It is all that remains of a four-storey building in Quibdó, a city in the western state of Chocó that was near the epicentre of a 7.4-magnitude earthquake which struck Colombia on August 10th. Around the country, at least 265 people have died. Aftershocks brought down more buildings.
“They pulled people out alive,” says Alberto, an onlooker, as a digger’s steel teeth smash into a heap of concrete.
Mr de la Espriella seems aware of the disparities. His cabinet has been dispatched to the worst-affected areas. Yet many families are wondering where that is. Colombia’s new president also faces the problem of how to pay for recovery from the quake. He has declared an economic emergency, letting him spend the national budget by decree, bypassing Congress. His new government has inherited a mess in the key agency for natural-disaster response. The National Unit for Disaster Risk Management is cash-strapped after being robbed by corrupt politicians and functionaries over the past few years.
Some talk of the country’s population suffering as badly as it did in 1999 when an earthquake killed around 1,230 Colombians.
Speaking in Quibdó, he said that victims would receive temporary housing aid. “We have no water, no energy, no nothing,” says Rosa Mercedes, staring at the ruin of her apartment in Quibdó. “No one has come to ask us what happened, to ask us how we are,” she says.
He is paying, too, for his foolish refusal to co-operate with the handover process initiated by the previous government. Badmouthing Gustavo Petro, his leftist predecessor, was popular on social media. The erratic Mr Petro himself was posting with—if anything—even more ferocity. This means the new government lacks information and capabilities that it urgently needs. The executive is having to act mostly through local governments. That just about works in wealthier places like the parts of the country that grow coffee, and Valle del Cauca. In Quibdó, Ms Mercedes is still waiting.
That was a “silly populist idea”, says Luis Ernesto Gómez, a former interior vice-minister.
