Is a Corrupt Government Better Than No Government?

Cartagena Shows the Power of Private Foundations and the Necessity of a Government -- Even if it's Corrupt

August 2018

Cartagena, Colombia, has gorgeous Caribbean beaches lined with luxury apartments, hotels, and new shopping malls. It is a regular haunt for famous celebrities like Bill Clinton. It also has had eight mayors in five years and one of those is in prison for corruption. Outside of the main tourist center, government services barely exist. Electricity and water services regularly fail. A director of a private foundation that provides preschool instruction, adult education, and micro-credit for small businesses said that her foundation spends significant sums to maintain a power generator and water tank for frequent outages. “It’s expensive not having government services because you have to pay for your own infrastructure with your own funds. Eighty-percent of our city is quite poor and the lack of services hit them the worst. They cannot afford the power generator or water tanks that we have at the foundation.” 

Additionally, there is limited publicly funded trash collection. The same foundation director gave a tour of a green belt across the street from her foundation that has become a de-facto garbage dump. The presence of garbage in the neighborhood, only a five-minute drive from Cartagena’s glitzy hotels, creates a breeding ground for diseases. The director also notes that the ubiquitous garbage debases the neighborhood’s image and sets a terrible example for the youth.

To combat the trash problem, the director and her foundation initiated a trash-collection enterprise for multiple neighborhoods in the city. Private industry provided some of the clothes and tools. The foundation and its microcredit arm helped finance a trash collection center where trash and recyclables are sorted after trash collectors bring them to the center. Collectors are paid by the kilo for their work. Many of the sorted recyclables are resold to bottling companies. Others are made into products like buoys that are used at the city’s piers. The streets are significantly cleaner. The green spaces are next on the list for cleanup.

Another foundation across town in an equally impoverished neighborhood sits on swamp land. Some in this neighborhood are descendants of Afro-Colombians who were kicked out of the city’s Chambacu neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s. Others are refugees from Colombia’s internal conflicts of the last 30 years. They came to Cartagena as farmers with skills ill-suited for an urban environment. More recently, Venezuelans have settled in the neighborhood. They are fleeing their nation’s recent economic and security crisis.

This foundation has organized residents into agricultural collectives. People grow vegetables on their own land or on community plots. They bring their produce together and sell it to restaurants in the tourist center and also eat a fair share of it themselves. The foundation teaches the growers how to use their different crops in recipes to promote healthy cooking and eating. It also provides pre-school education to over 200 children for 3 dollars a month per child.

Public security, however, is an area where citizens are less apt at replacing the government. Citizens complain about the impunity criminals enjoy. In a city of just over 1 million, Cartagena has experienced over 200 murders every year since 2009. A taxi driver who has been robbed twice at knife-point says, “I report these crimes to the police, and of course they don’t do anything.” At a different foundation that provides job training for teenage mothers the students unanimously complain that the police never do anything to solve crimes. Colombia’s recent history, however, offers a cautionary tale of citizens taking the law into their own hands.

In the 1980s and 1990s, paramilitary groups organically formed in Colombia’s countryside to protect communities threatened by Colombia’s rebel group, the FARC, and criminal gangs of narco-traffickers and kidnappers. Colombia is a geographically treacherous place with extremely high mountains, rivers, and jungles that isolate many communities from the state. Many of the local paramilitary groups, without a check on their power, became involved in the very criminal businesses that they formed to fight. This is little different from what has occurred more recently in places like Michoacán, Mexico, as shown in the Netflix documentary “Cartel Land”.

Residents also frequently cite the lack of economic opportunity as a cause of crime and violence. “Without improved public education, any hope for a decrease in violence is wishful thinking,” says a public-health instructor at a foundation. The local newspaper carries multiple stories every week about schools without enough teachers and crumbling buildings. The wealthy, without exception, send their children to posh private schools.

Inconsistent cash flows also highlight the limits of relying on non-government entities for essential services. All three foundations I visit say 2018 has been a very difficult year for funding. At the foundation that provides job training for teenage mothers, one of their three departments was eliminated for the year due to lack of funding.

Foundation directors give different reasons for the cash flow problems. One says that “people pulled back from their giving here because they were afraid that Petro (the left-wing) candidate (in the 2018 election) would win. They were keeping their money because they were afraid that Colombia could turn into another Venezuela. Now that the election is over (and Petro lost), I think people will start donating again.” Another foundation director says that foreign donations are down because the ex-president, Juan Manuel Santos, won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the internal conflict with the FARC. “As such, foreign donors think that Colombia has solved its problems. They have moved on to Syria, Myanmar, and other hot spots in the world. They don’t realize that in Cartagena, which does more to attract tourists than to help its own people, there is still a mountain of work to do.”

Not surprisingly, though, people in the city have little faith in the government’s ability to turn things around. “Right now, if the government got more involved it would simply lead to more corruption,” says a long-time foreign resident of the city who assists the foundations with fundraising. “More taxes just means more money for the government to steal,” adds an employee of a foundation.

Many locals from poor neighborhoods voted for the right-wing candidate Duque who was inaugurated August 7, 2018. The left-wing Petro, many state, would have just expanded an already corrupt government. The example of next-door Venezuela as a failing state, which has had nearly two decades of left-wing rule, is also regularly cited as a reason to block a left-wing expansion of the government.

One area in which the city government has been effective is in new road construction. On a visit to a small business that receives microcredit from a private foundation, a loan officer points out the difference between the paved and unsaved parts of the city. In the newly paved sections, houses look newer and freshly painted. The pavement abruptly ends and gives way to a dirt road. The houses suddenly look dirtier, lack paint, and sometimes just have dirt floors.

“Once a new road is built, it’s like an invitation to people to start investing in their homes. They feel like their neighborhood has a future,” says the loan officer. She adds that paved roads and an improved neighborhood image were good for the small businesses she serves. City government building roads, citizens improving their homes and neighborhood image, and businesses benefiting from infrastructure and neighborhood renewal. I joke to the loan officer that newly paved roads are evidence that the government is totally evil. Without a smile, she nods her head slightly. It is a reality that does not fit with her narrative of government waste and corruption but one that must be told. The necessity and efficacy of public-private partnerships are real. The future of Cartagena’s vast underclass depends upon it.