After a few days of mayoral campaign debates we can see that, among all the candidates in contention, only the candidate of Dignity and Commitment, Jorge Enrique Robledo, is unraveling the depth of the crisis in which the Capital has been plunged for several decades and, therefore, is aiming to provide solutions framed in the causes of the ills and not only in its symptoms.

It is like what happens in social security, that while the bad health entities are guided only by what hurts the patient, and treat him with palliatives despite the cancer that afflicts him, those who are responsible resort to analysis to find the reason for the ailments and attack the malignant tumor with the appropriate procedures.

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The position of candidate Robledo emanates from a lifetime of struggle -more than 50 years- alongside the discriminated and plundered majorities of the country, to understand that their situation is explained by the political and economic structures that have prevailed in Colombia, which has allowed him, through a rigorous analysis embodied in more than 15 books and countless articles and opinion columns, to clarify the direction that should be taken by a country that is dominated by politicking and corruption, perverse instruments that maintain the privileges of a minority that has surrendered sovereignty, threatens democracy and deepens the levels of poverty, inequality, unemployment and insecurity that shake Colombia and its capital.

For this reason, the fighter Robledo believes that a local mayor can accomplish what he can do at his level, because it is demagogy to claim that a mayor can solve problems of national origin.

Jorge Enrique Robledo knows like few others the causes of the problems of Colombian cities, because as an architect and teacher for 26 years he taught future designers how to respond with knowledge and good judgment to the achievement of urban quality of life, so absent in most large cities.

For that, he was always guided by technical precepts, but subject to social and environmental requirements that would allow the achievement of objectives framed within the right to the city of thousands of people displaced from the countryside to the city: the adequate relationship of formal and stable work with decent housing, social security and education, recreation, fast, comfortable and cheap public transportation, etc.

For this reason, he has detected that, in the cities of the country, including Bogota, two cities can always be perceived, on the one hand, the one that meets the above requirements, which must be preserved, but which should also serve as a model to help build the other city, the one that the citizens themselves have undertaken at their own risk, the one lacking the minimum resources to live in civilized conditions.

The twenty years as senator of the Republic -of which ten chosen by opinion leaders as the best- were dedicated to unmask corruption in the governments of Uribe, Santos and Duque, and as a member of the Fifth Commission to study the causes of the socioeconomic and environmental problems of Colombia and present respective proposals that were never approved by the majorities that put petty and rigged interests above the national ones.

Among the more than 200 political control debates he conducted, we must remember for example one that aimed to denounce the nefarious decision of Mayor Peñalosa, in 2015, to throw away two serious and complementary studies on the first subway line for Bogota, which had been initiated in 2008 to recompose the wrong path that had been traced by the same mayor in his first administration (1998-2000), with the absurd argument that “TransMilenio does the same as the subway”.

But since in his second administration he could no longer discard the subway, he pulled out of his sleeve a convenient idea for him, that of continuing with his nonsense that the backbone of public transport would continue to be TransMilenio, accepting the subway only as a mere subsidiary of the articulated buses.

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This is very important to point out, because the interest of this local leader was, on the one hand, to continue putting Bogota as a showcase in the world to sell to underdeveloped countries this system of lower capacity and quality, and on the other hand, advertising the subway with unrealistic simulations that hid the disastrous environmental impact that would cause his elevated proposal.

Today, candidate Robledo will continue with what has been contracted and built so far, including the first line of the subway, because not doing so would violate constitutional legality. But he will aim that the city, supported by a strict short, medium and long term planning, is definitely heading towards the goal of a structuring network of subways, which is what suits the large and complex cities in the world.

In addition to the fact that subways are the most technologically advanced modes of transport, with greater capacity and speed and less harmful to the environment, the construction of a network of ducts totally segregated from traditional surface traffic would be a relief to reduce vehicular agglomeration in what is today the most congested city in the world.

With respect to security, the other serious problem facing the city, Robledo also assumes that with Bogotá’s resources it is impossible to address the lack of police manpower. Although much can be done in technology to detect crime, to fight it it is necessary to increase and streamline the number of police to at least match the average in Colombia and Latin America, which is 300 per hundred thousand inhabitants -Bogota has 200-, and that corresponds to decisions and resources of the national level.

So quantity, but also quality is what the candidate claims and proposes, emphasizing the necessary improvement in the relations between the police and the citizens of Bogota, so deteriorated to the detriment of the increase of insecurity.

And about the origin of criminality, increasingly structured in organized gangs that take advantage of misery and hunger to recruit the excluded who do not find opportunities to survive, the former senator insists on the solution to the causes of this breeding ground that fosters insecurity: to generate thousands of sources of formal employment.

Decent work, which is the only civilized means for the majority to be able to have at least three meals a day -one third of Bogota’s population cannot do it-, is also the basis for the creation of wealth, indispensable for a city to solve its complex problems. In this regard, Robledo is comparing the enormous difference between Bogotá, with only $12,000 dollars per inhabitant per year, with San Francisco, California, which has $120,000.

Therefore, his central proposal, which encompasses all the others, that is, the most urgent and decisive, is to promote industrialization in the city, which generates productive work and formal employment, for which the candidate proposes a great agreement around that purpose to create one hundred thousand jobs.

Of course, he warns, changing Bogota in this aspect has the obstacle of the national situation, in which the impositions of transnational capital for 30 years imposed on the country the free trade that has threatened food security and has deindustrialized the cities.

And the national governments, including that of Gustavo Petro, have done nothing to resist the onslaught of neoliberalism, such as renegotiating the Free Trade Agreements and questioning Colombia’s indebtedness with international banks, which today reaches unsustainable levels.

Getting Bogota out of its structural crisis is therefore an enormous task, which it is possible to begin to implement, but, under penalty of making demagogy by promising the impossible, it has the stumbling block that the situation of the country has no signs of a real turn towards development.

Will common sense prevail now?