News
Latin America Programme - [12/11/2008]
2nd Meeting on Coexistence and Security.
The city of Medellin was the venue for the 2nd Meeting on Coexistence and Security, which this year was titled “ Local government and the private sector, an alliance to foster citizen coexistence and security”. The event represented a continuation of the one held last year in Barcelona, and confirmed the need for greater efforts to create a framework of encounter, reflection and dissemination on the subject of coexistence and security on both sides of the Atlantic, using the approach of dialogue between local governments and public and private institutions.
The second Meeting brought together 24 specialists from Argentina, Mexico, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Spain and, naturally, from Medellin. The event was organised by the CIDOB Foundation, Casa América of Catalonia and Medellin City Council, and was also supported by Medellin Chamber of Commerce for Antioquia, the Agency for Cooperation and Investment of Medellin and the Metropolitan Area (ACI), the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation with Development (AECID), Barcelona Provincial Council and the Inter-American Development Bank. A total of 130 people enrolled to attend the event's sessions.
The works were structured around four round tables with the following objectives: to show the “Medellin model”, to present the city's experiences over the past 20 years, to share different experiences of good practices, through the perspective of public administrations, to provide a more academic view and, finally, to express the views and concerns of the private sector in its commitment to citizen security.
The city that hosted the event, Medellin, has represented an “ideal” observatory from which to discuss the issues of coexistence/security, citizen security/democracy/security and freedom/security. As a consequence, the works took as their starting point the intersectorial experiences of citizen coexistence in Medellin over the past 20 years, by making visible the city's proven experience in its championing of public policies on citizen security, policies that have been conceived comprehensively, and interwoven with actions in public spaces, urban development redesigns, and social action programmes based on real, preventive and inclusive citizen participation. In other words, championing a model that has succeeded in bringing out onto the streets a society that has been hidden and concealed for years, owing to fear.
The participants debated many different issues, some of the most important being:
- The need for public policies in the face of the worrying and disquieting absence of same in certain countries in the region;
- The championing of a human security that represents an improvement on the traditional one, which was based exclusively on police and military aspects; this new approach to human security is preventive, comprehensive (social inclusion, new conception and management of public spaces, etc.) and an instrument for coexistence, identifying early warning systems;
- The pre-eminent role of local administrations, owing to their proximity to citizens and their responsibility in the space in which such policies are instituted and developed. A call for a new redefinition of authorities in this field, and, furthermore, the need for greater intergovernmental collaboration.
- Permanent alert in the development and realisation of such public policies to avoid the dangers of the initial aims of said policies being perverted and altered, and to avoid the regressive temptation that is innate in the freedom/security binomial.
- The fundamental role of citizen participation as a political element that is indispensable, as well as having an enormous practical significance, so as to involve all the actors affected in the exchange of concerns and contributions, building social pacts on coexistence that promote what citizens appropriate from such policies and from the transformational processes of all kinds that are inherent to them.
- The flat rejection of any conception or practice that suggests any possible violation of human rights. There are not sufficient police and legal instruments, though the ones existing are indispensable, albeit limited in their content, proportionality and limits in the unquestionable respect for human rights.
And, as the participants on the round tables made clear, the open reflections at this Forum by no means exhausted all the aspects of these issues, and they are fully deserving of a continuing collaboration and exchange, over time, of concerns, ideas and projects.
