Here is a video featuring Pedro Arenas, the recently elected mayor of San José del Guaviare, Colombia (someone we’ve known for a long time). Here, the mayor gives a tour of a public housing project whose scale dwarfs anything else in this town of 40,000 people.
Begun back in 2004, the project is an unfinished semi-ruin because corrupt authorities made off with the construction funds. Pedro Arenas’ administration is now trying to get the building job finished.
Of course, there is no shortage of government contracts stalled by corruption in Colombia and Latin America (or, for that matter, in the United States). What makes this particular case outrageous, though, was that the intended beneficiaries were 168 of the thousands of internally displaced families who have arrived in San José del Guaviare over the past fifteen years.
April 19th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Good video Adam. Great reminder of some of the difficulties in carry out many of the policies espoused here. Development must be sufficient, complete and sustainable. Corruption ravages all of these and here is a good example. Hey, if they apparently got a whole new Bojaya built, maybe this project can be finished sometime as well. Hopefully Arenas can provide some hope. This is (should be) one way he could be judged.
April 21st, 2008 at 11:26 am
Is it in any way indicative that no one has commented on this topic, or is it just a slow last few days on the blog in general?
April 21st, 2008 at 8:34 pm
We’re here. We’re listening. Colombia needs the support of her friends in Washington so we can achieve a better democracy. We don’t want Fujimori.
We want institutions that are transparent and accountable to the people. We want, above all, peace, not war and atrocities, to again become the norm .
July 1st, 2009 at 10:54 am
[...] subject of two previous posts to this blog (2008 video, 2005 post), Mr. Arenas belongs to a locally based center-left political movement and has run afoul [...]