Introducing Antanas Mockus
by Charles Lemos , Fri Apr 30, 2010 at 05:01:46 AM EDT
Antanas Mockus, at the moment the front runner to win the presidency in Colombia, is not your typical politician. The son of Lithuanian immigrants, he is not a man who chose a political career but rather instead someone who catapulted to national attention as a result of a now famous, some would say infamous, incident. In 1993 when in front of an unruly mob of students who would not allow any of the scheduled guests to speak, as the then rector of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the largest university in the country, he stepped to front of the podium turned his back on the whistling students, dropped his pants and mooned them.
The students were stunned into silence and Mockus' unlikely ascent had begun. In explaining why he chose to moon the audience, Mockus has noted that he was connecting "two extremes, extreme contempt and extreme submission." The mooning incident, the leading story in Colombia that day, would cost Mockus his post running the state-run institution but it would earn him a place in Colombian lore while gaining him many admirers for having stood up to an anarchist mob.
Timing, they say, is everything in politics. In the mid 1990s, Colombia was a desperate place immersed in ever-spiraling violence but change was on the horizon with a set of political reforms that had begun to open up the Colombian political arena. In the late 1980s, Colombian electoral law was changed to allow direct elections of governors and mayors and in 1991 a new Constitution further opened up the political process.
It was into this political opening that Antanas Mockus was drafted into a run for mayor of Bogotá, then a city of over six million people that was considered the worst city in Latin America with the second highest homicide rate in the world after Medellín, an overstretched infrastructure and one of the largest disparaties between rich and poor anywhere on the planet. Perhaps such was the despair that the political novice Antanas Mockus - the full name is Aurelijus Rutenis Antanas Mockus Šivickas - was elected mayor of Bogotá in his first run for office in late 1994 becoming the first independent mayor in the city's history.
What unfolded over the next three years ranks as one of the most innovative mayorships anywhere and launched the transformation of Bogotá from one of the world's worst cities into one of its best. A mathematician and a philosopher by training, Mockus' viewed Bogotá's problems primarily as one of culture. Change the culture and you change the city.
More:
http://mydd.com/2010/4/30/introdantanas-mockus?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mydd+%28MyDD%29
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