I still have vivid images in my mind of children from that kindergarten; dirty children, chained in wheelchairs like bugs, without the slightest strength to take a soup spoon to their mouths, and others burning in urine-soaked pajamas.

I don't forget one of the employees who called the children with animal names; there was the lion, the zebra, the tiger, and the monkey was a teenager who, possessed at every moment by fits of epilepsy, would jump from chair to chair and throw himself on the floor to devour his own tongue.

I still have vivid images in my memory of children from that kindergarten

A ministry organized a Christmas afternoon for these children. We journalists had been crammed into a room and would be thrown into the arena like bulls as soon as the minister arrived. We stood in the small room sweating and drooling with heat and from time to time we would test the horns of our pens because we were bulls...

When the minister arrived, we heard it from the snarling of cars and the rushing footsteps that settled into the nursery school. One of the kindergarten employees took a bunch of keys out of her apron, took minutes trying them out one by one, and when she found the right key, she opened the door for us and we ran after the minister because we were bulls.

We journalists had been crammed into a room and would be thrown into the arena

The minister made a speech, gave hugs to two children, the only ones who were clean, who smiled non-stop and moved their microcephaly-ridden little heads. The nursery staff sang and others controlled with chains and sticks other children who, like bugs, wanted to throw themselves on the minister and devour him. Slowly, the minister walked around the nursery school, talking to the director and asking silly questions. He asked, for example, if the kindergarten had ever thought of opening a well. Not that the kindergarten had water problems, maybe a well for the kindergarten bugs, one by one, to throw in and be done with it.

The minister made a speech, gave hugs to two children, the only ones who were clean

Vegetable soup was taken, the nursery filled with balloons, exploded with joy. The minister, as he prepared to offer presents to the rattlers, began to mutter with his flock of advisors. He had already glued on his Santa Claus beard and his empty gift bag seemed to irritate him. The mumbling never ended, but we knew at the same moment that the presents had not arrived at the nursery.

The gifts that the minister was supposed to give to the kindergarten children had been misappropriated in his office. The aides were firing each other with accusatory fingers. The minister's Santa Claus beard began to wither, his sack of presents was filled with shouts and insults, and the dirty children, organized in an endless line, were holding out their little hands for the embezzled presents.

The gifts that the minister was supposed to give to the kindergarten children had been misappropriated in his office.

I don't forget that Christmas, because afterwards the minister took off his Santa Claus beard, got into his car and flew off. The soup ran out, the children went back to their dungeons smiling again because at least they had seen Santa Claus full of nothing.