The Comptroller General of the Republic has identified six projects in Guaviare within the “Diagnosis of White Elephants or Unfinished Works and Critical Projects”, whose estimated value amounts to $3,108 million.
Five projects are categorized as white elephants or unfinished works, since after one year of the term for their liquidation, they have not been put into operation and do not provide any service to the community. This is the case, among others, of one of the phases of the Villa Andrea project, the artisans’ park and the Milk Collection Center in the Agua Bonita village.
In total, the white elephants in the Guaviare have a value of $2,945 million pesos.
For its part, the diagnosis shows only one critical project, the infrastructure for comprehensive care for early childhood. in Miraflores, which amounts to $163 million.
About Villa Andrea and the artisans’ park, the Comptroller’s Office already has rendered judgments with fiscal responsibility for a value of $326 million, that are in the process of recovery so that they enter the public patrimony again.
In the case of Milk Collection Center, whose value amounts to $543 million, the citizens requested the Comptroller to activate the strategy “Colombia-Rescuing White Elephants Commitment”. Within the framework of the dialogues carried out within this initiative, the Mayor’s Office of San José and the Governor’s Office of Guaviare acquired the commitment to manage new resources to provide drinking water to the built infrastructure and to ensure its use by allocating the infrastructure to other productive activities related to the milk chain.
This project, which was delivered to the Association of Milk Producers and Agricultural Producers of Guaviare – ASOPROLAG in 2019, never had the resources, such as tanks and cold rooms, required by the standards for handling food products and especially for milk. . In addition, the lack of drinking water made it unfeasible to put it into operation, due to lack of hygiene conditions.
In the course of the dialogue spaces, both the governor’s office and the mayor’s office have proposed converting the collection center into a plant to produce cheese or other milk derivatives. Although these new proposals have not prospered, the Comptroller’s Office draws the attention of the territorial entities to improve the efforts before national entities, such as the Ministry of Agriculture, to ensure that the project finally contributes to the economic reactivation of the department.
The Comptroller’s Office, in support of citizen oversight of the project, will convene dialogues with the entities involved to obtain a solution in the medium term.
Additionally, the Comptroller’s Office draws the attention of local administrations to the need to develop relevant projects for the community that include, in addition to the construction phase, the requirements for their operation, maintenance and administration, in such a way that they do not become white elephants. and in sources of corruption.