Thousands of demonstrators have been protesting in Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar against the removal of Mayor Gustavo Petro over his Zero Garbage programme. Credit: Andrés Monroy Gómez/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ, Dec 13 2013 (IPS)

The ousted left-wing mayor of the Colombian capital, Gustavo Petro, is a casualty of the battle over the introduction of a Zero Garbage programme, which had included thousands of informal recyclers in the waste disposal business.

“His removal was arbitrary,” said Nelson Rojas, one of the workers in the city government’s Basura Cero (Zero Garbage) programme.

“We don’t know what is going to happen now,” he told IPS in Plaza de Bolívar, where tens of thousands of people have demonstrated every day in front of city hall in support of the mayor since he was sacked on Monday Dec. 9.

Petro was fired and barred from holding public office for 15 years due to three “extremely serious infringements,” according to the inspector general, Alejandro Ordóñez, who has the authority to investigate and dismiss public officials.

Two of the infringements were logistical and the third was a “violation of the principle of free enterprise.”

The measure against Petro appeared to be final. But legal experts have said they found an article in the constitution establishing that the mayor of Bogotá can only be removed by the president, at the inspector general’s request.

According to the ultra-conservative Ordóñez, the mayor’s decision to put 63 percent of the lucrative waste disposal business in public hands violated the principle of free competition. At the time, the business was run by four private contractors.

The inspector general charged Petro with handing garbage collection over to public companies that supposedly lacked experience and that used garbage dumpsters instead of trucks for six months, which caused the death of one worker.

“There’s a lot of money in waste disposal,” said Rojas, wearing a green Basura Cero uniform. “The private companies are opposed because they got rich off the collection of garbage.

“The inspector general is an ally of the rich and they are against the mayor’s policies,” he said, as people rallied in Plaza de Bolívar, where Petro had urged people to come out to protest his removal.

“The private companies don’t give work to women or to older people,” he said.

Three women and a man wearing the same green coveralls agreed. “In Basura Cero, 60 percent of the workers are women. And it is mainly women who are employed to sweep the streets in Bogotá,” said another one of the protesters.

“More than 3,000 families will be left without a livelihood…we’re going to keep working in Basura Cero, we’re going to protest in shifts,” he added.

Jorge Estrada, 37, also wearing a green coverall, held up a sign with the reasons the mayor was fired: “For giving the recyclers decent working conditions”; “For taking the garbage business out of the hands of the Bogotá mafia”.

This city of eight million people is run as an autonomous capital district made up of 20 municipalities. Over the past year, garbage collection in 12 of them – 63 percent of the waste disposal in the city – has been in the hands of Aguas de Bogotá, a subsidiary of the state-run Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado de Bogotá water and sewage company.

In the rest of the municipalities waste disposal is still carried out by three of the original four private consortiums.

Dec. 18, 2012 was the deadline for the city government to fulfil a constitutional court order for all organised garbage pickers to be included in the waste disposal business nationwide. The aim was to create equal conditions for those who make a living scavenging for and reselling recyclable materials.

Petro’s predecessors failed to fulfil a similar sentence in 2003, instead extending the contracts held by the private companies, which are the exclusive owners of the rubbish in their areas.

In practice, waste pickers, who go through the bags of unseparated trash that residents of Bogotá leave out on the sidewalk, made a tiny dent in the private companies’ monopoly.

The contractors are paid per ton of garbage trucked to the Doña Juana dump on the south side of Bogotá – a system that discourages recycling.

After taking office in January 2012 it took Petro six months to win city council approval for his development plan, which included a new rubbish collection system.

The idea was to move towards the goal of zero garbage by reducing the amount of waste dumped in landfills by separating garbage at source and recycling.

A city government census found that there were some 15,000 garbage pickers in Bogotá. The Zero Garbage programme hired 3,000 of them, and the rest are paid to transport recyclable waste to warehouses, instead of only paying the private contractors.

The new system extends the life of the city dump, and incorporates a vulnerable segment of the population in the business of trash collection.

But the private companies, who wanted to bid for new seven-year contracts, were not pleased when Petro tried to temporarily extend their contracts as he worked out the details of the new system.

In heated negotiations, Petro talked about putting the entire system into public hands. That is what inspector general Ordóñez cited when he argued that Petro was violating the principles of free enterprise and free competition.

When the city government saw no agreement was going to be reached, it prepared a district company to collect the garbage after the Dec. 18 deadline.

In just over two months it reconverted Aguas de Bogotá, which cleaned up sludge and garbage from sewers in dumpsters that were specially conditioned to transport leachates.

But the Petro administration suffered a severe backlash.

The contractors did not agree to return the garbage trucks to the city.

There weren’t enough dumpsters and the city government faced legal limits that kept it from acquiring trucks or adopting other measures before Dec. 18 because officially there was no emergency yet.

Three days before that date, the influx of garbage to the landfill dropped, according to measurements by the Special Administrative Unit of Public Services of Bogotá.

The night before, mountains of garbage had begun to appear on the streets, which the city government garbage collection service was unable to pick up because it would have violated the terms of the private companies’ contracts, which gave them exclusive control over the waste.

The city government was careful not to allow the contractors’ trucks into the landfill after Dec. 18, because it would have meant an automatic extension of the contracts.

The Petro administration used the dumpsters for leachate and rented used garbage trucks from the city of New York.

Although it took the trucks weeks to arrive, the system was working again within three to eight days after the Dec. 18 deadline, depending on the municipality.

In the negotiations, Petro finally agreed to allow three consortiums to continue operating in eight of the municipalities.

But in the view of the inspector general, it was not necessary to put garbage collection into public hands in order to live up to the constitutional court order.

The inclusion of thousands of garbage pickers in the system has involved carrying out a census, issuing special cards, and helping people open savings accounts – a process that has not yet been completed.

Justice Minister Alfonso Gómez Méndez announced that the government would propose a constitutional reform to modify the post of inspector general, who is named by Congress, has practically absolute power, and has 30,000 public employees under him.

But in the meantime, the constitution allows the inspector general to sack publicly elected officials, whose only recourse is to appeal to the inspector general’s office itself.

Only if the constitutional article that would leave the case in the hands of the president, Juan Manuel Santos, prevails will Petro be able to return to the mayor’s office.

Congressman Iván Cepeda, of the left-wing party Alternative Democratic Pole. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Jul 12 2012 (IPS)

The same week that a bomb attack targeted Colombia’s former interior and justice minister, Fernando Londoño, a Colombian national came forward and confessed that similar attacks were being planned against former senator Piedad Córdoba and current Bogota mayor Gustavo Petro.

The individual, who was to participate in the plot, then fled to Venezuela, seeking refuge.

Londoño, a 68-year-old right-wing politician, suffered minor injuries when an explosive device attached to his car detonated on May 15, killing his driver and one of his bodyguards and injuring some 20 bystanders.

Córdoba said that after the attack she received a threatening phone call saying, “We’re going to do the same to you.”

The senator claimed that this was all part of a “destabilisation plan”, and filed a report with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia.

A month later, however, on Jun. 15, prosecutor general Eduardo Montealegre reported that the investigation into the attack against Londoño had found “very serious elements that indicate that the perpetrators of the bombing are the FARC,” or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a left-wing guerrilla group formed in 1964.

The prosecutor added that the attempt against Londoño “was definitely connected to the car bomb that was found and detonated that same day” and which was meant to go off in front of the main police headquarters in Bogota hours before the explosion that targeted the minister.

The name of the informant has not been disclosed, but his statements were published in the Monday, Jul. 9 edition of La Opinión, a newspaper from the Colombian city of Cúcuta, on the border with Venezuela.

According to his own account, the man crossed the border on May 20, seeking exile in Venezuela, after distancing himself from a small cell formed by three professional assassins, including one woman.

He claimed the cell operates with high-tech weapons, planting micro-devices near intended targets to remotely fire rockets at the chosen time.

The now exiled cell member served in the same military unit as retired army sergeant Hernando Medina, who had now allegedly offered him money to kill Córdoba and Petro, but had long abandoned military life and had not been in contact with Medina for years.

The group of assassins were to be paid one billion Colombian pesos for these murders (some 560,000 dollars). Medina would pocket half of that payment and the other two would receive almost 112,000 dollars each. The remaining 56,000 dollars or so would be used for “logistical expenses”, according to the informant’s account published by La Opinión.

The would-be assassin said he backed out when he overheard a telephone call on speaker phone where someone said there could be no “loose ends”, and was afraid he would be killed after completing the job.

Upon leaving Colombia, the informer refused to be identified in the press or record a video with his testimony, arguing that he feared for his life.

Prosecutor Montealegre told IPS that “there was a statement in the (Londoño) case” and that “an investigation is being conducted by the Technical Investigation Team” (judicial police) of the prosecutor’s office.

IPS was not able to corroborate whether the informant had also given the prosecutor’s office the names of at least two retired generals who are allegedly behind the exposed plan, and which he had disclosed to other sources consulted for this story.

La Opinión identified Harold Bedoya, who served as armed force commander from 1996 to 1997 and is now retired, as one of the generals implicated in the plan, but Bedoya denied the accusation categorically. Bedoya was fingered by the informant as the brains of the destabilisation plot.

According to a reconstruction by IPS, the informant first went with his story to legislator Iván Cepeda, son of communist journalist and senator Manuel Cepeda, who was murdered in 1994.

“He told me he came from Huila (in southwest Colombia) and that as boy he had lived in the same neighbourhood as Hernando Medina, one of my father’s assassins,” Cepeda told IPS.

Medina was head of Red 09, the intelligence unit of the Army’s Ninth Brigade in Huila, and in 1999 he was sentenced to 43 years in prison for the murder of Manuel Cepeda, along with Justo Gil Zúñiga, another sergeant in the same unit.

The two, however, were later inexplicably released on probation – Zúñiga in 2006 and Medina in 2007 – despite the fact that a judicial proceeding had found evidence that they had killed a lieutenant in mid-1999 while they were supposedly being held in a military facility.

According to what the informant told Iván Cepeda, while he suffered one financial crisis after another, Medina progressed in his army career and trained in “new techniques”. The training courses were conducted in Colombia but the instructors were “gringo (U.S.) officers who were stationed in Ecuador, at the Manta” U.S. military base, which was shut down in 2009 by the Ecuadorian government.

The informant claims to have told Medina of his financial troubles in 2010, and that Medina had promised to help him.

That year, Medina supposedly told him that he had “a small job” for him, and asked him to kill Piedad Córdoba. He also added that they “were thinking of doing the same to Petro.”

The informant “said Medina was a compulsive criminal, who can’t go more than two days without killing someone, and who’s been involved in several assassinations and military operations in Colombia,” Cepeda told IPS. “He mentioned my father’s murder and others. I’m not saying who, because that information may be considered confidential information in a criminal proceeding,” he said.

Again according to the informant, “while in jail Medina went on committing crimes” and “working for the army”, Cepeda added.

In a Nov. 3, 1999 letter addressed to then president Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002), Human Rights Watch (HRW) charged that “in spite (of) their purported suspension”, sergeants Medina and Zúñiga “remain in active duty within the armed forces”.

Medina, who at the time had been prosecuted for murder, “continues to direct an intelligence network”, the HRW letter reported.

“Both Medina and Zúñiga apparently move about freely in Bogota. Medina travels frequently to the city of Neiva (capital of Huila) where his relatives live,” HRW added.

Two days after that letter was sent, Iván Cepeda and his wife received death threats.

According to La Opinión, Medina is now “under investigation for his involvement in a conspiracy to commit a crime and traffic drugs” and has been in prison in Bogota since November 2011.

If the informant – who told La Opinión he met with Medina on May 6 in Neiva – is to be believed, Medina is still moving freely in and out of jail and committing crimes.

The plot first came to light on May 9 when Iván Cepeda declared that a retired army officer had informed him that a group of retired military men implicated in human rights abuses had allegedly been formed to conduct intelligence operations.

The alleged plot was to target diverse and even opposing political sectors, including right-wing politicians like Londoño, the liberal former senator and peace activist Córdoba, and mayor Petro, of the central-left.