GUATEMALA: ADMINISTRATION OF PRESIDENT ALVARO COLOM UNDER FIRE REGARDING FOOD-SECURITY CRISIS.
By Louisa Reynolds
One of flagship social programs of the administration of President Alvaro Colom, the conditioned cash-transfer scheme Mi Familia Progresa (see NotiCen, 2008-07-24), has come under fire in recent days as more than 300 cases of severe malnutrition have been reported in the drought-stricken eastern departments of Guatemala known as the Corredor Seco (see NotiCen, 2009-09-03).
Colom came to power in January 2007 claiming to be "the government of the poor" and promising to tackle rural poverty through programs such as Mi Familia Progresa, which gives low-income families US$18.50 a month, as long as the children attend school, and an additional US$18.50 for them to receive regular medical checkups. It is managed by the Consejo de Cohesion Social, a government body integrated by ministries, secretariats, and funds dealing with social development set up under the Colom administration and managed by first lady Sandra de Colom.
Although similar programs implemented in Brazil and Mexico have had positive results, Mi Familia Progresa has been hugely controversial because it has been funded with much-needed resources diverted from the Ministries of Health and Education. There have also been allegations that the program is being used as a canvassing tool by the governing Unidad Nacional de Esperanza (UNE) party and in particular by Sandra de Colom, the most likely UNE candidate for the 2012 presidential elections, and that implementation of the program has lacked transparency. =20=20=20=20=20 Assessment finds program lacks adequate controls
An assessment of Mi Familia Progresa published in September by Accion Ciudadana, the Guatemalan chapter of Transparency International, points to the lack of control mechanisms to verify that beneficiaries are indeed enrolling their children in school and taking them to regular medical checkups as the program's main weakness.
When ghastly images of severely malnourished children hit the headlines, the Colom administration's critics seized this as proof that Mi Familia Progresa was not working. The government's attempts to underestimate the scale of the problem fueled accusations of a cover-up, especially after Carlos Rodriguez, former head of the pediatrics section of Hospital Nacional Nicolasa Cruz, in Jalapa, one of the Corredor Seco departments, was transferred to Coban on Aug. 26 after making public the increase in malnutrition cases and the hospital's lack of resources to deal with the problem.
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