What Petro & Hernndez Offer Colombia's Urban Poor As They Head Off in the Second-Round Presidential
What Petro & Hernández Offer Colombia’s Urban Poor As They Head Off in the Second-Round Presidential Election
Clara Ines Yalanda, 36, and her 4-year-old daughter, Valentina, in front of their house in an informal settlement in Popayan, the capital of the southern Colombian department of Cauca / credit: Antonio Cascio
Clara Ines Yalanda, 36, is a Misak Indigenous woman and a single mother. While she was still a girl, she migrated from an Indigenous reservation to Popayan, the capital of the Cauca region in southern Colombia. With few options available, Yalanda and her family settled in an informal neighborhood.
Twenty years later, Yalanda has been unable to break the cycle of poverty associated with informal neighborhoods. A housing deficit and migration to cities has led rural migrants like Yalanda to construct homes within cities using low-quality materials. These type of homes—which make up 65 percent of housing in Colombian cities—lack basic services, such as a connection to water or a sewage system, and they are constructed outside the bounds of local laws.
Yalanda’s house puts her family’s health and safety at risk because it is near a stream and a sewer drainage system. Currently, only one of Yalanda’s five children lives with her because of her strained finances as well as the poor state of the house.
Early this year, Yalanda’s home and five others’ flooded, with the water having risen more than 1 meter (3.28 feet) high. That forced her to temporarily abandon her home, losing her possessions in the process. Yalanda said the municipality has warned several times that her house is in a risk area—but she added it has not offered a solution.
More:
https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/americas/what-petro-hernandez-offer-colombias-urban-poor-as-they-head-off-in-the-second-round-presidential-election/
