#poverty

Colombia at crossroads; show us promised land Mr President

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Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos goes to the polls in May promising to bring peace to Colombia if he is re-elected for a second term.

Rumours say the campaign slogan will be “Unidos por la paz” (“United for peace”).

But is peace really enough?

Colombia is at a crossroads. After a decade of record levels of foreign investment, with peace on the horizon, and an economy now bigger than Argentina`s, there is a unique opportunity for Colombia to secure its place at the top table.

But Colombia faces real and structural problems that block the way.

A politician not willing to show us the way to the promised land does not deserve another four years in power.

Time then, Mr President to tell how you will fix:

1. Colombia`s education system which last year was rated among the world`s worst.

2. A health service you promised to reform three years ago but remains unfit for purpose.

3. Infrastructure, for which you promised billions of dollars of investment but have failed to get spades in the ground.

4. Corruption; despite your government passing a host of legislation, Transparency International last year gave Colombia its worst score in 10 years.

5. A sclerotic justice system where – according to the World Bank – it takes four years to enforce a contract.

6. Rural Colombia and the agribusiness on which 50% of the nation is dependent. We`re six months on from the nation-wide rural protests but we still await a plan for a sustainable future for the nation`s farmers.

7. Law and order. You say crime is down and certainly homicides rates are moving in the right direction, but Colombians feel less not more safe since you have come to power.

8. Poverty, you have made progress in some areas but 10 per cent of the nation still live on little more than a dollar a day and 40% of Colombians are poor according to your own figures.

Politics should be about solutions to these and many other problems facing the nation. 2014`s election campaign has avoided this debate.

Yes, Colombia Politics supports Santos` bold efforts to negotiate with FARC guerrillas to end 50 years of conflict. But this election cannot be reduced to a vote on whether to support peace or to continue with the war.

Time to end the demagoguery Mr President and tell us what you`ll do to make Colombia the country its people deserve.

Too poor for school in Regalo del Dios

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Anna Tyor recently spent time in Regalo del Dios, Antioquia. Ana`s portrait of this “Forgotten Colombia” is being published on Colombia Politics over four articles here.

The view from the school high in the mountains is impressive. From inside the barbed-wire fences you can see the line of newly developed cable cars drift down the valley’s sides, over thousands of tin roofs gleaming in the midday sun. The shacks that cover the hillsides are a jumble of plastic and plaster and a far cry from the pearly-white school buildings equipped with customized wooden doors.

Fe y Alegría (Faith and Joy) is a recently constructed vocational school located in Regalo del Dios, an impoverished town that lies high above Medellin, Colombia’s second-largest city.

“The facilities here are great and free,” said Lady, one of the teachers from Fe y Alegría, while walking from the engineering building to the cooking school. “The problem is that the people choose not to take advantage of them.”

The people Lady refers to live in the area of El Pinar, of which Regalo del Dios is a part. The population is mostly made up of internally displaced persons from Antioquia and Choco. They were often forced to flee their ancestral homes after repeated violence and threats, perpetrated by Colombia’s main rebel groups, the FARC and the ELN, neo-paramilitary groups, and other illegal armed groups. They came to Medellin hoping for a better life, but ended up high in the hills surrounding the city, in the comunas – the shanty towns.

“They don’t come to the school for many different reasons,” Lady continued. “Maybe a woman can’t come because her husband is gone, she already has three children, and she has to work. Others don’t see the point of studying here when they can make easy money through illegal work.”

Fe y Alegría is located in the municipality of Bello, north of Medellin, and is funded by the National Learning Service (SENA). It offers free technical classes for any person over 16 on weekdays, with daycare services for the children, and organizes a 6-month paid internship for each student after their theory classes are finished. Those who complete the full 2-year program are guaranteed jobs at local factories.

According to Lady, the availability of the schools in Regalo del Dios and the surrounding area is not the main problem. “No, the problem is that there are so many bad options for the people who live here, and they don’t think about their future, just what would make the present better in that moment.”

Many residents in the area, especially young men, turn to illegal forms of work to make quick money, becoming parts of the combos, the small gangs – often employed by larger organizations like the Urabeños and the Rastrojos – who control the drugs trade in the comunas. Medellin has several hundred combos operating throughout the city many of them located in the northeastern sector of the city, close to Regalo de Dios.

When money is readily available for criminal work, and the benefits of education are just intangible rewards far off in the future, it is no wonder that young men – and increasingly young women – are joining the combos before they join a class at Fe y Alegría.

“I had one student in my class who was beautiful young girl. Soon she began dating someone who could seemingly provide her with a lot of money and expensive things because he was involved in illegal activities. She ended up quitting the class,” said one teacher at the school.

Other women do not even have time to begin the classes. Most women in the area have children before they are 18 years old, and many of these women have families of five or more by the time they reach 25. With hungry mouths to feed and the responsibilities of a growing family, there is simply no time for school.

A report released in the last week of October by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) found that one in five girls in Colombia gets pregnant before 18. In Regalo del Dios, where poverty is high and sex education is non-existent, the rate is significantly higher.

Some children who grow up in Regalo del Dios and similar communities are disadvantaged from the start. UNICEF states that each year in Colombia 500,000 children do not register for elementary school and only about 75% of Colombians attend secondary school.

In the hills of Medellin over the last 10 years, schools have been forced to close temporarily due to violence in the area, and some have even been directly targeted. When the schools are reopened, students and teachers alike are afraid to return, leading to lower attendance rates and fewer resources.

The problem is exacerbated by the city’s massive inequality. A recent UN report found that Colombia has the most unequal cities in Latin America, with Medellin being the chief culprit. UN-Habitat representative Eduardo Lopez told newspaper El Espectador in early October that in Medellin there is “an oligarchy that continues to dominate the economy, and so the wealth created since the mid-90’s still hasn’t reached the poor.”

The governments of Medellin and Bello categorize their neighborhoods into different estratos, or socio-economic strata. Regalo del Dios is located in the lowest social stratum, Estrato 1, and the way the education system is structured means that students have little chance to move up to a higher estrato. It is a vicious cycle: lack of funding leads to low-quality teachers and a complete lack of resources. As a result, students learn little and leave school early are then uninterested – or incapable – of demanding the change that would see the community’s situation improve and result in more funding for the schools.

While students in the lower estratos are barely able to pass the standardized test or the basic English exam that would allow them to study in the low-cost public universities; schools located in estrato 6 – in the ritzy, southern end of the city – offer year-long study abroad programs in the United States and England.

“I learned a few words of English in school, but I’ve had to learn in other ways,” said Jeison, a resident of Regalo del Dios. “Most of my English I’ve learned at the community center close to my house.” Jeison makes the muddy trek to the community center almost every day because he knows that he must learn more English to qualify for university.

“The quality of the schools here is low; they lack educated teachers and resources. Teachers here in the schools don’t know English but they still teach English classes,” he said.

Jeison dreams of becoming an electrician. As his English improves so will his chances of going to university, and with schools like Fe y Alegría to support him there is no reason why he cannot achieve his dream. But the dream must outshine the allure of the quick buck, and it must continue strong even when his friends drive by with the spoils of the drug trade – cars and women. Jeison’s dream is a humble one, but the fact that he dreams of honest work is hope enough – that is half the battle in Regalo del Dios.

UN: ´Colombia`s urban rich poor gap worsening´

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Colombia`s cities are Latin America`s most unequal, according the United Nations.

The UN claim Medellin is the city with the largest gap between the rich and poor, and that despite government claims to the contrary, the situation is worsening.

A report on urban equality in Latin America whose results were revealed yesterday, shows that inequality in Colombia`s urban centres grew by 15% between 1990 and 2010.  Worse still, inequality is growing faster in Colombia than in any other of the 18 Latin American countries studied by the UN.

To preview the report`s official launch, in an interview with the newspaper El Espectador, the report`s director Eduardo Lopez Moreno claimed, “Colombia is the only Latin American country where inequality is growing in all of its cities”.

Consecutive Colombian governments have heralded record economic expansion over the past decade, pointing to annual GDP growth figures north of 4 per cent. But Lopez Moreno claims this has been “in no way pro-poor”.

Lopez appears to propose Colombia change its economic model; something Colombia Politics has long argued for both in the TV studios and on this website.

Lopez claims Colombia`s economy is run by “monopolies”, “oligarchs” whose hands so tightly grip the levers of business that the poor (and let`s be honest, the middle class too) are kept out of the game. According to Lopez, Colombia`s  “markets work under the logic of hoarding or restricting (money and opportunities)”. In Medellin, he says, “the oligarchy continues to control the economy in the region, preventing wealth from reaching the poor.”

The comments seem to echo conclusions reached by Havard Professor, James Robinson in this year`s publication, “Another Hundred Years of Solitude” :

“Rich people in Colombia mostly make their money from monopolies in protected sectors that are created and shielded by the government”

Colombia Politics view

Robinson, like Lopez see Colombia`s economy as dysfunctional – almost pre-capitalist, even mercantile.

In this context any fight against poverty will fail. Colombia desperately needs to encourage the growth of more small and medium-sized businesses, to de-regulate and to establish a proper monopolies commission.

In private conversations accountants, politicians and small business owners have all told me that things are getting worse under the Santos administration. At the end of last year, the government introduced a new finance bill which reformed the tax code. All terribly boring stuff, but the key for many is that far from making things easier for the little guy – as we believe he should – Santos is rewarding the multi-nationals with cuts, at the expense of independent and start-ups on whom a greater tax burden has fallen.

Anecdotal perhaps, but it is an issue that unites many on the right with many on the left.  Over lunch with the high-profile left-winger, Senator Jorge Robledo, I asked the campaigning firebrand whether he thought the anti-market measures used by socialist governments across the Americas would work in Colombia. He laughed and said that if he were in power the first thing he would do would be to move Colombia towards capitalism. His argument is that there is no competition in the market, that it is run by “combos” (code for mafia). The monopolies and oligarchical figures that rule the roost mean Colombia must be seen as a “pre-modern” and “pre-capitalist” society, he asserts.

Robinson, you feel, would agree:

“The richest men in Colombia have monopolized different sectors—Carlos Ardila Lülle, soft drinks and sugar; Luis Carlos Sarmiento,banking and financial services; Julio Mario Santo Domingo, beer.”

There are many succesful businessmen and women in Colombia, there are plenty of start-ups and entrepreneurs. The time has come however, for real reform, real competition and real capitalism.

Under the current rules, “the poorest 10 per cent of Colombians pay 8 per cent of their income in taxes, the richest 10 per cent pay just 3 percent” (Robinson).

Step forward a pro-business pro-change presidential candidate.

Picture, The Guardian.

Colombia´s poverty rates shock as millions on 1.5 USD a day

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Extreme poverty is on the increase in Colombia´s most under-developed regions, with figures revealing over 40% of inhabitants of the remote Chocó have a monthly income of less than 91,000 pesos (47 US  dollars).

Colombia´s national statistic office DANE, yesterday published its poverty index, showing over 10 per cent of Colombia´s 46 million live on little more than a dollar a day.

Official figures show that since coming to power in 2010, the Santos government has taken as many as 700,000 out of ´extreme poverty´, and 1.7 million out of ´poverty´.

Despite this, nationwide poverty rates are running at almost 40% of the population while in Chocó, and Cauca this figure is much higher, 68 and 62% respectively.

Santos may argue that improvement has been made, but poverty is on the increase in Colombia´s hardest hit regions.

What is poor?

´Extreme poverty´ is classified as those who earn no more than 91,000 pesos a month, while the monthly income threshold for those considered ´poor´ varies according to department.

Here´s the thing. The government recently amended the way in which it measures poverty. Under the current regime, for a Colombian to be considered poor, he must earn less than 200,000 pesos (100 USD a month). This figure is the national average, and in poorer departments like Cauca once a worker earns over 168,000 pesos a month he is no longer considered poor.

Hang on… Someone that earns less than 90 US dollars a month is not considered poor?

Equally, the government does not consider poor a family of four with an income of 780,000 pesos. That´s 400 dollars a month. Yes, between four. Ask yourself; can someone living on so little really be considered to have moved out of poverty?

Colombia Politics view

The Santos doctrine is “Prosperity for everyone”. If 68 per cent of those from Chocó and if 62 per cent of those from Cauca struggle by with 90 dollars in their pocket, can the president really argue that the country is progressing – and for everyone?

Bruce Mac Master, the minister for Social Prosperity last year told Portafolio newspaper that the government had already reached 70% of the goals set for the four years of the Santos mandate. Well, if the government has already made such inroads into its target – laudable as that is – then the bar was, frankly. not set anywhere near high enough.

President Santos´government is building houses for the poor, it is undoubtedly focusing attention on those left on the margins, but is it doing enough? Is it surely complacent to argue Colombia is now a more “modern, just and secure” country (Santos´ new election mantra) when so many live in such abject conditions.

Colombia is one of the world´s most unequal societies.

The media and the political class have celebrated DANE´s figures over the past couple of years. Colombia Politics sees very little to cheer.

On the contrary, poverty in Colombia should be cause for sorrowful soul-searching, for reform, for action. For us, the DANE´s figures are a tragedy.

Picture, 24.