Photo courtesy of Juan Pablo Pérez Burgos. Retrieved from news.mongabay.com
After the disaster, Colombian authorities sent help to Providencia; by the end of 2022, two years after Iota, almost every house was rebuilt. But the reconstruction process was far from over. From the disaster’s aftermath, locals felt they were not part of the decision-making process. A month after the storm struck, Huffington filed a lawsuit against the Colombian government, arguing that officials were leaving them out of the reconstruction and rebuilding their homes with deficient materials that offered no real protection against future storms. The country had spent around $141 million to rebuild, but locals frequently complain about rotten decks, ineffective cisterns, and leaking ceilings and septic tanks.
Huffington, who leads the Movement of Civic Surveillance of Old Providence (Movimiento de Veeduría Cívica de Old Providence), says she’s never trusted the Colombian government. According to her, the defective tents offered to locals after the disaster and the officials’ attitude were early evidence that they were going to exclude the residents from the entire reconstruction process.