Had no idea Macri's family was connected to this thing until reading your information.

Now how could something this vast screw up, anyway?

Could it be a warning shot at the countries of Argentina and Uruguay, like coercion, that the owners can literally bring both countries down completely, if they don't accept them as absolute rulers? Kidnapping two countries?

Yacyretá could be a horrendous weapon if used against people.

The late Franco Macri was the largest single contractor during the dam's 1983-98 construction, through three firms created for the very purpose: Sideco, Impregilo (a partnership with Fiat), and IECSA.

He later, as noted, bought the Yacylec transmission line during the Menem-era privatizations in 1993. This is one of the two lines that triggered the outage, caused by stalled works on a transmission tower - a IECSA contract.

Getting back to Yacyretá, the dam's cost ballooned far beyond original estimates: Originally budgeted at $1.5 billion, construction ended up costing $4.5 billion - plus $7 billion in financing costs due to high-interest loans taken on over time to finish the project.

As the main contractors in the project, the Macris should have been brought to testify as to why, exactly, construction costs tripled (at a time when inflation, in U.S. dollar terms, was low). They of course never did.

Nor have they explained how they ran the Postal Service into $900 million in debt in just 6 years (1997-2003, upon which the recently-inaugurated Néstor Kirchner rescinded their contract).

Macri got into trouble in 2017, you may recall, for using the presidency to try to write off most of their $300 million postal-era debt to the state; the rest had to be absorbed by (of course) the state.

More recently, IECSA's been in the headlines for serious cost overruns on their three biggest contracts:

· The 100 mi Highway 8 project (20% complete, when it should've been finished by now),
· The 11 mi Sarmiento tunnel (work has stopped at 40% completion),
· And the 4.5 mi Riverfront Freeway (which was inaugurated to great fanfare in May - but at $650 million, cost twice as much as had been budgeted).

Between the three, around $2 billion has been spent, and as noted two of the three projects are still far from finished.

Suffice it to say, Macri's congressional allies have stopped any effort to audit these works, or - as Cristina Kirchner herself requested - all the works carried out in the Kirchner era.

Reminds one directly of those crimes called "smash and grab," in which someone drives a vehicle into the front of a store, and everyone inside runs in and starts making off with everything he/she can grab at once and racing out before anyone can stop them.

With one of the gang in the President's office, they don't have to be super fast, just super organized.

What they have done to the people of the country is astounding. Their crimes are so enormous, and, of course, they own a lot of the judges by now, too.

Thank you, so much, for laying it all out for citizens of the world to follow. Cannot imagine how the citizens of Argentina must feel about this, the honest ones, that is, the ones who have to pay for this mega-crime wave with inflated prices far beyond sane standards, and deadly levels of devaluation, and no end in sight without nearly divine intervention.

Wow, oh, wow.

Excellent reading this exposition, sandensea. Illuminating, so helpful.