A few hundred people from the anti-vaccination obligation collective gathered on Saturday in the Route du Rhum village, located in the heart of Pointe-à-Pitre, to denounce “the money spent unnecessarily in a boat race that brings in nothing in the country “. “While we are spending millions on this, we are not solving the problems of Guadeloupeans,” Maïté Hubert M’Toumo, general secretary of the health branch of the General Union of Guadeloupe Workers, told AFP ( UGTG).
Listing in particular the reintegration of suspended caregivers, public health problems, and the question of water, “which is still not settled”, the Secretary General pointed to the amount of regional investment (more than five million euros) in the Route du Rhum, part Wednesday of Saint-Malo (Ille-et-Vilaine). “We see our elected officials being satisfied to see the State put a few million in this question but we know that it takes several billion to repair the pipes and the treatment plants”, she added.
“We will be there when the boats arrive”
CRS and police were deployed, on the sidelines of the demonstration, in the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre near the Memorial ACTe, where the main village of the Route du Rhum is located.
Activists have announced a new demonstration in the middle of the week, when the first boats, the Ultims (giant flying multihulls 32 m long), could arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday. “We will be there when the boats arrive,” said Gaby Clavier, a UGTG trade unionist, before heading back on the road with the other demonstrators, waving their flags to the sound of a pro-independence song.
The Route du Rhum is a solo offshore race created in 1978 and which takes place every four years from Saint-Malo to Pointe-à-Pitre. For this 12th edition, 138 boats took the start.