Cities built around sea ports are often prosperous. Not on Colombia's Pacific coast
around seaports are often prosperous. Not so Buenaventura, on Colombia’s Pacific coast. Its four ports collect more customs revenue than those of any other city in the country. Yet two-thirds of Buenaventura’s 400,000 inhabitants are poor, according to a government measure. Few have access to piped drinking water or sewerage. Rows of metal shacks on stilts jut into the sea. Vegetation devours the only public hospital, which lacks equipment to perform even minor operations.
Among the most important is Ley 70 of 1993, under which 60% of the land on the Pacific coast—6m hectares—is communally owned . Colombia enacted it to benefit the region’s mainly Afro-Colombian people. The area was settled by fugitives from slavery, then by freed slaves after abolition in 1851. Ley 70 gave their descendants rights similar to those of indigenous peoples, including the right to form councils that can claim title to government lands they have long occupied.
But in some ways Ley 70 and the related right of communities to be consulted on projects that affect them, derived from the International Labour Organisation’s convention on indigenous peoples, hold back the region’s people. The effect is made worse by the government’s failure to issue rules that define the application of both rights. That makes unclaimed land subject to an eventual claim by a community.
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