The story goes something like this. The Government of the Canary Islands, thanks to the State's forgiveness of the extinct general tax on business traffic (IGTE), suddenly finds itself with 1,600 million euros to spend within ten years. The regional executive had to make two major decisions: how to distribute those 160 million annually and what to spend them on. Without the first question being entirely clear, the second has already been sadly resolved. The data that President Clavijo has on the table is, in all respects, alarming. One in three Canarians subsists in precarious conditions, unemployment rates are among the highest in the country, job insecurity continues to increase, the socio-health situation is extremely poor, and waiting lists in hospitals remain eternal for thousands of citizens, to make a quick composition of these islands where some live and others, increasingly, survive.
What does the Government of the Canary Islands do with this scenario and with 1,600 million euros extra in its pocket? Invest in Health? Invest in education? Invest in socio-health infrastructure? No. It decides to allocate these resources to R&D&I projects, tourism projects and, up to a fifth, to employment plans. The question, therefore, is obvious. What leads a president of one of the communities that is suffering the most from the consequences of the misnamed crisis to humiliate its citizens in this way? What name do we give to this disease that desensitizes its rulers and makes them forget about those who are having the worst time, even in these circumstances? Social blindness? Inability to feel empathy? Euro psychosis?
Fernando Clavijo and his team took the Lanzarote tour last week to extol the virtues of the financing route opened by Pedro San Ginés to the worst of local businessmen, see the owners of the Marina Rubicón marina. No one should have told Clavijo that the ownership of the port is family of his Minister of Tourism and the CEO of the Tourist Centers and surely they also forgot to tell him that the promoter of the underwater museum project is a German criminal named Helge Achembach, to whose foundation the Tourist Centers planned to donate part of the collection from the brand new underwater cemetery. What Clavijo did make clear at the meeting he held with the island's mayors and spokespersons for the political groups of the Cabildo is that "of course, the IGTE funds could be used for projects such as the underwater museum", it would be remiss not to. Some of the mayors asked him, worried, if they could buy land with that money to make an agricultural museum. Others criticized him for not being able to use it to build the long-awaited congress palace, "the one that even the Majoreros have".
Clavijo also commented at that meeting that, for example, "a tourist spa could be financed with these funds, but never a nursing home." He said it like that, as it sounds, without lowering his head or hiding his gaze or blushing a little, he said it upright and without complexes, perhaps knowing, as it was, that none of the mayors would reproach him for the infamous decision not to allocate those resources to social purposes. He said it as if for a moment he had lacked blood supply to the brain, as if the pressure from his businessmen had become blood pressure and blocked his ability to think clearly and see how badly his people are doing. As if he were the victim of a kind of economic stroke, that disease that will be discovered in the future and that will consist of the cerebral paralysis caused by the natural assimilation of this criminal neoliberalism that marks the pace of our economy and condemns millions of people to misery.
Carlos Meca, Councilor of Podemos in the Cabildo of Lanzarote.