The Minister of Human Capital, Sandra Pettovello, provided an assessment of the first two years of the National Government's administration. She strongly targeted a corruption structure that had been entrenched in the State for years, linked to the management of social welfare programs and picket movements.
In a conversation with Radio Mitre, the official stated that her Ministry managed to dismantle that network through a strategy coordinated with the Ministry of Security.
"It was an entire large network of different State agencies intertwined to steal", Pettovello stated. She then explained how a system functioned that relied on the proliferation of ministries, secretariats, undersecretariats, and social programs without effective controls. "This profusion of ministries, secretariats, undersecretariats, and welfare programs muddies the waters so that there is no transparency", she added.
Coordination with Security and the end of the pickets
One of the central themes of the interview was the control of public space. Pettovello attributed the end of the pickets to coordinated work: "The work we did on the issue of the pickets was carried out together with Minister Bullrich. She restored order in the streets and I cut off their funding."
According to the head of Human Capital, the strategy combined the actions of the security forces with the cutoff of funding. She maintained that the organizations used social welfare programs as a tool of political pressure.
"They were on both sides of the counter"
Pettovello also described the mechanisms used by the so-called "managers of poverty" to appropriate public resources. "What they did was to be on both sides of the counter", she explained.
In that regard, she mentioned as an example social leaders such as Emilio Pérsico and Eduardo Belliboni, who are currently under complaint. She detailed the use of cooperatives linked to INAES to issue fake invoices and purchase supplies with surcharges.
"You had one of them who, from the outside, made noise to demand more subsidies. The one on the inside seemed to get angry, they acted, and they granted many more subsidies," she described. She also maintained that control over the beneficiaries was practically nonexistent: "There were one million four hundred thousand people in an Excel file".
