Economic inequality threatens stability of Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Economic inequality threatens stability of Colombia
By Juan Forero
Washington Post
Updated: 05/15/2010 10:36:15 PM CDT


ALGARROBO, Colombia — Eight years after President Alvaro Uribe took office and began harnessing billions in U.S. aid to pummel Marxist guerrillas, Colombia is safer for this country's 45 million people and for the foreign investors who have flocked here.

But stubbornly high levels of poverty expose a harsh reality: Despite better security and strong economic growth, Colombia has been unable to significantly alleviate the misery that helps fuel a 46-year-old conflict and the drug trafficking behind it.

What social scientists here call lackluster results in fighting poverty have become a campaign issue ahead of this month's elections, in which Colombian voters will elect a president to succeed Uribe, Washington's closest ally on the continent. Unless a 43 percent poverty rate can be steadily reduced, experts on the conflict contend, Colombia could regress even as the United States continues to provide military assistance.

"There is not only significant poverty, but some of the poverty is stunning in its extreme," said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., who has traveled extensively in Colombia since 2001. "It really is at the root of so much of the unrest that occurs."

That poverty, and Colombia's big gap between rich and poor, is particularly evident in towns along the Caribbean coast, such as this community of dirt roads and forlorn farms. Here in Algarrobo (population 12,000), a wealthy and influential family, the Davilas, received $1 million in grants through an Agriculture Ministry program that provided tens of millions to affluent farmers nationwide. Critics here say it made no difference that the Davilas own one of the most productive and lucrative oil-producing palm groves for miles.

The subsistence farmers in the surrounding countryside, meanwhile, have remained desperately poor, among the millions of rural Colombians left behind even as Latin America has grown richer in the past decade's commodities boom. Those farmers, scratching out a living in a stretch of northern savannah that fired the imagination of the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, said they received nothing from the state.

"To the contrary, they charged me taxes," said Beatriz Mesa, 44, who recently gave up farming.

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