Colombian Update The Weekender - Politics, Tragedy, Communities.

THE WEEKENDER

Not a big weekend for news per se, clearly Colombians were out and about keeping busy and none more so than the Mayor of Bogota Enrique Peñalosa who went for a three hour hike to visit his ambitious 'butterfly walk' project in the hills around the capital city - he and his party managed to get lost and add six hours to the hike eventually being rescued by the fire brigade....fortunately everyone was safe and sound.........memefest !

COMMUNITIES Fusagasuga is not a name that slips off the tongue easily but it was in the news this weekend after becoming the latest community to hold a referendum against mining, oil and fracking - of the 39,377 that voted fully 99.18% are opposed with the main reason it appears being the various mineral reserves which lie below the Sumapaz paramo (moors). It is though unclear as to how legitimate this vote will prove to be, the Constitutional Court recently put limits in the reach of such votes after a slew of such local actions over the past 18 months. It is a tricky situation with big oil supported by the President preferring to overlook environmental concerns and choosing instead to focus on vast potential to add to national oil reserves (this could easily be a passage from ‘US politics today’) - it is an immensely tough situation, whilst we are talking about the long term prosperity of 50 million people at the same time a community of 104,538 voters is also a number not to be discounted. Other communities will be watching developments carefully to see what the courts decide is the next course of action, one of the other variables of course is just how recoverable are the reserves of any given find and how economically viable is their extraction.

POLITICS It promises to be a feisty old week in the Senate as the proposed reforms to the political system reach the Plenary stage - headlines should come along thick and fast. Amongst the most polemic of the themes are the following :

Lowering of the salaries of Congress members as well as leading political figures around the country - this comes as a result of huge turnout for the referendum in August which contained this as one of its key themes, in terms of the public this would certainly be a crowd-pleaser.

The scrapping of the National Election Council - hard to see this occurring especially given their recent efficiency in getting results calculated and into the public forum within an hour of polls closing. It would be tough to bring them to book for the corruption in local elections which unfortunately has become par for the course.

The aligning of political term periods between President, Governors and Mayors. Likely to get sunk especially in the current format of extending the current periods of the latter two groups, this is being sponsored by the Centro Democratic Party however if you are going to have a US style political system you need some sort of balance every two years and with current Senate and Congress elections occurring just prior to Presidential elections it need to be at the local level. One of the main justification from the CD was that it would save money holding simultaneous elections but it is a low price to pay for democracy and is money which could easily be saved elsewhere. CD Senate President Macias this weekend even suggested an alternative idea which was to extend the current Duque Presidency by an extra year to the same end. As if to sum up neatly the conflict en route the VP herself stated yesterday evening that she was against altering any of the current term periods ...spoken like a lady with ambitions !

So this week expect to hear a stream of comments on the above themes as well as many more....the referendum of August demanded change and President Duque was quick to offer his support once the results were in. He himself is in Europe for a few days and that might just be a good place to be. *Please note all quips & references to extending the term period for Bogota Mayor Peñalosa in order to give him time to get back from his hike were omitted *

TRAGEDY I have lost count of the number of human tragedies I have written about over the past 13 years here in Colombia but this past weekend once again mother nature was at her lethal worst. This time around it was the populace of Barrancabermeja who were awoken in the early hours to the horrors of mud and water cascading through the town. At the time of writing 9 souls have lost their lives with 5 of them being children - this is a modest number versus other disasters but a tragedy nonetheless....Colombia suffers so many of these events that there is an element of 'tragedy-fastigue' which in itself sums up the heartbreak of the situation and as ever it is the most needy who suffer. Ironically the authorities over the weekend increased their outlook for El Nino with the probability being raised to 90% before the end of the year, few believe it will come close to the record breaker of a couple of years ago but farmers and inflation watchers will be keeping a beady eye on the temperature gauge.