The mayor of Montevideo Mario Bergara requests a million-dollar loan that will not change the city.
Sidewalks. Swept away. Containers. Garbage trucks. Various urban interventions.
Things that any city council should finance with the taxes it already collects.
And here comes the key question. What of all this will continue to exist when the debt is paid off? The containers?
The trucks?
The bins?
Nothing. There's nothing left.
This is not structural investment.
This is borrowing for current spending.
Going into debt so as not to adjust.
Because if domestic spending is not touched, if the budget is still a machine for paying salaries and maintaining gigantic structures, then the only way to show works is with debt.
Bergara, who is an experienced economist, knows this perfectly well.
You know that the IDB lends easily.
You know that the loan is repaid within several governments.
And he also knows that when the time comes to pay he will no longer be in the Quartermaster.
So the logic is very simple.
He asks.
He spends.
He inaugurates.
And he pays for another one.
But Montevideo doesn't need more debt to sustain a model that doesn't change anything.
Montevideo needs something else.
It needs order.
It needs priorities.
You need fiscal responsibility.
And above all, it needs to regain common sense.
Because if we continue to cover up our problems with debt, the hole they are going to leave us will be so big that we will end up reaching the center of the Earth.
The loan request that the Municipality of Montevideo wants the Departmental Board to approve is, to be generous, not serious. If we are more sincere: this is political, economic and administrative nonsense
.Let's go in parts. While a project worth more than $1 billion is being discussed for the tunnel under 18 de Julio and other traffic works, Mayor Mario Bergara now appears with another loan: 318 million dollars
.The question is simple: why does an intendency that already has a huge budget need to borrow in this way? The answer lies in the budget itself.
Almost 48% of what enters the Quartermaster's Office goes to salaries and personal remuneration. In other words, the margin for investing with own resources is minimal.
The departmental government's solution? Don't cut, don't reform, don't review spending
.The solution is to borrow money. Inwardly, the message is very clear:
“nothing is touched here”. Spending is not adjusted. The structure is not changed. Trade union power is not being confronted. The size of the municipal apparatus is not in dispute
.You ask for a loan and that's it.
That way anyone manages.
But besides, the loan is not free. It is requested from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and it has an important characteristic: it is at a variable rate. This means that if the world enters a deeper financial crisis — something that today no one rules out — the cost of money may rise. And if it goes up, the debt goes up. In addition, there are supervisory costs, administrative expenses, audits and all the international bureaucratic machinery that makes a living from these projects
.For the IDB, the business is perfect. It's public debt. They always charge
.If the world gets complicated, the problem isn't theirs.
But the most striking thing is something else. The loan has a four-year grace period.
What does that mean?
That Bergara asks for the loan today, but it begins to be paid only in 2030, when there is already another departmental government. And then you pay for 20 years.
In other words, one government spends it and several people pay for it that we don't even know who they are going to be yet. Even generations that don't even vote today.
That's not serious.
Now, let's see what the famous 318 million are going to spend on.
According to the Intendency's own document, the distribution is as follows:
Sanitation: 32% Sidewalks
: 20%
Cleaning: 19% Streets: 16%
Old City
: 13% Inother words, less than a third goes to sanitation, which is the only clearly structural investment. The rest goes on a kind of municipal shopping list.
