📋 Tender Overview
President Alberto Fernandez led this afternoon, together with the Minister of Health, Carla Vizzotti, the inauguration of the Cultural Center of the Laura Bonaparte National Network Hospital, specialized in mental health and problematic consumption, a reference center in the matter, located in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Parque Patricios. "It is a very important step in how to conceive health to think about this building made available to the population and in tribute to a woman who fought so hard for rights, memory, truth and justice," said the president, also accompanied by the director of the institution, Beatriz Baldelli; the representative of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Founding Line, Taty Almeida and the journalist Luis Bruschtein, son of Laura Bonaparte.
The President stressed the importance of the inauguration of a center of these characteristics, which implies a significant modification of the model of institutional approach of people with mental health-related conditions, as well as their family group or network link, promoting full access to culture and recreation in the context of adaptation of monovalent hospitals. In that sense, he pointed out that "there must be a Ministry of Health that promotes, for example, all these mental health policies that we have presented here a year ago, and that today transcend this hospital and are being developed federally throughout the country."
"There must be a State that equalizes and allows the possibility that those who need health have access to health, who need a doctor have access to a doctor, and who needs a study have the assistance of the technician who allows him to do so," said the President. "We must never forget that the best Argentina is the Argentina that expanded rights," he said and remarked: "The more rights we expand and recognize the rights of minorities, the better society we are. And the more access and equality we generate, the better society we are."
In taking the floor, Vizzotti said that the "Cultural Center is a collective construction, which are those strong constructions that last, remain and are defended" and highlighted the President's commitment to the Federal Plan of Comprehensive Approach to Mental Health and Problematic Consumption, which represents a paradigm shift. In this sense, he expressed that "without mental health there is no health and without social inclusion there is no mental health. So we are going to continue working with that conviction and with that love, so that all these advances continue to be reinforced in Argentina and that no right is reversed."
Meanwhile, Baldelli said that this is "the first work that I have to inaugurate within this institution as director, given that by decree 407 of 2023, the President put an end to the intervention of this institution that had been more than 10 years." And he recalled: "We began with the recovery and reoperation of this space that during the Macri administration has been a place of lag of furniture and old junk. We recovered it to continue expanding rights and inhabit them together."
For her part, Taty Almeida congratulated "those who have made it possible for us to be gathered today to celebrate that this Cultural Center bears the name of Laura Bonaparte, with whom she united us, what so many other mothers, given that they took away the most precious thing that a woman who is a son has. Laura, despite that tremendous pain, was a woman who loved life, wanted to live and that's how we were companions and friends for so many years."
Finally, Bruschtein explained that his mother "always fought for patients to have the attention of a human being, as a being with rights," because "she always saw the human being behind what society often demonized or discriminated against." "For me this is the great tribute, because it is putting into practice what she always saw," he emphasized.
The opening of a cultural space open to the community in a state-run public hospital originated within the framework of the National Mental Health Law No. 26,657 and is part of the Strategic Plan 2020-2023, prepared from the lines proposed by the Ministry of Health of the Nation, in continuity with the comprehensive public policy of the national government to comply with the regulations.
