Controversy over the trip of mayors of Cundinamarca to a “training “in Europe

A new controversy arose after the Cajicá councilman, Jefferson Tuta, denounced that the mayors of the Central Savannah of Cundinamarca are making a trip to Europe to “train”. According to him, these visits would seem to have a more tourist than academic agenda. All this in the midst of the winter wave that has hurt several municipalities in the department.

In an interview with Caracol Radio's '6AM Hoy por Hoy' he publicly released this complaint, since these trips to cities such as Madrid, Paris, Rome, Toledo, Florence, Venice, among others, would be disguised as trainings, when in fact it is a “tourist package.

“There is a tourist package disguised as training or some coordination with territorial entities or government experiences to apply in the municipalities of Sabana Centro. This is done by a tourism company called MTA and sends a package to the mayors and through Asocentro they make a tourist package,” said the councilor in the interview with the Caracol Radio program.

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He denounced that the mayor of Cajicá, Fabian Hernán Ramírez, will travel this Wednesday, April 20 and will be in Europe for 10 days. “The only thing they say is that it is a visit to Europe where Madrid, Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome are included, in a post-pandemic era and I tell you, even today in the municipality, they have just arrived here to tell us that the road to Santa Lucia is flooded, amid this situation that we have as a city today, the priority is to travel and not to attend to municipal issues”.

Regarding this situation where mayors travel for several days to different cities in Europe, the councilman recalled that in 2015 he denounced the councillors of that time because they made the same tourist packages with Fenacon and were going to travel to different places. “This is a well-known methodology that is completely legal but highly, in my opinion, immoral.”

Apparently, and according to the councilman, these trips are made in order to have training, but after this the mayors dedicate themselves to “walking”. He pointed out that there are already some companies that are dedicated to this and he gave as an example in MTA that according to Anato, it appears as a tourism company that sells trips as technical missions. “it's a formal way of disguising these trips.”

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Councilman Tuta also assured that, “I have officiated because I believe that Asocentro has paid for it or paid by the administration are public resources in both cases. I do not know the figure, because here the council authorized this trip and did so without knowing the value, without knowing the itinerary or details of the visit (...) I have officiated to know the detail of the amount and how this trip was financed, it most likely had to have been with public resources, not otherwise”.

Regarding the winter season that the country is going through, the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD) confirmed that Cundinamarca, Antioquia, Cauca, Tolima,. Nariño and the Coffee Region have been the regions most affected by the rains of recent days.

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