An initiative of
the National Academy of Public Administration, 
and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, 
Princeton University



Oral History Program 	Series: 	Governance Traps	
				
			Interview no.:	J7





Interviewee: 		Guillermo Guevara
			
Interviewer:		Matthew Devlin

Date of Interview:	17 October 2009

Location:		Grenada, Colombia		


Innovations for Successful Societies, Bobst Center for Peace and Justice
Princeton University, 83 Prospect Avenue, Princeton, New Jersey, 08544, USA www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties







DEVLIN:	Today is October 17, 2009 we're in Granada, Colombia with Guillermo Guevara who is the Coordinator for Infrastructure for the Plan for the Integrated Consolidations for the Macarena. Guillermo thanks for joining us. 

GUEVARA:	My pleasure.
 
DEVLIN:	First, I might start by asking you to describe your position and the responsibilities you have as coordinator for infrastructure here?

GUEVARA:	The infrastructure portion of the plan is related to diagnosing the conditions of the infrastructure in the six municipalities that encompass the Plan de Consolidación de La Macarena, the PCIM. I joined the team in May 2008 at the invitation of [Indecipherable].  He knew a little bit about my experiences in construction and supervision of civil works around Colombia, especially my work in remote, dangerous places in the past ten years. He also acknowledged my experience working for the American Embassy in Colombia. That sped up the communication with the OTI (Office of Transition Initiatives) people and USAID (United States Agency for International Development) people.

	My main tasks are related to visiting the municipalities in the plan, getting acquainted with the condition of the basic infrastructure and as a result of the diagnostics, formulating reasonable plans to improve the infrastructure oriented to providing better living conditions in the communities of the area. The main tasks are dealing with roads, mainly tertiary roads, bridges, drainage works,  rural electricity projects, water supply and sewage systems for the villages and towns of the regions and the communication's infrastructure and connectivity.

	The first priority of my work is road improvement, because the people in the region need to have better transportation facilities to speed up the time that they have to spend going from one place to the other as well as making it easier to bring produce, equipment and all type of goods from the cities like manufactured goods, food, fertilizers and construction material and equipment and other type of goods and services. Also these roads have to be used to take the produce, the agricultural products, and the farm products to the markets and the rest of the Department of Meta and other regions of Colombia.

	The main task was to evaluate the infrastructure, try to formulate projects to solve the existing problems and to search for funding from different sources and to bring people interested in regional development to invest in the improvement of roads and communication facilities. To do this I have to go to every municipality and talk to the mayors. The mayors are the people that identify the main needs and we confirm those needs by studying what kind of benefit those improvements would make to the population and then calculate the necessary investment to re-establish what we call "transit ability". Transit ability means the improvement of roads up to a certain condition so people can drive on them. It's  a very rainy region. It has a lot of water. Rivers are everywhere. So it means the roads need a lot of civil work to take the water far from the road surfaces to try to keep them as dry as possible to avoid damage caused by traffic.     

	This first evaluation was made in 2008 and the resulting budget to improve the most important roads and the tertiary roads, was a huge amount of money because these roads had been without maintenance and without any care for years and were unusable. So the next task was to try to get money and resources to start fixing the roads, to build the most important drainage works, to rebuild bridges. We tried to identify sources that would invest in the region. We identified the national government as one of the institutions dedicated to help the municipalities maintain their tertiary road system, but there was very little money, only about 150 million pesos per year, per municipality. It's the same for all municipalities in Colombia included in the plan of the PCIM. With 150 million pesos, you can hardly build five culverts because the distance and the cost of materials and the cost of doing the work are high in the region. These regions are remote, they are far from the production areas where there are crushers of quarry stone and we wanted the work to last for at least twenty years because otherwise the investment would be badly spent. The quality of the work had to be good and quality means, in this case, more money.   

	So we had to balance all of these conditions and make a list in order of importance, according to the needs of the communities and the recommendations of the mayors about where we should work, to tell us which road was more important than another. Last year, we started to do some work. We were able to find additional resources from other Colombian national institutions and we were able to get money to invest in the region, thanks to some of the high government offices. For instance, the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace had had some money to negotiate a peace process with the ELN (National Liberation Army). ELN is another guerrilla group in Colombia different from FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) The Commissioner had the resources, but this process was a failure and he still had the money without using it for anything. We convinced him to allocate this money to help us in the reconstruction of the infrastructure in the PCIM region. We managed to build something like 64 projects consisting of 21 roads, one suspension bridge and 9 rural electricity projects to bring electricity to some 1000 houses in the rural areas of three of the municipalities. We also built 34 social projects such as classrooms and school dining rooms, sanitary buildings, bathrooms and so on for the schools. We built football fields. We built many other projects with this money. We were able to make the money useful and to last for many projects.

	We also had international cooperation. In this case, we had the help of an OTI project in Colombia and their operators. We had some resources to be invested in roads, in repair of bridges, in building of drainage work for certain roads and some social buildings like multi-functional courts, installation of public lighting for some hamlets and towns and other type of things. 

	We also brought our ideas and plans to the regional government, the department government, to look for their help in contributing to the success of our projects. We had the word of the government that they would match the same amount of money that we were able to get from outside the region. It was a 50-50 deal. But later the government found it difficult to honor this commitment, so at the moment, we have had delays in the accomplishment of the construction of the projects that were approved by them.

	We have spent some of the money they owed us that had to be invested to honor the commitment.  Now at this moment, we have a second plan with them to rebuild all the roads. Phase One was the reconstruction of nine very important tertiary roads in the six municipalities with resources from international cooperation. Phase Two, with the same amount of money, but given by the Department of Government, hasn't happened yet. Phase Three is the cooperation of the military. They allocated money from their own budget to help in the reconstruction of the roads. That's happening now. Phase Four is more help from the international cooperation. The two million US dollars is a grant to match the amount of money provided by the regional government. We hope we are going to be able to get this as well. 

	So from 2008 to 2009, we worked on seventeen different projects and built two bridges. We have actually finished half of them and we are starting the second part of both Phase One and Phase Four. And we are still working with the government to have Phase Two and Phase Five completed. We hope we're going to be able to use the next dry season to go into actual construction. At the moment in the tertiary road plan, we keep on visiting places, inspecting roads, getting the technical information about the roads, their locations, the needs of every one of these roads. We have a summery of all the needs. Our plan for the six municipalities is not yet complete, but when we have the security guaranteed, then we'll go to inspect the areas, inspect the projects, calculate the budget and start to plan what must be done to have these works completed. 

	One interesting issue is that in the years before our presence and in the years before the beginning of military operations in the area to defeat the guerillas, the communities were not able to ask for improvements. They were silent, they never said anything either because they were menaced or they felt they didn't need the roads. Now the conditions have changed so much that they feel free to ask for road improvements. This is very important. When the communities start to ask for road improvements, it means that they want to communicate with other places. They want to be able to go out and the people who had left because of security conditions in the past, want to come back.  So I know that even if we have a big issue with getting the resources, I'm happy when the people start praying and asking and pushing you to do some work for them. It is very important to me that they speak up, that they say they need a road. For me, it has a second meaning. It means that things are changing for good.

	We have also worked on power projects. We have been able to solve some of the problems and now, at this moment, five of the six municipalities have a continuous electricity system. At least, the main towns in the six municipalities have around the clock continuous service. But we still have the municipality of La Macarena that has no electrical services through the interconnected system in Colombia. They have an isolated diesel engine to supply electricity for some hours a day, but it is very costly for them. The administration of this system is not good at the moment. We are trying to change the way they administer the resources that are given to them by the national government to buy the fuel for the diesel engine to supply electricity to La Macarena.

	We have a short-term plan to solve this problem, but we also have a long-term plan to interconnect the municipality of La Macarena to the rest of the Colombian power system, by building a hydro-electrical plant in San Juan de Arama. Building a dam and a power house in San Juan De Arama and taking sub station and transmission lines down to La Macarena to get it interconnected to the rest of the national system, is going to be a five year project. We have already started with the design and we almost have guaranteed funding for the whole project. It's going to be like a 40 thousand million pesos project complete with a power plant and a transmission system completed. 

	There's an environmental issue because the transmission lines cross through the La Macarena National Park and it means special treatment and special permits to be able to build the towers and the transmission lines through the park. But we are working on this; it's a joint project between the national government, the Minstery of Mines and Energy, the local electricity company [Indecipherable]. And while the local government is also interested, the regional government has no money for this project. The resources are going to be supplied by the national government and by the [Indecipherable] the local supplier for electricity. 

	We have other plans to continue bringing electricity to regions that also are being recovered by the plan. Those regions where the security exists again, we'll start bringing electricity as one of the most important services for them and in this way  many places, villages and counties near [Indecipherable] will be included in this new interconnection plan. As I said, all the main towns in the municipalities are interconnected at the moment, except La Macarena. And we have made progress in bringing electricity to the production areas, bringing electricity to families scattered around the counties with this rural electricity system. The only sources of funding are those of the national government and the  companies that will supply electricity in the future, because they can invest money and recover this money through the years.

	We also work on the power supply and sewage systems. The regional government is the only source for these projects. We do not have private companies interested in supplying water or sewage systems to the municipalities, it has to be public. There's a regional institution in Meta, called Edesa that deals with water supply and sewage systems. At the moment, they are working in the main villages in the whole Department of Meta. They are only able to work in the main towns. In the years to come they will start bringing the same services to other places, to other hamlets and other villages. 

	The region has a plan called the Regional Water Plan. It is a huge plan and it has a large amount of money to spend, but the department is also big. There are 29 municipalities in the department and all of them have to have a share. We have  six of the municipalities in PCIM, but the first part of this plan is going to be invested in the main towns, in the municipal capitals. In the years to come it will go to other places. The source of this money is from what we call the [Indecipherable] regulares.  It's like a tax that is paid by the oil companies  for oil production in Meta. They export oil from Meta to other parts and they sell it for export or to the refineries. The regional government gets money by taxing the production of oil and this is quite an important amount of money. Part of it is invested in water supply and sewage. This is a source of financing, it also has  help from the national government through the Ministry of Environment and the Vice Minister of Water Supply, Leyla (Rojas). She's an excellent person and she's very good. She's the best person for that job.

	The fourth part of the infrastructure component of the PCIM is the communications infrastructure and connectivity. Communications meaning at this moment, cellular telephones because fixed telephones are not used anymore in the world I believe. To bring fixed telephones to these remote areas is very costly. The lines are very costly, of course. Problems for fixed telephone systems can be solved via microwaves or satellite and as they are in the cities. In Bogotá, there is a network of telephone lines but my service is for a satellite telephone. It's very widely used in Colombia, but fixed telephoning is not used much anymore.

	As long as we have security in some regions, cellular telephones are easier to use. We encourage the Ministry of Communications and the commercial companies that provide the cellular cell phone service to build antennas to bring the service to the region.  Puerto Rico, today, has a very good cell phone signal. There is a very good signal in the capitals of the municipalities and in some surrounding areas and we keep on extending the scope of the cell phone system. It has been a difficult task because of the remoteness of the places, which means an extra cost for the companies to build an antenna, to build installations. Some of the places don't have electricity so they have to supply a power plant or solar system to supply the electricity to the antenna to work 24 hours a day. We have problems, but we keep on working and spreading the scope of the services in the six municipalities.

	This is very important. It's the communication between people that encourages others to come back to the homes they had to leave a few years ago because of the security conditions and the problems of terrorism. Communication is important around the world.  If you're not connected, you are alone in the world.  PCIM has not a single peso to invest, we have look everywhere and use our contacts and make new contacts, talk to people, attend meetings to tell people about the plan so they'll invest in it. In some cases, they have invested in a project and then lost money, because the market is very small. You need the service, but for a very few people.  It's not a big city and the number of people that are able to buy a cell phone is very small. So although it's not a good investment, we try to touch their social feelings and try to convince people that  investing in social projects is a way to establish security. We have three new projects to enlarge the coverage of the cell phone and signal in the municipalities. 

	We also have worked in radio trying to establish radio stations in the region to be able to transmit more sensible messages to the population. In the past, radio stations and the messages promoted guerrilla activities such as drug trafficking, cocaine crops, but the messages from government of the Colombian State didn't get to the population. We want to integrate these regions to the rest of the country and one way is through radio and the other is television. There are very few people that live in these remote areas, as a result, a national TV system has not arrived in these regions. Although some people in the region have international television because they have a satellite antenna, they do not see Colombian television. We want to bring Colombian television to them so they can be a part of the Colombian economy, the Colombian news, Colombian sports,  Colombian successes like Juan Pablo Montoya and the national soccer team, and hear the president's speeches or the meetings in congress.  

	We are going to have a Colombian TV signal in 20 different places in the six municipalities. They are going to be installed in places with free access to the population, in public places like schools and public meeting places. We're going to supply the equipment and we're making all kinds of effort to get money to buy twenty 42", flat screen TV's.    

	We want the schools to be connected to the internet because it improves education when students get access to the rest of the world. We want them to have the same facilities that our kids in Bogotá have. So connectivity, meaning world connectivity, through the internet is another goal of our program.

                         Oriented to education, with the help of other programs of the Colombian government [Indecipherable], which has the participation of [Indecipherable] and Intel they supply small, very cheap, good computers to students. La Macarena has them for 600 students. They have received these computers and now they are using them. The teachers are buying computers to get connected to the internet, to improve their teaching facilities and for educational purposes.

	We have the help of the government of Meta and Meta has a program sponsored by the Ministry of Communications that is called Meta De [Indecipherable] Meta de [Indecipherable] is oriented to education, is oriented to medicine and is oriented to marketing because if the people have access to the markets via the internet they can sell their products without the participation of a middleman. We know that the middleman in Colombia makes the money. Producers make little money. The producer's direct communication with the markets will improve business for both the producer and the reseller and will eliminate a lot of other people.  It's sponsored by the regional government with the help of the ministry.

	There's also the help of international cooperation in this program.  [Indecipherable] that works with us. We have what we call here [Tele-medicina? Indecipherable]. They can transmit images, they can have a x-ray in Puerto Rico and send these images to a specialist in Villavicencio or in London and have a diagnosis without moving the patient from the area. This is being used now in Meta. 
	
	So that's what we do in infrastructure in the PCIM.

DEVLIN:	One thing you had mentioned was that you definitely take into account in all these projects the community's priorities about what they want. How do you go about including that in your analysis, do you have meeting with the community, do you just go to the mayor and rely on him or her to let you know?

GUEVARA:	OK the process is like this. PCIM has local coordinators in every one of the six municipalities. They are local guys who know the region well and they are in constant contact with the communities, not only in the capitals, in the towns, but in the whole region. So they visit when they have calls from the communities. As the communities become more confident, they become closer to these coordinators and are the source of information. The coordinators go to a certain county and they talk to the people and the people say that  they need a school, they need improvement in the electricity, they need a road fixed and we get the information as if it is related to infrastructure. I get emails from the local coordinator telling me that community such and such needs improvement of a road. 

                          The communities know me and they have my telephone number and call me directly or the mayor calls me and says he needs help in this or please have someone come because they have a big problem with the bridge. We just schedule all these needs and periodically visit the region to have a look with a technical view of the problem and what is the cheapest and fastest solution. We do not have money and we do not have time, we have to provide fast and cheap solutions to this. 
	
DEVLIN:	Do you carryout any projects in the red zone? The zone that's still considered a high security risk?

GUEVARA:	No, not yet. We have gone to some red areas but we are not allowed to go there and work. Sometimes it's even difficult to go to yellow areas because if there is military activity it means that there are combat encounters with the guerrillas. And we follow the military instructions. If they say don't go, we don't go. It never happens in the green areas today. There is no problem for anyone and we don't feel any fear going there and staying there. It's a 150 kilometer road and a very  beautiful, lonely road. Sometimes it's very scary, because you hardly find a car or motorcycle. We never go to red zones. When they become yellow, we start going.

DEVLIN:	And one of the areas you said you had to lobby people or encourage them was in extending cell phone coverage.  Is the idea you would encourage these companies to put antennas up there and you lead them by the hand in this effort?

GUEVARA:	This cell phone technology is like a style of fashion. Everybody wants a cell phone, even my eight year old kid needs a cell phone. So everybody wants to have one or sometimes two, even if they only use it for a couple of days.  

DEVLIN:	So would you say that is the main point of your job is really to lobby people and raise money?

GUEVARA:	Yes. We have what we call the round or square tables, a type of meeting with the people that may have resources to invest. Sometimes I go to the private sector. For instance, if I see an oil company drilling a well somewhere, I go there and say, " Well you're going to bring your equipment, you're going to damage my roads so what's going to be you're participation? What are you going to do? Can you fix this part of the road and you promise to maintain it during your operations? And if you are successful with your well and you get oil what are you going to do"? This is private activity, but I do it. I go everywhere. I knock on every door.	

DEVLIN:	And one other thing that you mentioned that you're bringing electricity to some areas that never had it before. Sometimes when that happens there's an initial problem. You're giving people electricity supply for the first time but you also are giving them a cost that they now have to pay. It's nearly a cultural shift, there suddenly is a bill to be paid for this electricity. Has that been an issue here has that been part of your experience?

GUEVARA:	Well, we call this the socialization of the projects. When we're going to do something, we go to the communities to tell them what is possible to be done and ask for their opinions, their feedback to us about this. It doesn't matter if it's a road, if it's a telephone system, if it's a sewage system or electricity. They know that we'll consult them. For some electrical projects, government lowers the costs for the people. We know how much a five-person family can pay in a rural area; they cannot pay the same as a family pays in Bogotá, because you have to look at the conditions. The cost of electricity is about the same everywhere so someone has to cover the difference and in this case, the company that supplies the services after the construction of the project helps to pay for it, because it's not going to be paid by the users. They call it the " financial adjustment" of the project.

GUEVARA:	The contact with the communities is constant. The community becomes a supervisor of all projects. They want to participate. My most successful projects are when I rely on the community. I can put all my technical skills, all my  engineering knowledge on a project, but the people that live in an area where we are building a road are the ones that know what places are the most difficult, for instance,  where so much water runs through an area, a culvert is needed.  It doesn't matter if we disagree, but we put it there. We rely on the community and we accept most of the things they do because we want them to be part of the project. We want them to consider these works as their works and it also sends a message to them that after construction, they have to be very careful to clean the culverts, to fix a small hole when it happens, not wait until the road is destroyed again before trying to fix it and then call people for help. 

	 I have good experiences when I rely on people, when the people are part of the project. I tell them, " Well, you will have to work a couple of days a month to help fix the road because the equipment is not going to come every week to fix a small problem that you can do it by hand. Of course we help them by providing the communities with hand tools, shovels and picks and other things to maintain the roads, to fix small problems. The main problem here is the water. The rainy seasons do a lot of damage and we have to come back because many things are damaged. 

DEVLIN:	If you leave the maintenance of the roads to the communities, do you also ever involve the communities in the construction phase as well?

GUEVARA:	Yes, at the beginning of 2008, the system was to have the communities supply the unskilled manpower to the project for free. It was their contribution. We supplied the materials and the equipment, the locals supplied the unskilled manpower, and the mayor supplied the skilled manpower, the supervisors and the foreman and whatever. Later we found out that we were having the people work for free, but these people had nothing. They couldn't give the work for free and so we changed the strategy. We decided to contract everything, skilled and unskilled workers, equipment, materials, everything, but we made contractors hire from the community to work on the project. This is a commitment in their written contract to use local resources but not only manpower, equipment in the area, trucks or machines to do roadwork.  It also helped to improve the people's skills to maintain roads. They are being paid, they have training when they do the work, so it's another way we improve the economy of the region through the working infrastructure.

DEVLIN:	Now when you were talking before about project selection, we talked about the role that the local area coordinator plays along with the mayor and the community groups. In other parts of the country, has the current president, President Alvaro Uribe, held these councils where he's made specific commitments to communities? Has that been the case here and on infrastructure? Could you talk about a couple of those examples and how that's affected your work?

GUEVARA:	Yes, there's a very important main road in the department of Meta that has a straight access to the Pacific Ocean. President Uribe wants this road to by-pass Bogotá, go straight across the eastern branch of the Andes to connect with the rest of the road network that heads to the ocean at Buenaventura. The project to build this road, called Transversal de La Macarena, has been stalled in the national government for ten years. Because of security conditions, nobody has an interest in the road, neither the government nor the contractors. The security conditions are the worst in Colombia. The road has to cross the municipality of Guaviare, the reddest area in the country.  

	And while there is a budget allocation in the national budget for this road, nobody had the slightest interest in this project. Every day, President Uribe says that the road has to built. The answer was that it's impossible, that's its very difficult and it would cause damage to the environment and there were no solutions. The president wanted this problem solved and went to the council in Villavicencio.  President Uribe actually spoke to Alverro [Indecipherable] about it saying he had to build this road. Alverro asked me what to do and we started tying to find solutions to the problems. We realized that there was a very simple strategy. Since the problem was security, we could have the military engineers build the road. It was the solution to the whole problem. It only took a very few sessions to get the right people talking and agreeing about what to do. The  money was there, they made an agreement and signed it, and they started.  The military are building this road. They have very good professional people, they have very good new equipment, they have very good skills, they have a lot of experience building this type of project. I know they're going to be successful. And so this is part of the work of the PCIM -  to lobby and to bring people together to agree on a solution of this problem.

	Recently President Uribe also demanded the construction of another very important road. One of the objectives of the PCIM is to connect the main cities of the six municipalities with the regional capital, Villavicencio. Except for La Macarena, all of the roads connect with Villavicencio. It's very important to have La Macarena, part of the department, connected to Villavicencio.  The big obstacle is the national park that makes it impossible to use this portion of the territory to build or to improve an existing legal road. But since the president says we have to connect La Macarena with Villavicencio, the only solution is to go from La Macarena to San Juan Del Guaviare using an excellent first order road from San Juan Del Guaviare to Villavicencio that was all ready built and is now used by producers. The president has started to relocate people and we have been working on the solution. We have now two small projects to start the first portion of this road, 180 kilometers through a very difficult region with jungle, rivers and water everywhere. It's going to be a very costly project that will take a long time, but we have started. The regional government got interested and allocated an important amount of money for this road and we are about to start. These two roads have been the most important orders given by President Uribe.

DEVLIN:	Your involvement with the plan was certainly not the first time you've dealt with challenges like these. You've handled [Indecipherable] before this doing similar stuff. What lessons from your previous work, what experiences were you glad you had had? What prepared you for this job? Were there aspects of the work you'd done before that really helped you avoid problems this time around?

GUEVARA:	 I have worked in remote and dangerous regions in Colombia and neighboring countries with some success by maintaining a very low profile on the project. I don't want to advertise that the army is spending a big amount of money  because I would become a target. I keep as little communication with people that have nothing to do with the project as I can, because I prefer to keep a low profile in this and I have a very high security profile. We in Colombia say [Indecipherable] papaya -  it's an expression about getting too much exposure. If I get exposed in a country with conditions like these, I'm going to be a target for sure. I do not go to places that I must not go or I do not go where I am not invited. I don't get involved in activities that are not of my interest. I do not go to drink beer in the local cafes or get involved with local women. I always keep a low profile and devote my efforts to the success of the project trying to get all the information available to foresee where are the leaks or where are the weak areas and my task is to identify them.

DEVLIN:	So what would you say were the greatest challenges of this particular job? What were or are the hardest parts here?

GUEVARA:	Lobbying activities, dealing with many public employees in both the regional government and the national government are the greatest challenges. Sometimes I feel it's very hard to rely on these guys. I have the experience of being led on for months about commitments that would never occur. I resent it when the regional government committed money, committed efforts, approved plans and then try to find problems as a way to forget about their commitment. It happens with the national government in some areas, but mainly it's the regional government that doesn't comply with commitments and agreements we had. They are not really interested in investing in the region.  This has been my main problem and it's related especially to the government of Meta. I have had very good help from the mayors, but we do not find an echo in the regional government.  

DEVLIN:	And this whole plan for consolidation is about building trust in the state, building the legitimacy of the state. In your work on infrastructure, I'm wondering are there specific types of projects that help build that trust in the community more than others. Are there projects that when the community sees them happen and sees the follow thorough on really cause a change in the mindset?

GUEVARA:	Yes, it's an easy question. The answer is roads, roads and tertiary roads.

	 Of course, people want paved roads everywhere, but it's impossible. They want double causeways but to widen an existing road costs more than doing a new road. Rebuilding is more costly than building. We have to look at the technicalities when we design a road. The first variable you have to take into account is traffic. How many cars per day circulate through a certain road? If you have one car per day or two cars per day, why have a double causeway road?  If  you try to calculate what the traffic is going to be in twenty years, you'll find that  these two cars become five or six. If you calculate this for the day and you calculate it for the future and you find that the economic potential and tourist development that exist there means that many people are going to go there and you're going to have a huge amount of traffic, then you take this into account.

	But in these areas where we take into account the scarcity of resources, all we can do is re-establish transit ability of the existing roads. We do not open a new road, we do not work on new roads, we work only on existing roads to re-establish transit ability.  There is a special road between Vista Hermosa and Pitalito that we have invested a lot of money in. Transit ability was re-established some one and half years ago and we are preparing it to be paved in a couple of years. It needed to be done like this because this is where we have our oil industry. This is the entrance to the rest of the counties in Meta that are becoming production areas. These are the areas where we are going to have electricity. These are the areas that have good economic potential to grow all kind of things. The only crops that are not successful in Meta are those that you do not plant.

DEVLIN:	Well on that note, thanks so much, Guillermo, for taking the time for talking with us.




Innovations for Successful Societies                                                      Series: Governance Traps
Oral History Program 	                                                                             Interview Number: J-7

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This transcript is governed by ISS Terms of Use, available at www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties