After President Gustavo Petro confirmed that he will decree the economic emergency, Finance Minister Ricardo Bonilla assured that the measure “is exclusively for the department of La Guajira.”
He added that “in this sense the local regional emergency decree seeks to resolve what has not been done in time.”
In turn, the Minister of the Interior, Luis Fernando Velasco, explained that it is taken based on the ruling of the Constitutional Court that declared the state of affairs unconstitutional in that department.
He said that decrees will be issued aimed at improving health and combating malnutrition in the population, since the analysis that has been carried out by the Government shows that many of the deaths of children due to causes associated with this scourge have been lack of medical attention.
“Children who have died from physical hunger had health cards, but they were not healthy because they were not being cared for, their growth and degree of malnutrition had not been monitored and that is why these catastrophes occur,” he said.
According to Velasco, the main problem they seek to attack is the lack of drinking water for human consumption, since the little resource that is available is being used for other types of activities.
“There is an evident scarcity of water and the water that La Guajira has is being privileged for uses other than the one that should be a priority, such as human consumption, drinking water,” he said.
President Petro, when making the announcement, said that “I think it is absolutely pertinent to decree the Economic and Social Emergency, because a public calamity is coming, because all the probabilities of the climate models, that the institutions dedicated to that need tell us, they are announcing with increasing probability the proximity of a drought that has never been seen before in La Guajira”.
“We are going to decree the emergency because a public calamity is coming that we want to mitigate and we have to do it quickly. The instruments for this will have to do with the fact that we are going to change the priorities of the use of water throughout La Guajira”.
He specified that, within the framework of the emergency, it seeks to create the National Water Institute of La Guajira, with short, medium and long-term goals. He said that among the immediate actions is to prevent and mitigate a possible public calamity, which could happen as a consequence of the climate crisis and the misuse of water in the territory.
Likewise, he indicated that the national Government, the Armed Forces and the ministries will have a fleet of vehicles to bring drinking water to the last corner of La Guajira, free of charge, public property, which will leave the Rancherías reserve and from where availability of this vital resource.
He also referred to the beginning of work to recover the more than a thousand wells that began to be built several decades ago, and stressed that, in the medium term, construction will begin on a tube that will draw water from the Ranchería River reservoir. , to lead it to the north end of the department.