Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Formosa is the quintessential peronist feud, governed by an eternal strongman who is the de-facto owner the province, which is by the by the poorest province of the country.
What the report says is true, and it’s even too polite. Before putting the people in detention centers, many residents who were out of Formosa when the lockdown started were unable to return to their province, so they got stuck in a “refugee camp” in the border. One person even died trying to swim the river that separates Formosa from Chaco, where the camp was.
The national government said nothing. In fact, not even national companies who work throughout the country could enter Formosa for infrastructure maintenance or stuff like that. Formosa was, for several months, a separate and isolated country, a local version of North Korea. Inside, it has some remembrances too, as huge posters worshipping the governor are everywhere.
Was it successful regarding the COVID pandemics? When the national lockdown was installed, Formosa was successful, or maybe just lucky to not have local dispersion yet. Obviously the virus entered from Buenos Aires and then it silently spread across the countries due to some infected asymptomatic travelers. Somehow Formosa was spared (after all, there is not a huge flow of people entering and leaving the province) and when neighbor Chaco had an outbreak (one of the first important outbreaks in Argentina), Formosa sealed its borders.
Later on, some cases appeared, but the local contagion was never significant. Whether it’s due to successful policies or just undertesting/hiding data, we don’t really know. It’s possible that Formosa has indeed had relatively very few actual cases, but the “messy” way they have treated the people who returned, the travelers and the quarantined, make many suspicious about what happened in there.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
