opinion

 

Doctors' strikes

by Miguel Antonio Bernal

The cost of living continues its unstoppable race against the great majority's means, while social problems only aggravate and multiply, and we're hearing no solutions. The immediate popular demands lead to ever more demagogic and spectacular actions, but they don't resolve anything. With its improvisations, Team Martín's "Patria Nueva" has only brought us greater frustrations. Amidst all this the coryphaeus spends $71,000 a day on self-adulation in the press and on radio and television.

It's in the middle of this situation that the medical organizations grouped in the National Medical Negotiating Committee, known as COMENENAL, after fruitless conversations with the governmental authorities have been seen practically obliged to call an indefinite strike from their professional labors. Making use of a right, the doctors have raised the banner of economic recovery of the salary scale, which is far from being a crime or even an act of arrogance.

The authorities of the main state institutions have lost little or no time in spreading, through the journalists well known to be in their pay and through their traditional wardheelers, all the venom that can possibly be produced in their totalitarian minds and those of their fellow travelers, in an attempt to manipulate public opinion against the medical professionals' recovery of their reduced real income. But the mortal damages caused by diethylene glycol begins to loom over them like a shadow of the moral damages they sow with their false accusations, with their epithets and name-calling, with their irresponsible insults of the hundreds of women and men who, with every right, seek to have the standard of living they earn by protecting our lives respected.

It's well known that the majority of the infrastructures of the health care system in this country are worse than poorly maintained. The barracks of the commissioned officers are better equipped than the hospitals, clinics and health centers, although the cops on the beat continue to be poorly paid. We know that the government has never stopped thinking in terms of privatizing the Social Security Fund and now they have demonstrated --- to the saturation point --- that they will spare no effort to deplete the fund, making it ever more secure and above all asocial. Who are they trying to fool when they tell us there's no money to meet the doctors' demands? They said the same thing to the teachers, the same thing they always say whenever dealing with education, housing, public safety or justice.

The previous strikes and stoppages by the doctors serve to remind us that those who today attack this social protest the same old people, with the same old motives.