Can Sergio Fajardo teach Colombia that negligence can be as harmful as corruption?
by Adriaan Alsema December 14, 2020
Charges against presidential hopeful Sergio Fajardo indicate how negligence in Colombia’s politics may be as damaging as corruption.
Fajardo, a former mayor of Medellin and a former governor, received global recognition as mayor of Medellin, a position he held between 2003 and 2007.
Fajardo’s Medellin façades
Fajardo gladly took credit for the city’s dropping homicide rate and named the crown piece of his library program after King Carlos of Spain, who inaugurated the building.
The man who deserved the credit for the dropping homicide rate was crime lord “Don Berna,” whose Oficina de Envigado made murder victims disappear so they wouldn’t appear in the statistics.
Fajardo’s failure to challenge Berna’s criminal rule got a name, “donbernability,” and fell apart after Fajardo had already left office and the crime lord’s extradition sparked a gang war.
It wasn’t until 2019 that the war crimes tribunal began investigating the disappearances and found that Medellin may have become Latin America’s largest mass grave between 2002 and 2012.
By then, Fajardo’s former security secretary, Gustavo Villegas, was in prison for his ties to “La Oficina.”
Before, multiple social scientists had visited Medellin to study the city’s self-proclaimed transformation, but found the city hall never maintained statistics that could have measured the impact of policies.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/can-sergio-fajardo-teach-colombia-that-negligence-can-be-as-harmful-as-corruption/
(I'm glad I looked it up, as the article tells me far more than I knew about Fajardo. Colombia can't afford to have him in office again.)
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