” the acquisitions. Other sources acknowledged that they simply miscalculated when making acquisitions.
Espacio Riesco and “the tourist”
The government’s lease to use the Espacio Riesco events center as an Emergency Hospital was also another misstep by the authority, marked by incomplete information, doubts and contradictory facts. In the last ten days of March, Minister Mañalich affirmed that they had closed “a very cheap lease with a very important event venue in Santiago to accommodate more than 3,000 people, so that we are in the adequate capacity to withstand more scenarios complexes. “
Cheap just wasn’t. As the Government itself later explained, the monthly rent of the facilities costs 0.2 UF per occupied square meter. In the first stage, according to Mañalich, between 3,000 and 3,500 square meters would be used. This, considering the value of the UF, would mean $ 17,145,000 per month, a figure that could increase a lot – specifically to $ 154,305,000 – if the 27,000 covered square meters were to be used.
Along with the criticism from various sectors for the expense incurred in a private lease in circumstances that the State has facilities that could be used for that purpose, everything became more entangled with the mismanagement of the President, who in an interview with CNN Chile on March 29, he said that “the cost of Espacio Riesco per month is less than what a parliamentarian costs per month for our country.” A phrase that is more than unfortunate in a State of Law, since the President of the Republic cannot vilify the role of the members of another power of the State, that of the Congress was made clear to La Moneda during those days.
In these almost two months, one of the moments in which Piñera has been most questioned for his political inaccuracy was when it was exactly one month after the first positive case of Covid-19 in Chile, seven communes in the Metropolitan Region were in total quarantine -among them Santiago and Providencia- and that day the President chose to stop at the Plaza de la Dignidad, walk through the empty place and pose for a photo at the foot of the Baquenado statue. There were only members of the Carabineros and the Armed Forces, given the controversy, the first official response was that the President wanted to greet the officers, which was never seen in the video or the photos that were circulated.
“Today, returning to my house, I passed by Plaza Baquedano, I went down for a couple of minutes to greet a group of Carabineros and Militaries who were helping to direct the traffic, I took a picture of myself and continued on my way. I am sorry if this action could be misinterpreted “, the President later wrote in his Twitter account, in the face of the rain of criticism for the provocation that the episode represented, considering that said plaza is the emblematic place of the social outbreak of recent months and because with his walk, he was skipping the restrictions that was being imposed on part of the population.
The episode haunted him for several days, and in another subsequent interview he had to say that if he could turn back the clock, he clearly would not have gone to the Plaza de la Dignidad, nor would he have taken the questioned photo.
In a tone of balance to the management of La Moneda during March and April in the context of the health crisis, Duvall specified that “the Government should avoid falling into despair to cover forados to go back to previous standards or to the past. The risk is the pandemic and the eventual economic crisis – we have seen looting and starvation in European countries – because for a President who is not loved by the population, the worst scenario can be transformed “
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