June 20th is International Refugee Day. A refugee is legally defined as a person who is outside his or her country of nationality and is unable to return due to a well-founded fear of persecution because of his or her race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. By receiving refugee status, individuals are guaranteed protection of their basic human rights, and cannot be forced to return to a country where they fear persecution.
In 2007, there were 15.9 million refugees around the world, including 4.5 million Palestinian refugees, and it is estimated that 80 percent of refugees are women and children. According to the UNHCR, the leading countries of origin for refugees in 2007 were:
* Afghanistan: 3.1 million
* Iraq: 2.3 million
* Colombia: 552,000
* Sudan: 523,000
* Somalia: 457,000
Internally displaced people (IDPs) have been forced to leave their homes as a result of armed conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations, but unlike refugees they have not crossed an international border. Although internally displaced people outnumber refugees by more than two to one, no single UN or other international agency has responsibility for responding to internal displacement. As a result, the global response to the needs of IDPs is often ineffective.
In 2007, there were an estimated 26 million people displaced internally by conflict. The largest populations of internally displaced people are found in:
* Sudan: 4.4 million – 6 million
* Colombia: more than 3 million
* Iraq: 2.8 million
* DR Congo: 1.25 million
* Somalia: 1.1 million
This year the crisis in Pakistan added an approximate 2 million more IDPs. Another crisis that has been under-reported is the IDP crisis in Sri Lanka as that country’s civil war wound down. The number of Tamil IDPs is estimated at 285,000 currently in resettlement camps. The displaced living in towns numbers perhaps another 500,000. These are largely silent crises because governments are often unwilling to admit that they have an IDP crisis even if one is self-evident.
Latin American countries must attract investment to ensure economic growth and improve the distribution of wealth. While Asian economies wrestle with the current slowdown, the Middle East is confronting volatile energy prices. How can renewed long-term investment between Asia and the Latin America region be increased? How can Middle Eastern countries make the most of agricultural resources and food production in Latin America?
Panelists
Lord Brennan, Member of the Board, Matrix Chambers, United Kingdom
Luiz Fernando Furlan, President, Foundation for a Sustainable Amazon, Brazil
Javier Santiso, Director and Chief Development Economist, Development Centre, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Paris; Young Global Leader
Alessandro Teixeira, President, APEX-Brasil (Trade and Investment Promotion Agency), Brazil
Moderated by Kellie Meiman, Managing Director, McLarty Associates, USA
Facing Up to the Economic Slowdown
Latin America is expected to grow modestly in 2009. Local financial institutions as well as international agencies are providing resources to finance the implementation of counter-cyclical policies. Responses in sectors are trying to ease integration among supply chain links and promote greater coordination of macroeconomic policies in the region.
How are business sectors responding to 2009-2010 economic prospects?
Which sectors are performing better under such constraining circumstances?
Are there winners coming out of the present crisis? If so, what can we learn from them?
Panelists
Timothy P. Flynn, Chairman, KPMG International, USA; Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum on Latin America
Jim Goodnight, Chief Executive Officer, SAS Institute, USA; Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum on Latin America
Lord Levene, Chairman, Lloyd’s, United Kingdom; Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum on Latin America
Ricardo Villela Marino, Chief Executive Officer, Latin America, Banco Itaú Unibanco, Brazil; Young Global Leader
Marcelo Bahia Odebrecht, Chief Executive Officer, Engineering and Construction, Odebrecht Brazil, and President, Odebrecht Group, Brazil; Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum on Latin America; Young Global Leader
Moderated by
Robert Greenhill, Managing Director and Chief Business Officer, World Economic Forum
The above is a web presentation from the Sergio Fajardo for President campaign instructing Colombians on how to sign his petition signatures. Mr. Fajardo is the former mayor of Medellín. He forms part of civic movement in Colombia and is running as an independent.
Did Álvaro Uribe save Colombia only to destroy it? This is a question my fellow Colombians should ask themselves as we traverse this fateful month. To begin with, President Uribe’s popularity remains high. The latest Gallup poll shows 71% of Colombians continue to have a favorable view of the Colombian President. His approval rating is well-deserved for in the seven years of his administration, Uribe has pushed the FARC to the brink but it is unlikely that he can bring about their final capitulation even if awarded with yet another four-year term. Uribe is a warrior but Colombia is in need of a peacemaker.
But it is that a third consecutive period for Álvaro Uribe is simply inconsistent with Colombia’s long-standing democratic traditions. The country has never subscribed to caudillo politics and now is not the time to start.
“He is carrying out a redistribution of wealth without a discourse of rage,” said Héctor Abad Faciolince, a prominent novelist and political commentator here. “If Medellín cannot take these risks, then what place can?”
A look at the transformation of Medellín under the administration of Sergio Fajardo Valderrama.
Elected in 2003 as an independent, and riding a growing economy and this decline in violent crime, Mr. Fajardo has turned the city into a showcase for new educational and architectural projects.
He increased city spending on education, bringing it to 40 percent of Medellín’s annual budget of $900 million, while also raising spending on public transportation and microlending projects for small businesses. Five new libraries are at the center of his social policies, but Mr. Fajardo is also building a sprawling public science center and dozens of schools, and expanding public transportation by building cable cars up into the slums on the city’s hills.
He contends the poor will develop the skills they need to compete through these investments in education and new public spaces, reflecting a faith in architecture to help achieve this goal.
“Fajardo is making a long-term wager by carving out a foothold for the state in areas that were neglected for years,” said Aldo Civico, who as director for the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University has done extensive fieldwork on Medellín’s violence. “You need to start a process of transformation somewhere.”
Many parts of Medellín remain far from idyllic. Police officers toting assault rifles and wearing combat fatigues still patrol many parts of the city. Downtown, just steps away from the elegant plaza filled with voluptuous sculptures by another native son, Fernando Botero, street children sniff glue out of plastic bags and snort cocaine. Some in Medellín whisper that Diego Fernando Murillo, the paramilitary warlord known as Don Berna, still controls much of the city from his cell in nearby Itagüí prison. Others say drug traffickers launder revenues into the construction boom in high-rise apartments and malls that is accompanying the mayor’s architectural reconfiguration.
And yet Mr. Fajardo’s transformation of Medellín has captivated the city and, increasingly, other parts of Colombia. His approval ratings stand at more than 80 percent, making him the country’s most popular mayor and leading him to be widely mentioned as a potential presidential candidate after his term ends this year.
It’s May and in Colombia that means it is time to begin our search for the next President. Colombian law requires that candidates for the Presidency not hold office a year prior to the election. At the moment the situation remains rather confusing since President Alvaro Uribe has not formally decided whether he will run for a third term though that decision will be made by the middle of next week. His supporters in the Congress, however, are pushing a Constitutional reform project that will allow Uribe to run for yet another term.
If approved as expected by the Congress, a referendum would be held later this year. At least at 25% of the Colombian electorate would have to participate and Uribe would have to get 50% +1 for him to be allowed to run again. I intend to vote against a third term for Uribe. Colombian democracy has always been vibrant and the permanence of one man in the Presidency threatens to alter the character of the nation. Twelve years is simply too much for one man regardless of how good he has been for the country. Colombia is more than Uribe and in truth it is time to tackle other issues beyond our infernal war with the FARC. Uribe has broken their backs and establish a fragile peace. It is now time to firmly build a lasting peace by tackling social inequality.
El hombre es Sergio Fajardo. The man for that job is Sergio Fajardo Valderrama, the former mayor of Medellín. Dr. Fajardo is a mathematician with a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. His stint as mayor of Medellín was first run at electoral politics. As I have noted in the past Colombia is a post-partisan politics country. The power of the two long-standing traditional parties that dated to 1830s has been broken replaced by new parties and by independent civic movement. Fajardo belongs to this new independent civic movement.
From 2007 Newsweek interview. Notice the answer he gives right out of the gate on the first question.
When you took over as mayor in 2004, what were the most critical problems facing the city?
Sergio Fajardo: I walked Medellín from end to end to get a clear conception of its problems, going house to house and talking to people. The first problem was inequality, and to start working toward equality you must improve education—public education. Public education must be the motor of social transformation. The second problem was violence. Everyone in Colombia today has lived in a violent society, but in Medellín we had a particular kind of violence because of drug trafficking. It is a violence with deep roots, and it has profound effects on a society, and it is a kind of violence that no other place in the world has the same experience of. But we have had results here. In 1991 there were about 6,500 murders in Medellín—381 per 100,000 inhabitants. Last year, 2006, approximately 700 murders—about 29 or 30 per 100,000 inhabitants. That is less than all other comparable cities in Latin America. My approach was to treat these challenges like math problems.
What was your formula?
Pragmatism built on basic principles, like math. We had to reduce violence, but every reduction in violence we had to follow immediately—and immediately is a key word—with social interventions. The order is important. Social interventions require time and resources to work, so they will have little effect in the midst of such profound violence. It is true that you must have effective social interventions to make sure violence does not return, but first you must do something about violence. I never before in my life thought that I would work closely with the police or that I would call for more police on the streets. But you need security for democracy, and for that we needed more police—as long as they were police who respected human rights, and out of conviction, not just because Human Rights Watch tells them to. Now the police force is the pride of Medellín.
Everyone in Medellín seems to disagree about where you fall on the ideological spectrum—left, right, center. How do you describe your governing philosophy?
We have broken the traditional structure of politics here. In 1999 I got together with 50 people, friends, from different arenas—academia, cultural organizations, social organizations, NGOs, business—all of whom were, in one way or another, interested in working for the city. We realized that we could work, talk, dream, but to really do anything we had to go into politics, because politicians are the ones who have power. So after many years of being outside of traditional politics, we built an independent civic movement. As a mathematician, I think in terms of axioms on which we can construct everything else. And that is how I came up with a proposal for the city. I don’t define myself as liberal or conservative, left or right. Those old classifications don’t mean anything today in Colombia. Now I can explain why public education must be the engine of social transformation, or why we have to work for equality in order to improve growth, and a conservative person can listen to me and see a lot of reason in what I say. That is what we have achieved: creating a new space to work together. It is a civic philosophy for the 21st century.
How did you go about improving education in the city?
We had to have a comprehensive approach. It is not just about schools. It is about the whole life of a society. And I should emphasize: it is about making public education good, not privatizing education. We went school to school, classroom to classroom, designing and carrying out “quality pacts.” We mobilized everyone—business leaders, universities, private schools—to start working in the public education system. We increased spending on education to 40 percent of the municipal budget. We also built a lot of new schools and five “library parks” in the poorest neighborhoods in the city. These are not just libraries; they are community centers, the new axis of the neighborhood. And we made sure that they were beautiful, with spectacular architecture.
Some of your critics accuse you of wasting money on fancy new buildings that do more for your image than for poor communities or poor students.
People who say that a beautiful building doesn’t improve education don’t understand something critical. We have to build Medellín’s most beautiful buildings in the places where there has never been a real state. The first step toward quality education is the dignity of the space. When the poorest kid in Medellín arrives in the best classroom in the city, there is a powerful message of social inclusion. That kid has a newfound self-esteem, and he learns math more easily. If you give the most humble neighborhoods beautiful libraries, you make those communities proud of the libraries. That is powerful. We are saying that that library or school, with its spectacular architecture, is the most important building in the neighborhood. And it is sending the rest of society a very clear message of social transformation, but of social transformation without rage. This is our revolution. The most powerful people see us focusing on the most humble, and they are supporting us—that is an important achievement.
Well, well, well, I must say that for the first time in my life I am truly awed by change in the United States and thus it doesn’t surprise me that the American right is beside itself. If I am happy, they must be truly miserable. Let them rot in their misery, the rest of us deserve better than the failed neo-liberalism that they continue to proffer in their orgy of self-enrichment. President Obama’s pledge to “seek an equal partnership” where there is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations is being greeted across the continent as a sign that this is really the historic change that Latin America has been seeking with the United States. As Time’s Tim Padgett notes:
If it’s genuine, it’s hard to overestimate how important that promise is to Latin Americans, who’ve experienced a lot more heavy-handed interventionism and condescending disregard than they have partnership from either Republicans or Democrats in Washington. It not only heartened Latin leaders in Trinidad, it disarmed them.