Infrastructure projects usually take years, if not decades, to build. The case of the Bogotá metro, though, puts even the biggest megaprojects to shame: From its original conception in 1942 to the closure of the bidding process in 2019, it took 77 years to move from the drawing board to a concrete bidding process — yet it is still not complete.
As astute readers of this column might guess, urban politics played a role in that saga. Debates over the Metro project influenced mayoral elections in 2015, for instance. But the Bogotá metro project shows a different side of urban politics than citizen opposition to megaprojects like we saw in Caracas and Mexico City. Instead, opposition came from within the government itself, especially through political competition at the municipal level and institutional blockage at the national level.
From the Beginning to the TransMilenio
Efforts to build the Bogotá metro began as early as 1942 when mayor Carlos Sanz proposed building a subway system to meet the city’s high demand for public transit — as many as 200,000 riders per day out of a population of 400,000 needed to use the city transit systems. However, Mayor Sanz’s plan did not come to fruition, and the next serious subway proposal came from the military dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla fifteen years later in 1957. Echoing events in neighboring Venezuela where squatters took over a project started during Venezuela’s own dictatorship, the democratic administration that overthrew Rojas Pinilla swiftly nixed the idea.
The next few delays in the project came due to strong inhibitory institutions in Colombia, as Harvard professor Alisha Holland argued in a November 2020 presentation at Boston University. Holland defines these institutions as those that have the power to “veto, gatekeep, or obstruct public decisions prior to their realization,” and they blocked the Bogotá metro project several times before its ultimate realization. In 1979, the national government refused to fund a metro proposal on the grounds that it would largely benefit the urban middle class in a time when the government prioritized funding projects that targeted the rural poor. In 1999, a government review of the project found that it would be socially beneficial but fiscally irresponsible, especially during a large credit crisis.
As Bogotá’s private bus lines continued to compete for passengers in the infamous “war of the penny,” the need for a more unified solution grew. In response, Bogotá mayor Enrique Peñalosa set the TransMilenio bus rapid transit (BRT) system into motion. The TransMilenio system shaved 20 minutes off the average Bogotano’s commuting time, and many foreign transit planners praised it highly for its success.
But three mayoral administrations unfavorable to the project succeeded the Peñalosa administration, and the TransMilenio became politically polarized. “If you attach a project to a single character, especially a political figure like Peñalosa, then you’ll end up with the opposition attacking a project as a way of scoring political points,” Daniel Hidalgo, the former deputy director for TransMilenio, told the CityFix blog. “At the end of the day, it’s the citizen who is affected, not the politician.”
The Metro Finally Gets Built
The political brew over the metro died down for the next couple of years, but in 2007, mayoral candidate Samuel Moreno raised the matter again when he promised to revive the metro project. The bus companies impugned in Peñalosa’s “war of the penny” discourse supported the metro project since it would threaten their businesses less than an expansion of the TransMilenio project, and Peñalosa won the mayoral election with strong public support for building the metro. Moreno went forward with expanding TransMilenio anyhow, and he continued to push forward studies for the metro project.
Those studies, however, did not fall in Moreno’s favor. Colombia’s National Planning Department found that the plans had not anticipated potential risks to the project well enough and sent the metro project back to the drawing board. “We’ve spent 60 years studying the metro,” complained Moreno. “Are we going to spend another 60 years studying it?” As it turned out, blocking the project proved fortuitous, as Colombia’s Inspector General suspended Moreno from office on unrelated corruption charges. However, Holland wondered whether inhibitory institutions that blocked the project actually improved the project’s quality “in terms of social priority and [reducing] corruption.”
Moreno’s successor, Gustavo Petro, pledged to continue with the metro project. However, Petro’s goals to contract out the project during his term in office flopped as the national government asked to review the Metro’s studies for evidence of corruption. Petro’s supporters charged the national government, which was under a conservative administration, of trying to impede Petro, a left-wing mayor, from claiming credit for finally contracting the metro. Inhibitory institutions at the national level certainly delayed the Metro project in this case, but some political elements had also seeped through.
In 2015, Bogotanos elected Peñalosa (the mayor who pushed TransMilenio through), and public transit figured heavily in the mayoral campaign. (Petro could not run again due to term limits). To save money, Peñalosa proposed running the Metro lines above ground, but before leaving office, Petro took a few potshots at Peñalosa. The incumbent charged that the incoming mayor would prioritize the TransMilenio over the Metro and discard the existing Metro plans. “That’s eight years of work that… [Peñalosa] is throwing in the bin,” Petro claimed.
Those charges proved incorrect, as Peñalosa finally managed to get the Metro project to the bidding stage in October 2019. Ironically, a Chinese company won the bidding process and broke ground in October 2020 in the middle of the pandemic. “Our relationship with this great nation, the People’s Republic of China, is just beginning, and with their help, we’re going to complete this and probably many other projects in Bogotá and Colombia,” said the current mayor, Claudia López. Citizens worry about Chinese intervention, fearing shoddy construction, corruption, and even the prospect of China using the Metro as a geopolitical wedge in Colombia. The project will not be completed until 2025 at the earliest, and it seems that the political conflict over this polemical project will not end for a while.
Looking Beyond Bogotá
While I hope that the four cases I’ve gone over have been instructive, I do not intend for this column to present a unified review of urban politics in Latin America, for the region’s cities (like its people) are diverse and unique. Indeed, I could have written this column with four entirely different cities and made the exact same points. In Panama City, planners and policymakers face a similar debate over corruption and utility in building their own metro project. In Peru, indigenous residents near Cuzco have already mounted a fight against a new airport project that would irreversibly harm Incan cultural heritage in the Urubamba Valley. The story isn’t always negative either. The achievements of Curitiba, a city in Brazil, show how a city can successfully adopt sustainable policies.
This column also took an infrastructure-heavy view of urban politics, but there is much more to urban politics than political battles over large infrastructure projects. Everyday experiences matter. For example, in Chile, an eight-cent fare hike set off massive protests in Santiago that revealed the city’s spatial inequality. Democracy makes urban politics possible, but in São Paulo, slum residents had to fight for the right to even have a say in the city’s basic decisions.
I kept coming back to a quote by city planner Patrick Geddes as I was writing this column: “A city is more than a place in space; it is a drama in time.” Geddes was right — in Bogotá and elsewhere.
Image Credit: “Bogotá Business Center” by Jose David Parra is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
