The costs in the reconstruction of Providencia that Petro denounced

On August 21, President Gustav Petro visited the insular zone of the country to review the progress in the reconstruction of the infrastructure in Providencia, which was affected by the ‘Hurricane Iota’ in 2020.

(‘Petro dividend tax would eliminate the country’s stock market’).

“The reconstruction had to contemplate the human point of view in the culture of the Raizal community on the island of Providencia. Perfectly with the cultural architectures, the same houses could have been built, perhaps three times cheaper and the process would not have cost 1, 2 billion pesos,” Petro said.

According to the president, not only was a “comprehensive view” of the island needed, especially its culture, but there were also cost overruns in its reconstruction.

In his opinion, the houses would not have cost 600 million “not even because the materials had been imported.”

(The impact that the tax on plastics would have on the family basket).

For him, it is the result of the “chain of a series of errors whose fundamental root is not having made the community of Providencia the central protagonist of the reconstruction,” he said.

Therefore, for Petro, it is necessary to open a research for the costs of homes in Providencia. “That warrants investigations and I hope that the control bodies will do so based on unit costs,” added the president.

The president affirmed that the reconstruction process of the island must go beyond the houses and must be integrated with the human part. And he stressed that to strengthen the economy, fishing must play a fundamental role.

“We are going to start with the Ministry of Commerce a work to strengthen the fishing cooperatives both in Providencia and San Andrés, which will make them go from crafts to industrialization and eliminate foreign intermediaries,” he said.

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