The train smash that killed 50 and injured more than 700 during peak hour in Buenos Aires Wednesday morning (local time) was not an accident. It was the final product of the mass looting and indifference that Argentina’s public and private sectors have had with Argentina’s rail system, once upon a time Latin America’s largest.

There were times when Argentina’s state railway network had 40,000 kilometres and more than 190,000 employees, it was the economic spine of this vast and diverse nation. Argentina was built alongside its railway lines, thousands of towns depending on them economically. It was a jewel that this South American country boasted about to everybody.

During the privatisation fury in Argentina 20 years ago, when the prescriptions provided by the Washington consensus were part of Argentina’s economic staple diet, a Peronist President — Carlos Menem — decided that the deficit of a $1million a day was too much and decided to close it, selling off of what little was left and at bargain prices.

Thousands of towns became ghost towns. The rusty, twisted tracks on the side of the road in towns in the middle of nowhere, with their abandoned colonial-era stations, is proof of the Argentina that was.

Add to this a deplorable state of maintenance and security measures that make the trip on most of its lines a living hell for commuters travelling in crowded conditions and circumstances that defy any sense of prudence.  I say most of its lines because a few select lines have state-of-the-art trains with air-conditioning, such as the line to Tigre, an upper-class district in the northern part of the greater metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, which is also a tourist attraction.

On Wednesday morning’s peak-hour train crash — the Sarmiento line that links inner-city Buenos Aires and its working-class western suburbs — many commuters were travelling between carriages because of the ridiculous lack of space while all doors were reportedly open because of the intense summer heat wave.

Last May, five left-wing railway trade unionists were arrested and detained — accused of burning railroad cars belonging to the Sarmiento line — on charges of extortion and conspiracy following an investigation that was at best doubtful and fully backed by the national government, headed by President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, and that seeks to criminalise the protest of commuters and railway workers alike, equating it with sabotage and terrorism.

What the government does not talk about today — a mere few months after its landslide win last October — is where does the millions of dollars in tax-funded money go and why is it that it doesn’t keep the privatised railway companies accountable and put an end to the union bureaucracy and shady business dealings with business management companies?

Patricio Echegaray, Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Argentina, believes that the government should start using its record high economic reserves on schemes that will improve the quality of life of millions of Argentine’s, also triggering employment and stimulating the nation’s developing economy.

“We must demand that the federal government does not use the reserves just to pay foreign debt or to control the exchange rate against the US dollar. Why not use two billion dollars that is in the central reserve bank and apply them to a rapid recovery of freight and passenger rail through re-engineering”, Echegaray said.

Pino Solanas, of the National-Left Proyecto Sur Party, has been a staunch activist on this issue in Argentina ever since the rail sector was privatised in the 1990s. Solanas, also a veteran, award-winning filmmaker, made a documentary La proxima estación — Spanish for the next station — on the issue.

“The federal government must give specific explanations for the silence they have given the Argentine people today and the lack of controls and sanctions against the company TBA over the years, as identified by the Auditor-General’s office,” he said.

“We presented two projects in federal parliament last year requesting the termination of the contract with TBA, however, the government is doing nothing,” he concluded.

Echegaray agrees with the immediate termination of the Argentine state’s contracts with private railway operators. “What happened can only be characterised as a tragedy waiting to happen as a result of the structural crisis of Argentine capitalism and sequel to the years of neoliberalism that scrapped public services in our country. A public service such as transportation cannot be governed by the motive of profit and the state cannot ignore its responsibility in these matters. We demand a thorough investigation into this tragedy and the immediate cancellation of the railway concessions.”

The current Peronist government which has been in office since 2003 – first led by the late Nestor Kirchner and since 2007 by his wife Cristina Fernandez, now in her second term — has given top priority to policy concerning the state of the rail system during all of the election campaigns, even promising to nationalise it and introducing a fast-speed rail system scheme — used by Bob Brown in a 2010 Australian Green’s election campaign video to support his claim that Australia needed a scheme like Argentina’s — that has since been aborted.

Now, in an era of full prosperity — Argentina has had an average of 8% growth per annum since the Kirchner’s took office in 2003 and reserves are at all-time highs — yet 7000 kilometres of railway tracks are battered where trains cannot travel at speeds beyond 40 km/h and the sector employs fewer than 20,000 people. The deficit, meanwhile, rose to about $3.5 million a day. It is money that the state provides in subsidies to concessionaires who, despite so much free money, do not even strive to collect tickets, nor invest in maintaining and updating equipment.

Argentine authorities have had plenty of time to stop that train that crashed on Wednesday. They’ve had years.