The new subdelegate of the Government in Pontevedra, Abel Losada, celebrated today the institutional act after his recent inauguration, appealing to the value of “good policy”, which is practiced based on cooperation and coordination between all the Administrations. An institutional event chaired by the government delegate, Pedro Blanco, who encouraged the subdelegate to “take on the challenges of promoting the projects developed by the Government of Spain in this province to consolidate the transformation and modernization that marks the action of the Government of Spain since Pedro Sánchez is president”.
More than 200 people crowded the headquarters of the Plaza de España, “I intend” in the words of Abel Losada, that this Subdelegation be a place of dialogue, meeting and service to the community”.
Before the mayors of Pontevedra and Vigo, Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores and Abel Caballero and the representatives of the State, Autonomous and Local Administrations, as well as other civil and military authorities, Losada claimed the value of politics, “because there is nothing beyond politics” and the need for guiding principles such as freedom and equality, not to be reduced to “words that are wrapped in flags or flags”, instead of “carefully wrapping them up” with the General State Budgets and with the Official State Gazette. He reviewed the social measures approved by the Government of Spain “in times of setbacks” and concluded by defending the value of taxes to guarantee essential public services “because without taxes it is the Salvese who can”.
In his speech he wanted to quote Antonio Machado to affirm that Spain “is on the way, a path of progress, equality and social justice” and he opted to continue attending to the demands of the citizens, “on this Machadian path, despite the incessant noise of insults, hatred and tension”. The deputy delegate alluded to the recent investiture of President Pedro Sánchez and expressed his personal and political commitment to the progressive government’s agenda of change in the last five years.
In his speech he related the negotiations that gave way to the current government with the Majestic pact of 1996, when another government agreed with Catalan nationalism and, among other things, agreed “nothing less than the modification of the territorial structure of the State”, deleting the old Civil Governments and creating the Subdelegations of the Government through a law that was approved a few months after that investiture. “I will therefore be the sixth deputy delegate in this province, following in the footsteps of Alejandro Millán, Delfín Fernández, Antonio Coello, Ana Ortiz and Maica Larriba.”
Abel Losada called for institutional cooperation and coordination as the only way to serve the citizens in a state as decentralized as Spain. In this regard, he referred to the crisis due to the “plastic tide” defining it as “an accident for which no one is to blame, except the shipping company”. However, he made it clear that cooperation in the face of an environmental emergency such as the current one depends on each Administration recognizing and exercising its competences from the first moment. “It’s not about hiding behind the trunks, then refusing to ask for help when it’s needed and finally ending up asking the State for the impossible by land, sea and air. Nor does Nin claim that cleaning beaches is a routine municipal competition.” “To me all this, because of my teaching tradition, sounds like a repeated subject. Let’s hope that from this we learn the lesson and for the next catastrophe the approved one will come.”
Machista violence focused much of his speech and stressed that although Spain is a pioneering country that “neither comforts nor repairs; it should only serve to motivate us to move forward with more force and more determination so that not one more woman sees her life aliased or cut short for the simple fact of being a woman”. He recalled the 56 women killed last year and the two victims of the province, Beatriz and Ana, as well as the pain that produced machista crimes as brutal as those recorded in previous years in Valga and Moraña. “These are irreparable losses, which hurt us and embarrass us,” he insisted.
Abel Losada criticized the rise of the negationisms of those who refuse to recognize climate change, “of the unreason of the machismo, of the homophobes, of the classists and of the xenophobes, who, in his opinion, have now been joined by the deniers of democracy itself, which vocifates that we are in a dictatorship or before an illegitimate government, trying to erode the institutions that represent us.”
The speech ended with an express recognition to the mayor of Vigo “the person I have learned the most from and because for me it has always been a pride that in the office next to mine, there was a doctor in Economics from the University of Cambridge” and also to his roots in the city of Pontevedra, where he began his career as a university professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences.
For his part, the government delegate, Pedro Blanco, said that Abel Losada was, because of his human professional worth, “the best possible subdelegate, because I can’t think of a better person for the position.” He also warned that “work is not going to be lacking” because to the daily tasks are always added the unexpected and the problems in whose solution the Subdelegation acts as a catalyst. Finally, she thanked the work of the former deputy delegate, Maica Larriba, and the general secretary, María Isabel Alonso de Linaje, who served as deputy delegate in office in the final stretch of the year. Maica Larriba closed her time in the Subdelegation highlighting her attempt to “bring the institution closer to the citizens” and recalling “moments of great pain” such as the shipwreck of the Villa of Pitanxo.