• Tuesday, November 01, 2011
• Inter Press Service

'The governments of Central America outline a number of requisites for access to housing, and people don't have the money to meet them,' says Roly Escobar, an activist with a Guatemalan movement of slum dwellers fighting for the right to decent housing.

Nearly half of the 43 million inhabitants of the seven countries of Central America — Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama — live in poverty, and millions have serious difficulties in gaining access to decent, affordable housing because that right has been left to the mercy of the market forces, experts say.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of people in the region live in slums, which are often located in high-risk areas like steep hillsides or the banks of rivers, where they face the risk of landslides and floods.

In Central America, 43 percent of the population lacks decent housing, according to the latest figures from the Central American Council on Housing and Human Settlements (CCVAH), from 2008.

'Poor people (in Guatemala) who are in need of housing do not have access to loans because they have no collateral, not to mention the bureaucratic requirements involved and the 6,666 quetzal (865 dollars) fee that they have to pay to the government in order to buy a house, which they often cannot afford,' Escobar, of the Movimiento Guatemalteco de Pobladores (CONAPAMG), told IPS.

Last week, the activist and dozens of other demonstrators blocked traffic on several main avenues in the Guatemalan capital to press Congress to pass a law on housing that would facilitate access to what they describe as a 'social right.'

The bill under consideration in Congress would create a multisectoral council with the mandate to propose housing policies, and would establish a fund and other measures aimed at finding solutions to the problem of access to adequate housing.

'What we want are solutions for 800,000 families who live in slums, including access to financing as well as legal security of tenure,' Escobar said. . The right to adequate housing is enshrined in several international human rights instruments, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

But housing policy has not been a priority of most of the governments of Central America.

'Business interests have prevailed and the state has failed to live up to its social responsibility in the question of housing,' said the director of the centre of urban and regional studies at the public University of San Carlos, Eduardo Velásquez.

'Regulations have been lacking, and the construction of housing has been totally left in the hands of the private sector. The draft law is aimed at getting the state to play its proper role,' he told IPS.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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