Sunday’s edition of the widely read column “Que se dice”(What’s being said) was a proverbial broadside. First on the columnist’s list was the “Parador del Mar”, the rest stop in the middle of the Las Americas Highway on the way to the airport. The columnist says that it was destined to end badly, and that now the government has the rest stop on its hands, and doesn’t know what to do with it. “Constructed during the prior administration as an example of pure willfulness, the ostentatious rest stop never did nor never will make any sense. All it ever had was a huge cost. If the truth be known, what we are dealing with here is a suspicious investment that the prior authorities were going to rent out at a ridiculously tiny fee. Oh how the taxpayers are abused by the State!” The columnist goes on to add, “the “Parador del Mar” is, among other barbarities, an assault on nature, who was robbed of a precious space on which now the pile of rubbish now rests. No one traveling to the east of the country arrives there with any real need to stop at the place, located so near the airport that IS a destination for many who travel that way. Conceived by someone lacking in ideas, surely, and with the apparent idea of favoring someone with political or friendship ties to the administration, the Parador del Mar will end up being assigned to some worthy institution that needs space for its stuff, such as Casa Abierta or Hogares Crea. Salt air for people in a difficult situation! But whoever proposes to invest in such a place and who proposes to pay a heavy rent to the State in order to make some money, is building in sand”.
While the second paragraph of the column deals with the conflicts between members of the administration, the third paragraph tackles Pedro de Jesus Candelier. The writer says that there are people who think that the weakness shown by the current administration – that a lot of people would like to see acting much stronger – permitted general Pedro de Jesus Candelier to prematurely place himself before the television cameras to day – in other words of course- “that he had the ‘equipment down below’ that the country badly needs” The columnist says that Candelier is “probably a man of insufficient intellectual qualifications and therefore not very trustworthy to get to the top of the administration of a State, as he would like to, but there is no doubt that his attitudes and achievements give credit to the image of a tough and inflexible personality that is being sold to the public. What irony! If Pedro de Jesus should become an option with an authoritative profile for the electorate – to the prejudice of the PLD and other traditional parties – there is no one to thank except the present administration’s leader, who dared to put him in the biggest fight of his life when he named him chief of Police, something that never would have occurred to Balaguer who used him cautiously and who once called him ‘a little bit primitive’. Moreover, it is the weaknesses of these four years now underway that appear to give political life to those who hold courage as their political flag”.