One Month After The Mining Strike: Freight Traffic Fell By 70% On …
12:01 AM
What once normality did not return to the ever-troubled Bajo Cauca in Antioquia for a month, when the mining began that turned this corner of the department and the south and turned Cordoba, and had a national brand to campaign for peace. Peter’s decision to govern with the Clan del Golfo.
Although commercial activities have resumed, markets have been revived and opened to the public, and children and young people have gradually returned to schools and colleges, transport and commercial traffic is experiencing a moment that they have called “logistic suffocation”. .
As a result, a new union was launched calling for the side effects that continue to cause impact. Felipe Muñoz Monroy, director in Antioquia of the Colombian Federation of Road Cargo Transporters (Colfecar), said that after more than 30 days of blockades in the Bajo Cauca, the costs are becoming more suffocating and there are fewer obstacles to moving the goods.
“The result of financial losses is very complex because it has many variations,” he pointed out, highlighting that one of the indicators that portray this risk in the logistics chain is the average number of trips made per day. For example, from the calculations of 2022, when the average daily number of transport vehicles that crossed the route to 1,000 in round numbers, in the stroke of that figure it reached the maximum between 320 vehicles.
Given that on a normal day the vehicular traffic moves up to 13,800 tons of goods daily, if that is multiplied by the 30-day suspension, the protests affect the flow of more than 414,000 tons.
“What worries us the most today is that, as he said, the mining of the mining elections, there were no negotiations after the 16th of April”, criticized the director, warning of the volatile state of public order, which is mainly focused on protest. union, especially if one considers that about 14% of the country’s transport is recruited through the western trunk.
The following Friday, he urged the authorities of the Diocese of Santa Rosa de Osos to initiate talks with the mining table in the region. Pointing out that the state of public order is involved in a large part of the Department, several leaders of the Catholic Church in the Department called to rebuild bridges between the government and the protesters in order to find a solution. conflict This, despite the fact that the Ministry of Environment has introduced regional meetings in six municipalities in recent weeks, in which they heard proposals from the leaders of mining, agricultural and productive areas, environmental care and water protection.
From this panorama, Muñoz insisted that the union urgently needs to form substantive solutions so that mobility can be reintegrated, taking into account the infrastructure problems that other roads in Antioquia have at the expense of rocks and travel times.
“We have reached a logistical bottleneck. The logistical complications in Antioquia are very strong, getting to and from Medellin is becoming very expensive,” he noted.
The mining strike, which is being carried out in Bajo Cauca and Oriente de Barma, began on March 2, when the mining unions of those subregions raised their voices to protest against the government’s refusal to announce the reactivation of operations to destroy dredgers and yellow machines for illegal miners.
While the government made its decision based on the argument that many of these illegal mining sites are run by armed groups, the miners accused the authorities of marking them and stated that they are putting the measure of the economic life of the society at risk.