Bucaramanga (Colombia) (AFP) – In October 2015, volunteers flooded an impoverished neighborhood of Bucaramanga in northeast Colombia with thousands of pamphlets promising free houses if Rodolfo Hernandez, a millionnaire engineer, were elected mayor.
He won the election, but the free houses never came. Now, Hernandez is running for his country’s top job.
“Rodolfo came here with pure lies. And now he wants to be president?” said Paulina Figueroa, a housewife in the targeted neighborhood, El Pablon, shaking her head.
She still holds on to Hernandez’s pamphlet, but told AFP that instead of getting a house, she had to take out a loan, which she pays off with half her meager monthly income, to build herself a shack of wood and zinc.
“Just another unfulfilled promise by a cheap politician,” added 57-year-old community leader Jaime Nunez, who received the same flyer and voted for Hernandez but continues to pay rent for squalid, crowded lodgings.
Despite failing to deliver on his ambitious promise, Hernandez remains popular among many in Bucaramanga, admired for his brashness and for building sports stadiums in poor areas during his 2016-2019 term.
He donated his mayoral salary to social causes and lived from his self-stated fortune of $100 million.
Hernandez was suspended as mayor for intervening in local elections, and resigned shortly before the end of his term.
In the rest of the country, he is known for another act as mayor: slapping…
