Infrastructure in Colombia: Taking the slow road WHEN Juan Manuel Santos became president of Colombia in August 2010 he promised that investment in upgrading transport infrastructure would become one of the "motors" of his country's economy. It was a well-judged priority. Difficult geography - the Andes split into three chains and the Pacific coast is backed by jungle - as well as poor roads mean that Colombia has the second-fewest vehicles per person in South America. Cutting transport costs is crucial to boosting the competitiveness of the country's hard-pressed manufacturers, who have suffered from the strength of the currency, and to overcoming the isolation that is at the root of the country's socioeconomic inequalities. But after three years in office, the government's critics complain that its fine talk on infrastructure has yet to be matched by much action. Official hopes are pinned on an ambitious programme of public-private partnerships (PPPs), set out in glossy PowerPoint slides and aimed at attracting $20 billion of mainly private investment into road schemes over six years. A new National Infrastructure Agency (ANI) has drawn up a standardised contract for such projects. It is aimed at attracting big foreign construction companies and ending a pattern in which firms that won contracts promptly renegotiated them to squeeze out more money. We said: be patient. We can't repeat the practice of decades, of starting work and only then organising it, with overspends of up to ten times, and starting and stopping," says Mr Santos. The new contracts still face big problems. A senior politician who supports the government worries that ANI has concentrated too much on financial engineering and not enough on the real kind. Contractors are wary of taking on Colombia's complex geological risks, and those arising from climate change, as the new contracts require them to do. There are other snags. Under the law, landowners can refer the compulsory purchase of land required for transport schemes to the courts, blocking it for years. The result is road improvements that stop and start, in both space and time. Getting an environmental licence for any project is another bottleneck. The environmental licensing agency has just 27 staff. Because the constitutional right of Amerindian and Afro-Colombian communities to be consulted about projects that affect them has never been regulated by statute, that is often another roadblock. To make matters still worse in an intensely legalistic country, state employees who sign public contracts live in fear of the procurador (inspector-general), an office that is unique to Colombia. The procurador acts as an inquisitor for alleged administrative misdemeanours. The current holder of the post is a political opponent of the government. Last year Mr Santos requested that an independent commission look into the infrastructure bottlenecks. Following its recommendations, he has drafted a bill to speed up compulsory purchases and environmental licensing. A separate bill to regulate community consultation is stuck in Congress. These legal issues were well-known and should have been dealt with at the start of the government, says Roberto Steiner, an economist who advised the commission. The government has "made a huge effort but the roads they promised aren't there," he says, though he adds that he is optimistic that the PPP contracts may at last get under way next year. At least Mr Santos is taking on a problem neglected by all previous governments over the past two decades. And the president points out that the government has worked on its own road-building programme: this year it will build 300km (190 miles) of dual-carriageway, he says. The problem is that Colombia is as big as France and Spain combined, and with far fewer roads. Mr Santos has several important achievements to his credit. He has launched promising peace talks with the FARC guerrillas and improved Colombia's relations with its neighbours. A new fiscal rule has put the public finances on a more solid basis. Thanks in part to a reform of social policy - though more because of economic growth - poverty and income-inequality are both falling. A tax reform should help reduce the weight of the informal economy. But by taking on so many things at once, he risks leaving the most important tasks only half done. "There's a naivety about this government in thinking that if it designs things well on paper, they will work," says Ana María Ibáñez, an economist at the University of the Andes in Bogotá. Unfortunately, Colombia is a lot more complicated than that.