During a visit to the city’s surplus yard accompanied by opposition councilors, the candidate for mayor from the Juntos por Asunción Alliance, Soledad Núñez, said she found dismantled municipal machinery and vehicles that should be in service but are abandoned. “This is no longer just neglect. Here there are municipal machines taken apart, stripped for parts, with pieces missing, vehicles that should be working for the city,” she stated.
At the site, Núñez said she identified tractors on blocks, pickups without wheels or accessories, and between four and six garbage trucks that are “relatively new, yet no longer even have their engines.” Some vehicles, she added, have even been used as shelter for cats and birds.
“When you come in here and see dismantled machines and parts that have disappeared, it’s impossible not to ask what happened and who let it get to this point. While the city is falling apart, they are letting millions in resources that belong to the people of Asunción go to waste,” said the candidate, who promised a complete overhaul of the process if she becomes mayor.
Núñez stressed that the bureaucratic procedure to decommission and send unused assets to public auction takes at least two years. “Here the whole system needs to be redesigned: the inventory scheme, how to decommission, the monitoring and, above all, the control to know what happens to the machines and trucks that are so necessary for the city to be in good condition and that arrive completely stripped and in conditions that are questionable to all of us,” she emphasized.
In light of the situation, Núñez said she has asked councilor Paulina Serrano to work with other municipal councilors to push for a formal request for information to determine the real state of the machinery, what happened to the missing parts, and what controls were exercised over these municipal assets.