Revisiting the echoing terminal on a recent afternoon, Maria Lujan Rey said there’s one more thing that hasn’t changed since Feb. 22, 2012: The trains are still unsafe.
She lost her 20-year-old son, Lucas Menghini, last year at Once, as the station is popularly known, when the lead car of a packed commuter train hit a shock-absorbing barrier and sent the next car crunching into it. The crash killed 51 people and injured 800 others, unleashing national outrage at the sorry state of the country’s once-proud rail system. Lucas was the last victim to be found, 60 hours after the crash.
Like other victims’ relatives as well as passengers, Lujan Rey said the government’s response so far has been cosmetic at best, and has exposed what they say is systemic, deadly corruption at the highest levels.
“What you see here are the same cars that caused the tragedy,” Lujan Rey told reporters in the station while gripping the hand of Graciela Bottega, the mother of 24-year-old train crash victim Tatiana Pontiroli. “They’ve improved the tracks that were rusted and at least 60 years old. But we’re running the risk of this happening again, because (the government) has not taken charge of what happened, and this is something we could have avoided.”
“It’s hard for me to come here,” Lujan Rey said, “but I come to seek justice.”
President Cristina Fernandez has certainly tried to show her country that she too is seeking justice and is fixing the problems.
An appeals court investigation has produced criminal charges against 28 people, including two former transportation secretaries and two executives, Claudio and Mario Cirigliano, who prosecutors say made a fortune on transportation subsidies intended for trains. The conductor, Marcos Cordoba, who narrowly survived the crash, has also been charged. A trial is expected to start by early next year.
Fernandez’s government has announced it will invest $3.5 billion to repair train cars, rail lines and stations. This month, she said that by next year, trains using the Sarmiento and Mitre lines, which run through the Once station, would be replaced with more than 400 Chinese-made cars equipped with “televisions and air conditioning.” In that 45-minute speech, however, she made no mention of the train crash.
In a move more symbolic than anything, train operators no longer charge passengers to travel to Once on the line where the crash happened.
“What we have to do is transform the Sarmiento line,” Florencio Randazzo, minister of the interior and transportation, said in January. “The best way to honor those who lost their lives on the line is to have a better line.”