Bogotá is famous for its vast network of bike lanes. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Dec 17 2013 (IPS)

“I ride 43 km a day and I love it,” said Carlos Cantor in Bogotá, Colombia. “Five years ago I switched my car for a bike,” explained Tomás Fuenzalida from Santiago, Chile.

They are both part of the burgeoning growth of cycling as a transport solution in Latin America.

But in the second-most urbanised region in the world, public sentiment towards bicycles is mixed, with some seeing them as a symbol of low socioeconomic status, says the “Biciciudades 2013” study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) with regard to the expansion of this sustainable means of transport in large and medium-sized cities in the region.

The report, based on surveys and commissioned by the IDB’s Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative, found that between 0.4 and 10 percent of the population in the region use a bicycle as their main means of transportation.

Among the cities studied, Cochabamba in Bolivia heads the list, with 10 percent of the population depending on the bicycle. It is followed by La Paz, Bolivia, and Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, with five percent. All of these are intermediate cities with populations between 100,000 and two million people.

Among the big cities, in Santiago and Mexico City, three percent of the population use bicycles as their main means of transport, followed by Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, and Bogotá, with two percent.

Bogotá is known as a world leader in bike paths, with 376 km of “ciclorutas” or dedicated lanes – one of the most extensive networks in the world – and 120 km of recreational paths. In addition, car traffic is cut on some streets on Sundays and holidays.

Cantor, a 58-year-old communications specialist, took a break from his daily ride to tell Tierramérica about his experience cycling in the city. “You can go fast, because there’s no traffic; on some stretches I even enjoy the greenery and the quiet,” he said. “There’s a lot of solidarity, and you make friends.”

The Secretariat of Mobility of the Capital District estimates that in Bogotá, a city of around eight million people, local residents make about 450,000 bike trips a day. The largest group of bicycle users are manual labourers and factory workers, followed by students from lower-income families.

The recreational bike paths date back to 1974 and are used by an average of one million people every Sunday.

“I love the [recreational] bike paths, I use them every Sunday,” law student Carolina Mejía told Tierramérica. “But I don’t use the ciclorutas, because many of them havent’ been completed yet, and there are stretches that you have to share with cars and buses, and that scares me. Also, it’s not safe.”

Cantor agreed that there are safety concerns: “Every day bicycles are stolen, and there’s a brisk trade in stolen bicycles. In a question of seconds they change the colour with a spray can and your bike disappears.” But he said “people learn to use less pretentious bikes, and they put marks on them so it’s harder to sell them underground.”

Fuenzalida, 44, swapped his car for a bike in the Chilean capital “for my health,” because “you get exercise without paying a single peso in the gym” and because “it is much nicer to ride a bike than to take the subway, for example.”

The public relations specialist not only pedals to work, but also uses the bike to take his kids to school, go to meetings, or visit family members.

For people like him, the Santiago city government is implementing a “master plan” to extend bike lanes to a total of 933 km. The city currently has 215 km of bike lanes, while there are 130 km of paths in adjacent rural municipalities.

Greater Santiago is home to over five million people.

“This is one of the keys to increasing the use of bicycles, and for the city and residents of Santiago to see the benefits in the easing of traffic congestion and for health and the environment,” the Chilean government’s spokesperson Cecilia Pérez told Tierramérica.

The mayor of the Santiago metropolitan area, Juan Antonio Peribonio, told Tierramérica that the plan would be ready in 2022 and that lanes were being built to connect the existing paths. To that will be added a public system to lend out bicycles, in order to promote cycling.

But not everything is positive for cyclists. “Sometimes pedestrians, taxi drivers or car drivers insult me, they call me stupid,” said Laurie Fachaux, a 28-year-old French journalist who has lived in Chile for a few months. “They should get used to the fact that I have a right to be on the streets just like they do.”

Antonia Larraín, 37, believes that part of the problem is the lack of regulations protecting cyclists. “If an accident happens, there is total impunity,” said the psychologist, who pedals 13 km a day to and from work.

Enrique Rojas, 50, who has driven a taxi for 30 years in Santiago, reflected the other side of the coin. “Cyclists are careless, they wind in and out of the cars and don’t respect traffic signals; I have often almost hit one of them because they didn’t stop for a red light or because they were riding at night without any light,” he commented to Tierramérica.

“Cyclists should also have to take out a permit, and bicycles should have licence plates. They shouldn’t just be able to get on their bikes and not worry about anything – they leave their safety in the hands of others,” he complained.

But bicycle use is growing nonetheless, like in greater Mexico City, which has a population of around 20 million.

“It has been a relatively short process,” said Xavier Treviño, director of the Mexican office of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). “The greatest success has been turning cycling into an alternative means of transport, and the main strength has been promotion of cycling,” he told Tierramérica.

The most visible symbol of cycling in the Mexican capital is the Ecobici Individual Transportation System, which since its launch in 2010 has drawn 87,000 users of 4,000 bicycles at 275 stations along 22 km of paths. Users register and pay 31 dollars a year.

Mexico City also has 90 km of separated and non-separated bike lanes. “Systems like Ecobici provide incentives for continued growth. It’s positive inertia. But infrastructure is lacking. All main roads should have infrastructure for bicycles,” Treviño said.

According to Ecociudades 2013, nearly all of the 18 intermediate and six large cities studied have bike lanes, with the exception of Asunción, Paraguay and Manizales, Colombia.

But only Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Asunción, La Paz and Montevideo – the capital of Uruguay – have regulations for urban cycling, as Rojas, the taxi driver, was calling for.

With reporting by Helda Martínez (Bogotá), Emilio Godoy (Mexico City) and Marianela Jarroud (Santiago).

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

The protests in Colombia have spread to the cities, fuelled by images of police brutality against rural families. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Constanza Vieira and Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Aug 30 2013 (IPS)

A strike declared nearly two weeks ago in Colombia by farmers and joined later by truck drivers, health workers, miners and students spread to include protests in the cities before mushrooming into a general strike Thursday, demanding changes in the government’s economic policies.

The protests ballooned after clashes with the ESMAD anti-riot police left at least two rural protesters dead and over 250 under arrest.

Also fuelling the unrest, say analysts, was the attempt by President Juan Manuel Santos to minimise the strikers’ actions. He said on Sunday Aug. 25 that “the so-called national agrarian strike does not exist.”

The authorities, meanwhile, allege that the nationwide roadblocks and protests have been connected to the country’s left-wing guerrillas.

The head of the Fensuagro agricultural trade union, Húber Ballesteros, was arrested Sunday, accused of financing the rebels. He is one of the 10 spokespersons selected by the Mesa de Interlocución Agropecuaria Nacional (MIA) to negotiate with the government.

MIA, a national umbrella movement, emerged from over two months of protests by campesinos or small farmers in Catatumbo, an impoverished area in northeast Colombia, where they are calling for government measures that would make it possible for them to stop producing coca – their main livelihood in the isolated, roadless area — and switch to alternative crops.

Since the campesinos began to protest in Catatumbo in June, the problems facing small farmers around the country have become more visible.

The difficulties they face are especially exacerbated in the central provinces of Boyacá and Cundinamarca and in Nariño in the southwest, where smallholder production of potatoes, onions, maize, fresh produce, fruit and dairy products is the main economic activity of much of the population.

Since Monday Aug. 19, small farmers around the country have been on strike to protest that they cannot compete with low-price food products imported under free trade agreements with the United States (in effect since May 2012) and the European Union (in effect since Aug. 1). They are also complaining about rising fuel, transport and production costs.

Another target of the farmers’ protests is “Resolution 970”, passage of which was required by the U.S.-Colombia FTA, which protects genetically modified seeds under intellectual property rights, making the replanting of them a crime.

In addition, they are protesting large-scale mining projects that have been given the green light in agricultural regions, without consulting local communities as required by law.

It all boils down to the lack of real policies for the countryside, says MIA, which presented a lists of demands before the farmers’ strike began.

The list calls for solutions to the crisis affecting farmers; access to land titles proving ownership; recognition of protected campesino territories; participation in decisions involving mining industry activity; guarantees for exercising political rights; and social spending and investment in infrastructure like roads in rural areas.

On Sunday Aug. 25, the protests spread to the cities, after farmers posted photos and videos on social networking sites of the ESMAD riot police’s brutal crackdown on campesino families, including children and the elderly.

A mission of human rights defenders reported that the riot police had fired live ammunition into crowds of protesters, and that injured demonstrators had wounds indicating that they had been beaten and even stabbed or shot by ESMAD. The mission also documented reports of sexual abuse and rape threats against the wives and daughters of campesinos taking part in the protests.

One woman who reported that the police threw a tear gas canister directly at her inside her home told the human rights defenders: “I was cooking for my kids when I saw an ESMAD agent in the window who, without saying anything, broke the glass and just threw [the canister] inside. I ran out to protect my kids.”

In response to the images and reports of police brutality, people in the cities began to protest, with “cacerolazos” – where demonstrators bang on kitchen pots and pans – which are common in some Latin American countries but are unusual in Colombia.

President Santos apologised and launched a dialogue, in an attempt to negotiate by region or by sector. But his strategy failed and the unrest continued to spread.

Santos said on Wednesday Aug. 28 that his instructions to the security forces to clear the roadblocks, “as they have been doing,” were still standing.

On Thursday, he unexpectedly cancelled his participation in Friday’s Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) summit in Suriname.

Thousands of indigenous people in the southwestern province of Cauca reported Wednesday that they had begun rituals to join the protests.

“The national agricultural strike is the result of problems and demands that have built up over many years,” economist Héctor León Moncayo, a university professor who is a co-founder of the Colombian Alliance against Free Trade (RECALCA), told IPS. “The only solution now is to bring about a major transformation.”

“A true agrarian reform process has never been carried out in Colombia. Every attempt has failed,” he said. The civil war, which has dragged on for nearly 50 years, “was a pretext for building up military power, and in parallel, paramilitary power,” he argued.

“The far-right paramilitaries stepped up the violence against the campesino population, fuelling massive displacement,” he said.
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According to the figures of the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a leading Colombian human rights group, 5.5 million people were displaced from their homes between 1985 and 2012.

From behind the scenes, “the drug lords increased the concentration of land ownership, and today there are very few regions with a small-scale campesino economy. Clear examples are the latifundios (large landed estates) where sugarcane and African oil palm are grown,” Moncayo said.

According to January statistics from the National Agrofuels Federation, 150,000 hectares of land are dedicated to sugarcane and oil palm, of the country’s total of five million hectares of farmland.

The government of César Gaviria (1990–1994) introduced free-market reforms to open up the economy. And more recently, free trade agreements have further undermined the competitiveness of small farmers.

Moncayo said campesinos have lost the ability to make a living by selling their products, thanks also to dumping – the export of products by Colombia’s partners at prices below production costs.

“It would be very hard to get the free trade agreements revoked, but it is possible – and urgently necessary – to design sustainable policies for rural development for campesinos,” he said.

According to the United Nations Development Programme, 32 percent of Colombia’s population of 47 million lives in rural areas, and between nine and 11 million people depend on farming for a living.

“We need to make the transition from traditional agriculture to agroecology, to revive the Colombian countryside,” Adriana Chaparro, a professor at Uniminuto, a private college that offers degrees in agroecology, told IPS.

“Agroecology is a big challenge that would make it possible to obtain the best results from farming, without deterioration of the land,” she said. “It would also prevent what many are calling for: subsidies for agriculture, which would require increasingly large investments, which are difficult to finance.

“These protests, which include fair demands, are also an opportunity to take a close, critical look at our agricultural practices, without falling into the government’s way of thinking,” Chaparro said.

Agroecology student Tatiana Vargas said these practices “should become a way of life, which would help us go back to our essence.”