For the patriada of a non-commissioned officer, Lázaro Báez's teams are already working in Antarctica

It's five and a half minutes of video. The voice of the NCO Eduardo Enrique Tavano is broken by the wind and the emotions. He speaks to

Mauricio Macri

to whom he supposes, he says, a patriot like him. We are in May 2018 and we are in Río Gallegos, in front of the Austral Construcciones installations, already transformed into cemetery due to the preventive detention of

Lázaro Báez

. Tavano records with his phone: he is panning machines, stationary trucks, and he asks the president to intercede for this equipment to be used by the air force, work through which he has ceased to be a homeless person She claims something that, after months of paperwork, was finally cleared by justice: become legal custodian of all such property.

This month, a Lázaro mechanical shovel and truck arrived at the base of Marambio, where Tavano is destined until December. Another shovel and grader should be traveling in a few weeks. Mission accomplished.

Macri has never seen the video. Judge Néstor Guillermo Costabel is the one who signed on October 3 the resolution authorizing the NCO in charge of the group of the logistics of the staff of the training and the enlistment of the army from the air to have about 50 teams in disuse, they will need repair. But Tavano is a mechanic and he is confident that he will be able to recover about 500 machines between trucks, trucks, graders and power shovels.

It cost him to get it. Because some of the leaders with whom he has come across since he's had the idea have ruled the initiative careless and because the air force does not The budget that would require the repair of everything that was seized. At the end of last year, the 1st Air Brigade of El Palomar did not know how to pay a light bill that was close to millions of one and a half pesos. From Antarctica, in communication with
THE NATIONTavano says the recovery until here for the state equals about 10 million US dollars.

These are details for a marine officer accustomed to the weather, which describes Antarctica, a destination that, at 47 years, away from his six children, the dream of his life. He had a difficult life. Catamarqueño, son of "a policeman and a hippie", as he describes his parents, escaped at the age of 11 from his home and lived for a long time in the Plaza Colón, in the capital of Córdoba. He slept under a monument: a fountain with an animal statue which he thinks to remember in the form of a lion. He bathed a few blocks away, in the Primero River, under the Avellaneda Bridge, and on Fridays and Saturdays he washed glbades in El Coyuyo. This pulpería founded by Don Bini allowed him to earn a little money and to interact with artists of the emission such as Cacho Buenaventura, Negro Álvarez or Elvio "Modesto" Tisera. He also waxed boots. "I'm not ashamed of my past," he says, and he remembers another gesture of this street universe: the grillman of a restaurant on the way home made a winking while throwing something in the trash and he knew that it was healthy food, no leftovers, and then removed his main course.

He reached the seventh year of school. He joined the school of NCOs in Cordoba in 1988, where he graduated from high school and learned mechanics. In 1990, two months before being received as a non-commissioned officer, he again contacted his parents, who approached the premises to inform him that the applicant had entered without his consent and that They did not agree with the fact that it was military. Tavano says that the Commodore who ran the school attended them, asked him if he wanted to receive and, if so, came back to meet the parents with a threat: "And now, they worry about their son? I denounce the abandonment of anyone ".

That's how his military career began. He met destinations such as Reconquista, Mendoza, Tandil, Buenos Aires, Moron, Mar del Plata and Comodoro Rivadavia, where, a few years later, he was responsible for transporting the 23 airports of Patagonia, below the 42nd parallel. to build the enclosure fence of the Rio Gallegos air terminal, 22 kilometers long, and to see where he saw the warehouse of his neighbor, Austral Construcciones, expand uninterrupted until the end of 2015. On these installations, he seized 14 residential modules, 15 flask machines, 15 Chevrolet S10 trucks, an ambulance, two minibuses, six trucks, two semi-trailers for general merchandise, a Peugeot van Partner and a Volkswagen Saveiro utility. Part of what he shows in the video that he recorded in May. "The planes left Malvinas 36 years ago," he told Macri. "All this here is immense: it is the weight of every Argentine, I ask you to help me set up a repair shop for the Air Force fleet. If this video comes to you, I would like to say: help me to magnify the homeland, our country is so rich that they could not melt it. "