The Vice Governor of Tierra del Fuego, Mónica Urquiza, has broken her silence in the most scandalous way possible by publicly admitting that, in relation to the expansion of the Port of Ushuaia projected in 2017, the State granted an advance payment and "the money vanished." This statement, far from being a mere hallway anecdote, is an indictment of the embezzlement of public funds that the administration of Gustavo Melella has kept quiet about for six years.

There is no doubt or reason why the Vice Governor should not immediately appear before the State Prosecutor's Office to file a formal complaint and provide evidence of this theft, which she herself has described. There is no more room for political commentary; it is time for criminal accountability .

The confession that exposed the inaction

Urquiza appears to have been referring to the 251-meter expansion project announced in September 2017 by Guillermo Dietrich, the former Minister of Transportation under Mauricio Macri, and former Governor Rosana Bertone . Those works, valued at $400 million , were never completed. If, as Urquiza claims, there was an advance payment that disappeared, the current Provincial Government has guaranteed this impunity by failing to pursue legal action since 2019.

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This omission takes on unprecedented gravity amidst the legal embarrassment the Executive is staging before Federal Judge Federico Calvete . While Melella 's legal team is reprimanded by the prosecution for "legal standing defects" and attempts to "bypass" the State Prosecutor, the Vice Governor admits that disorder and corruption at the port have been commonplace for almost a decade.

A logical move in the face of the abyss

The legal challenges to the national intervention in the port are currently at a dead end:

Faced with this scenario of technical defeat, the only way the Provincial Government can demonstrate its genuine interest in transparency is to denounce the theft that Urquiza now admits to knowing about. If the money "vanished" and the province did nothing, the narrative of "violation of autonomy" collapses under its own weight: autonomy was surrendered the day they decided not to denounce internal corruption .

The time for words is over

Tierra del Fuego cannot continue to be the battleground for a government that confesses to crimes on social media but neglects to report them to the courts . Mónica Urquiza must act with the institutional seriousness that her position demands .

If tomorrow there is no formal complaint filed with the State Prosecutor's Office to investigate the disappearance of those funds, it will be clear that his statement was not an act of honesty, but a distraction maneuver to hide the fact that, under the Melella-Urquiza administration, the port became a political slush fund, instead of a strategic asset for the maritime and Antarctic development of the bicontinental province .