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June 12, 2009
Community Policy-making in Action and Indirect Contact with Spanish Royalty
Yesterday I got my first taste of community policy-making and it was definitely a mixed experience.
The meeting was yesterday afternoon at Casa Museo Pedro Nel Gomez, an old house/museum that housed plenty of avantgarde muralist Gomez's work. Gomez could most easily be described as Medellin's own Diego Rivera. Both were twentieth century artist famous for vast murals displaying mostly local people. They painted portraits of society as it really was, not wealthy individuals but the poor masses.
The Museum is well-guarded but severely lacking in resources. The parking lot is little more than a plot of grass, weeds and cigarette butts, but the inside is beautiful and silent. It is located in the Aranjuez neighborhood in Medellin, a more or less centrally located working-class neighborhood. Unlike the far poorer neighborhoods in Medellin's surrounding mountains or parts of Moravia, Aranjuez is one of Medellin's original neighborhoods and most houses are well-built, legally owned, and many decades old.
The meeting was, more than anything, chaotic, but from what I gathered it was a kind of follow-up meeting to the neighborhood assemblies held throughout the city a few days ago. There were all sorts of people there: interested residents of all ages, representatives of government agencies, lawyers, business leaders, University students, etc. The Moravia has been holding these kinds of meetings for years; there was a core group of people who clearly had experience in these assemblies and knew each other. This meeting built on those precedents to try to ensure that the 12 basic goals determined at the recent neighborhood assembly (from an original list of 101) would be integrated into the formal Moravia Project plan.
I came a little late and sat behind a very poor couple who each had a notebook. It is quite inspiring to see college-educated idealists and Moravia residents who probably didn't finish high school and have no reason to trust government institutions come to these meetings and make plans together as equals. Soon after I got there, however, the meeting had already descended into anarchy and confusion.
Each attendee expressed a different opinion about the scheduling of such meetings. The residents in particular had several problems with the schedule as it was. Some veteran community leaders complained about changes in the schedule, as they had already made sacrifices and adjustments to be able to work with the original schedule. Other residents complained that most meetings were scheduled during school vacations, when mothers had to stay home to take care of their kids and when many Moravia street salesmen migrate to small towns in pursuit of tourists. Finally, for many community leaders it is difficult, expensive and time-consuming to migrate all the way to Aranjuez to attend the meeting.
In short, the planners of these meetings did not fully take into account that the sheer poverty of Moravia residents would prevent many of them from attending. If the community couldn't attend, residents strongly emphasized, then all the meetings were pointless.
It is clear that, once Moravia residents were presented with the opportunity to participate in the policy-making process for their own neighborhoods, they latched on with enthusiasm. The question, however, is how much patience they will have as they wait for the changes they asked for. Numerous times at the meeting, residents complained about delays, problems and flaws in the project's execution. They obviously appreciate that the city invites them to important conversations and that it is committed with turning around their neighborhood, but what they really want is results. In other words, to them, an ineffective city administration is almost as bad as an indifferent city administration.
By the time I left, the meeting had not really even gotten started. The original idea was to divide up into small groups, each dealing with one of the project's components: Economic-Financial, Sociocultural, and Urbanistic-Environmental.
Outside, I ran into the Moravia project administrator who toured me around Moravia during the Spanish journalists' visit. He had brought about a thousand copies of a letter and was clearly stressed out. He said he was about to quit the project, and showed me the letter to explain why. It was harshly written response from ISVIMED to a pamphlet distributed around the neighborhood. The pamphlet, my friend said, sounded almost like a guerrilla pamphlet. By that, he meant that it was aggressive and almost spoke of class warfare.
According to the anonymous authors, ISVIMED had promised an effective relocation of residents to public housing projects but then left many people on the streets. It urged people not to accept the relocation plan and to resist any approach by ISVIMED or the city. Pamphlets are an effective way of doing dirty politics in poor Colombian neighborhoods. Guerrillas use it to stir up chaos and paramilitaries use it to make public death threats, impose curfews and announce social cleansing. This time, the pamphlet was being used to protest against bureaucratic inefficiency, which had resulted in serious problems for participants in the relocation process.
Political tensions are quickly developing in Moravia, and if public resistance to relocation grows, it could threaten several of the project's basic goals. On that note, I just got a call from Edith, who lives on the third floor of an abandoned house (read previous post). Nobody has visited her from the city, despite the fact that I had sent a woman to solve Edith's problems on Monday. She's growing impatient, and wants to be in constant contact with me to make sure that her problems are solved quickly.
It's an uncomfortable position for me to be in, but Edith is not wrong. The Moravia project is failing many of the people it is meant to serve, despite the fact that it is run by highly skilled and committed people. Ambitious urban renewal is very difficult, and Moravia residents have expectations as lofty as the goals set in the project's original plan.
On another note, the man who drove me to the meeting yesterday was a mayor's office driver who was hired to help drive a bulletproof car around the city during the recent visit by the Prince and Princess of Spain. He was lucky enough to have the princes themselves in the backseat, and told me that they treated him as an equal. Days later, he was still ecstatic and showed me a picture of the three of them together at the airport. They told him to call if he ever went to Spain and even gave him their number and even told him the Spanish origin of his name, Ramiro. Not only was he starstruck, but after learning the origin of his name, he seemed to even have a stronger and prouder sense of identity.
Posted by Pablo Rojas at June 12, 2009 11:11 AM
Comments
Thought I'd send you a comment to let you know people are reading. I know I like comments. :)
Anyway, very interesting! It's revealing to hear how poverty can hinder community organizing and the development of formal social capital...hm. Sounds like you are learning a lot. Good luck!
Posted by: Nadia at June 15, 2009 12:09 PM
