Despite billions in U.S. aid, Colombia struggles to reduce poverty

[mudplanet]

By Juan Forero
Washington Post staff writer
Monday, April 19, 2010

ALGARROBO, COLOMBIA -- Eight years after President Álvaro Uribe took office and began harnessing billions in U.S. aid dollars 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.

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 Dávilas, received $1 million in grants through an Agriculture Ministry program that provided tens of millions of dollars 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 last 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 García Márquez, said they received nothing from the state.

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

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/18/AR2010041803090.html

If only Venezuela was more like Colombia. Sigh.