Actualidad Colombiana IN ENGLISH

Bulletin No. 388 Index

July 21 – August 4, 2004
Year XXV

Politics
The public hospitals crisis in Colombia

Human Rights
Refuge: an historical and changing phenomenon

Economics
Atlanta: the second round of the FTAA

Social Movements
Organized diversity

Full Bulletin in Spanish and in English (.doc).

The public hospital crisis in Colombia

The hospital sector is in one of its most critical moments due to lack of funds. The origin of this problem is complex and cannot be solely blamed on the personnel rosters of the hospitals, as the national government claims.

GLADYS ASPRILLA CORONADO
Public Accountant, Partner and Manager of the firm Auditoría y Gestión Ltd.*

Since the expedition of Law 100 of 1993, the Colombian public hospitals have been involved in a series of processes destined to reform the model service lenders without the expected results. The changes from a service system to an insurance system have generated an institutional crisis due to the distortion generated by market failures, the inclusion of the insurance companies, especially the Administradoras del Régimen Subsidiado (ARS) and the unexpected conversion of the public hospitals to Empresas Sociales del Estado (ESE) (Social Companies of the State).

Refuge: an historical and changing phenomenom

Normative limitations for incorporating different migratory experiences

DANIEL MANRIQUE
ILSA Researcher

The wars of the past century were different. In The History of the Twentieth Century, Eric Hobsbawm defined them as impersonal wars whose technology generated the worst cruelties but made the victims invisible, following distant decisions justified as deplorable operative necessities. After these wars, humankind was accustomed "to obligatory exile and slaughters perpetuated on an astronomical scale, phenomena so frequent that it was necessary to invent new names to designate them: 'expats' or 'genocide’."

It was the century of the refugee, in which the most serious acts of exodus in the history of humankind appeared. Between 1914 and 1922, after World War I and the Russian Revolution, between four and five million people became refugees, a number in no way comparable with what took place in World War II. It is estimated that during May 1945, 40.5 million Europeans were uprooted, not including the Germans forced to flee in advance of the Soviet armies (13 million more!).

Atlanta: the second round of the FTAA

The return of the negotiation in Atlanta is the same as what we saw in Cartagena: little information, little consultation, a lot of pressure and few concrete results for the Andean countries

JAIRO BAUTISTA
Advisory Congress of the Republic

The results and the development of the installation of the negotiations of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) in Cartagena promised that the conversations and agreements produced in the Atlanta round would be ultrasecret and a matter of the most effective maneuver of disinformation capable outside the national government. In effect, the results are not known even for those sectors that have been defending the FTAA with the United States.

Nevertheless, much worrisome data has filtered through to the mass media about the Atlanta negotiations and which we will now analyze:

Organized diversity

This past June 27th saw in Bogota the most attended march of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people.

LILIANA GUARÍN
Planeta Paz

In the street, in the supermarket, in the line at the bank, in the cafeteria or anywhere she goes and wants to live her life, she causes a stir. She provokes impetuous declarations of admiration for her beauty, acclaims to her bravery, hysterical gestures of solidarity and, though not very often, aggression, insults and outcries that condemn her to an eternal hell. However, in the middle of all this noise, she maintains her impeccable bearing and an appearance of sweetness and calm which seems to soar over a riotous planet.

Samantha, a young transgendered woman, with her single presence can alter any place, but with her work, on behalf of the human rights of people with this sexual condition, she is altering a society that frequently denies, makes fun of or mistreats anyone who is different. She is part of Cotransgénero, one of the organizations which, since the 1990s, has been formed to defend and promote the recognition and exercise of human rights of transgendered people. Also, she is part of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgendered) sector that was organized more recently.