Free Fall / Fernando Dámaso

When an economic system has demonstrated its ineffectiveness for decades, dragging the country into regressive process which has erased the achievements of previous generations and established poverty as the standard of living, it means the time has come to replace it with something more efficient.

Arguing that it should remain based on the idea that it would terrible to remove something for which people have struggled for more than fifty years, is not a comprehensive plan. The roads that lead nowhere, even if they have been traveled for a long time, should not continue to be traveled. It’s like beating your head against the same wall over and over.

Moreover, to plan a route that borders on the abyss, when in reality you’ve been in free-fall into the abyss for a long time, is too optimistic.

It’s natural that, faced with the mistakes involved, it is not an easy situation. Even worse is having to inform one’s travel companions that the road was badly chosen and the sacrifices in vain. It encompasses a great historical responsibility. However, it is the honest and courageous path.

Wanting to buy time is more difficult with each passing day, as both capital and time are depleted and the time is coming when there will be neither one nor the other. To insist on defending something indefensible, and something in which most citizens don’t believe, although they still don’t dare to say so publicly, is to maintain the immobility and unnecessarily prolong the national tragedy.

January 17 2011