Two months after the last crossing of accusations, the difficult situation of the hundreds of homeless people who spend the night in Barajas has once again unleashed crossfire between the Madrid City Council and the Ministry of Transportation. While the mayor of the … Capital, José Luis Martínez Almeida, has first urged the central government to “assume its responsibility, stop” washing your hands and addressing the solution “, the president of Aena, Maurici Lucena, announced this Friday that they will send a formal requirement to Cibeles” to fulfill their legal obligations as responsible public administration. “
In a statement before the media at the headquarters of Aena, Lucena has pointed out that the alderman’s words put “in question” the spirit of collaboration with the City Council, to which his “abandonment of functions” on this subject has recriminated, whose competences are of the town hall. “It is absolutely unacceptable that Almeida’s response is to throw balls outside and say that social services are collapsed,” he said.
In this line, he has advanced that Aena “is obliged to use the mechanisms provided for in the administrative contentious law before the inaction of the City Council”; Although he has pointed out that, in case of a change in attitude on the part of the Consistory, they will continue “collaborating as until now, as has been done with other airports in which similar situations have occurred.”
-A diametrically opposite vision of that of the capital town hall, whose greatest exponent considers that the government “have to address, definitively, the solution.” “This cannot be left to Aena, nor taking responsibility to the Madrid City Council because it is not just a matter of Aena, it is a matter of the ministries, which have the ability to be able to solve the problem,” he underlined hours before Almeida from the Plaza de la Villa.
«We are in continuous contact with AENA, we are part and accept to be part of a work table, but the Government of Spain has to assume its responsibility because here they will not be able to say that it is a private operator, as they say with Red Eléctrica. Aena is public, the government has control and what is happening there depends on several ministries, “he stressed, without forgetting that the image of Madrid is being very resentful in the main international point of entry that the city has.
All this, after airport workers have denounced the serious situation at the base from the middle of February, given the uncontrolled increase in the airport facilities of homeless people and the derived problems that are generated. The last one, an alleged plague of bed bugs, something that the Madrid Minister of Health, Fatima Matute, has denied this Friday by ensuring that “public health has made an evaluation and that there is no plague of bed bugs, nor of any other parasite, nor of any other emerging disease that can affect the Madrid population.”
