Introduction
In 2002, electricity companies on the Atlantic coast of Colombia were hit by a major financial crisis. According to press reports, the root of the problem was the so-called ‘overdue payment’ or non-payment culture, which brought a number of companies to the brink of bankruptcy, and put the whole Caribbean region in danger of having its electricity supply cut off. The majority of the defaulters were among the country's 4 million displaced persons generated by the Colombian war, who had taken refuge in sub-standard neighbourhoods, transforming the main cities into the most densely populated on the continent.Footnote 1 The government and Congress had gained power with the support of paramilitary groups that had been spreading terror in the areas once home to these displaced persons.Footnote 2 At the beginning of his term in office, President Álvaro Uribe (2002–10), inspired by experiences from countries facing similar problems, proposed the introduction of a new payment system for electricity.Footnote 3 In 2003, Congress approved Law 812 introducing the ‘energy prepayment’ system.Footnote 4
Similar energy prepayment systems have also been, or are in the process of being, implemented in other Latin American countries.Footnote 5 In Argentina, power cooperatives started to use this approach between 1992 and 1994.Footnote 6 The economic crisis which gave rise to the cacerolazo (popular public protest) in 2001 led to a widespread reduction in income and large-scale power cuts due to non-payment of electricity bills. The energy prepayment system was then extended to address the payment collection crisis affecting companies in the sector.Footnote 7 Recent research states that there are around 154,400 prepaid meters installed, most of them in rural areas.Footnote 8 The system was even introduced as an experiment in remote areas of Brazil in 2005,Footnote 9 and later extended to the whole country through Luz para todos (Electricity for All programme).Footnote 10 In Peru, as with Brazil, ‘the focus group is the extremely poor consumers located in rural areas’ where there are 5,000 prepaid meters installed in 86 localities.Footnote 11 In the Dominican Republic the goal until 2015 was to install 300,000 meters and the main target group was rural communities located in isolated areas.Footnote 12 According to recent research it is expected that 37 million prepaid metering services will be installed worldwide by 2017.Footnote 13
In developed countries the prepaid system has been used to force low-income groups into prepayment metering plans when they run into financial difficulty.Footnote 14 The implementation of these plans indicates that prepaid energy is more expensive than other ways of paying,Footnote 15 with potentially life threatening consequences.Footnote 16 The approach of this article, however, is that the introduction of the prepayment system in Colombia has become an effective way of managing the lives of the millions of displaced persons, regulating their access to energy, water and other essential utilities in towns and cities. Introducing the prepayment system is a form of biopower, or more specifically, energopower, ‘a genealogy of modern power rethinking political power through electricity and fuel as an analytical tool’, and which Dominic Boyer goes on to define:
…as an alternative genealogy of modern power, as an analytical method that looks in the walls to find the wiring and ducts and insulation, that listens to the streets to hear the murmur of pipes and sewages, that regards discourse on energy security today as not simply about the management of population (e.g., ‘biosecurity’) but also about the concern that our precious and invisible conduits of fuel and force stay bringing and humming.Footnote 17
As Boyer also argues, inspired by Bruno Latour's studies, ‘the politics of energy are becoming an acute “matter of concern” […], when the effects of increasing energy consumption are transforming planetary ecology in deeply troubling ways, it seems timely to inquire more deeply into those powers, to interpret not only what they signify in various settings, but also what work they do’.Footnote 18 In this regard, Boyer has stressed that ‘there could have been no consolidation of any regime of modern biopower without a parallel securitization of energy provision and synchronization of energy discourse’.Footnote 19
The implementation of the prepaid energy system in Colombia can be viewed as an instrument of energopower for governing society in its current state of forced migration and urbanisation. The first city in the country to implement the system was Medellín. The city's Empresas Públicas de Medellín (Public Utility Company, EPM) is renowned in Colombia as a model in the provision of servicios públicos domiciliarios (domestic public services, SPD) regarding water, electricity, gas, telecommunications and, more recently, solid waste management.Footnote 20 Much of Medellín's budget comes from the profit generated by EPM, around 30 per cent of which is channelled directly into the city.Footnote 21 Since its foundation in the 1950s, the connectivity schemes developed by the company have helped integrate informally built districts into the official consumption system of the city's domestic public services, which has turned EPM into a major player in normalising these communities and managing strategic infrastructure works. For this reason, the way that the city has managed EPM has been highlighted as an important model of sustainability for the Global South.Footnote 22
By adopting the prepaid energy system, the managing director of EPM and the mayor of Medellín, on the one hand, have ensured that the new system is ‘a socially-responsible alternative for those users who have had their services cut off for non-payment, or who are in danger of them being cut off’.Footnote 23 On the other hand, they have maintained that ‘this scheme changes the history of energy marketing in the residential band of most limited incomes’.Footnote 24 Both the socially-responsible nature and the historical change that prepaid energy has introduced into marketing are discussed in this article dealing with its implementation as an expression of energopower in Colombia. It emphasises how energopower has been used in Medellín in three different lines. The first is the way in which EPM builds on the notion of displaced persons being new buyers of prepaid energy services; the second demonstrates how the prepaid energy system contributes to the financing of both the ‘Social Urbanism Planning’ model for the city and the regional expansion of EPM's services in Colombia and other Latin American countries; and the third is how prepaid electricity as an energopower tool shapes the behaviour of the population in the lowest income bands and how barrio women discover and respond to its disciplinary methods of domination.
The first two sections of this article are based on press archives and company statements used as expressions of propositional discourse regarding the implementation of prepaid energy. The aim is to recreate what Günel refers to as an ‘energo-political experiment’ designed to educate populations into developing new habits of energy use while, at the same time, instituting disciplinary measures to regulate the consumption behaviour of individuals.Footnote 25 In this respect, the third section is based on group interviews with women leaders in low-income neighbourhoods conducted in March 2010. Their accounts provide important insights into the disciplinarian nature of energopower which has thus far been little studied in available literature on both EPM and Medellín as a paradigm of energy and urban living. The survey in Medellín examined the role played by women in two scenarios: the first addressed the issues of sustainable development in the city in general and the second the planning of three new library parks on the outskirts of Medellín. Their analysis focused on the realities of life in the deprived areas on the outskirts of the city and interacting with the bulk of the women's social movement with its own organisational identity and epistemology, in what they refer to as a feminismo barrial. This ‘barrio feminism’ has its origins in the organisation of ‘housewives’ around their rights, where emphasis was placed, in particular, on the value of their work in society. This multifarious value finds expression in parenting, the care economy, the relationships women have with the church, school and politics, and in issues of self-value and self-esteem, with particular regard to the effect violence has on women, their mental health, depression caused by relationships with partners and children, how to manage money in the family and the relationship women in the home have with authority. To express their barrio feminism, women began to form groups around topics they had most in common regarding their lives in the barrios. Among the central themes that emerged was that of ‘economic, social and cultural rights’ to education, health and to the environment:
We can only deal with the theme of water and utilities if we have these rights. Why? Because … the privatisation process has resulted in public utility rates becoming unaffordable. And there's a slogan, for example, that says that we women, or our families, have ‘either to eat or to pay’ for domestic public services.Footnote 26
As witnesses of how energopower has transformed the city and their lives, they insisted that the new way of providing both water and energy regulated the bodies of both the people and the communities.
The second group of women was contacted during the library parks planning workshops run by staff from the Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano (Urban Development Enterprise, EDU). The fieldwork involved following women who were attending a workshop organised by researchers from the National University, recording their contributions to the strategic housing plan for the city. As with the first group, these women were also leaders on community action boards. Their experience was more local and was concentrated in the East Central districts of the city where EPM had implemented the prepaid energy system on a mass scale, and the mayor was preparing to launch a Projecto Urbano Integral (comprehensive urban project, PUI). Using their barrio feminism, these women criticised the redefinitions EPM was invoking to describe the nature of the prepaid system. These redefinitions embody abnormalities that will be addressed in the final section along what Gayatri Spivak has studied as a catachresis, ‘a “wholesome” abuse of a figurative move’ to show how women are deliberately stripped of political power by those who speak on their behalf.Footnote 27 The catachreses the women touched on are those likely to rename displaced and disconnected persons as ‘bad debtors’, decreased quality of life as ‘affordability’, forced inclusion in energy prepayment as ‘Social Urbanism’, and submission as ‘consensus and solidarity’.
Energopower and Women
As can be guessed from the preamble, the introduction of prepaid energy is the manifestation of a social class struggle between the ruling elite and displaced Colombians who are far from being a homogeneous group. A large number of them were women, young and old, of peasant, Afro-Colombian and indigenous extraction. Ninety per cent of them were from rural areas, 34 per cent of indigenous origins and 9.2 per cent of African descent. About 48 per cent were under 15 years of age and between 3 and 6 per cent were over 60 years of age, of whom, in turn, 70 per cent were women. Thirty-six per cent of teenagers were pregnant and 98 per cent of children under four had not received their full set of vaccinations, and 50 per cent of all displaced persons lived in sub-standard housing in run-down neighbourhoods.Footnote 28
The intersection between class, gender, age and ethnicity defines the relationship between the rulers and ruled that Michel Foucault, in his notion of biopower, formulated as a series of practices designed to standardise both life and the body, and to determine what kind of life people are allowed to live.Footnote 29 Foucault applies this analysis to his study of domination by performing three essential tasks. The first is to show how a social subject is constructed in different states of subjugation. The second is to make power relationships transparent, showing how operators of domination complement each other. And the third is to demonstrate the technical tools used on a daily basis to mould the body of those subjects and social communities that are subjected to domination.Footnote 30 As regards relationships of energopower domination in Medellín, the first of these tasks is to demonstrate how the introduction of the prepaid energy system is designed to think of disconnected people as a new ‘social subject in a position of submission’. The second task is to demonstrate how operators of domination are presented as a multi-service company such as EPM, with the political legitimacy to implement new systems and technologies. The third is to demonstrate how prepaid energy meters function as a tool to subjugate and mould the behaviour of those subjected to domination through energopower.
By performing these three tasks, it is also possible to understand the way in which the city promotes different kinds of energo-political experiments to regulate populations into developing new habits of energy use while implementing disciplinary measures to govern the behaviour of individuals.Footnote 31 To analyse these experiments, it is crucial to consider how critical conditions are for the poor, those displaced by war, and for other migrants who are both subjects of domination and subjects of opposition to energopower. As will be discussed in the final section, the women from the neighbourhoods are making a prismatic study of prepayment energy in connection with barrio feminism. That is, simultaneously looking at bodies such as EPM, and local and national government, from the viewpoint of the relationships that EPM was trying to impose the new prepayment meters on the population. These meters, in their role as regulatory devices, thus become agents with the power to mould the population into behaving how energopower wants them to. With this kind of agency, material feminism, inspired by techno-scientific studies, takes a holistic view of phenomena instead of viewing things, bodies and relationships in fragments.Footnote 32 To overcome this thingification, Karen Barad intends to take what she refers to as an agential realism that enables one to ‘acknowledge nature, the body and materiality in the fullness of their becoming’.Footnote 33 Material feminism thus promotes the idea of looking at how this agency generates diffraction, defined by Barad as ‘mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear but, rather, maps where the effects of differences appear’.Footnote 34 Thus, energopower can be seen as a diffractive phenomenon that generates a broad spectrum of effects from the socially differentiated energy consumption of cities. In studying Boyer, the need to unify speech, materiality and history is highlighted, which, incidentally, tallies with what Barad regards as to ‘acknowledge nature, the body and materiality in the fullness of their becoming’.Footnote 35, Footnote 36
As tools to be used to mould social behaviour, contemporary prepaid meters were designed in South Africa with two goals in mind, the first being the capitalisation of the energy companies. As David Harvey writes, on studying privatisation policies proposed in South Africa, the World Bank ‘promoted, for example, either the privatisation of water or “total cost recovery” by municipality-owned utilities. Consumers paid for the water they used, rather than receiving it as a free good’.Footnote 37 The second is monitor ‘non-payment’ behaviour adopted by the irregularly connected majority of South Africans to oppose the racist apartheid regime.Footnote 38 The academic community is still being called on to mould this behaviour. To adapt the prepayment system for implementation in countries such as India, some technologists have devised it as a means of punishing those people described as electricity ‘thieves’.Footnote 39 However, this form of punishment generally demonstrates what other authors have highlighted as being gender inequalities in the use of electricity.Footnote 40 The women interviewed in Medellín, in continuing to be responsible for the area of care, consider that having their domestic public services disconnected had a direct effect on them.
Forcing them, for example, to have to carry water, whenever they are suspended from the right to use these utilities or have this right withdrawn: these limitations have a knock-on effect on their other rights, such as their right to participate and their right to recreation. In addition, it prevents girls from going to school, which is the reason why we have said that this is a political issue for women.Footnote 41
The political implications of disconnection are identical to those experienced by women in other countries. For example in Argentina, in adjusting the use of prepaid energy, women substituted with manual labour the tasks they previously performed with domestic electrical appliances. The electricity austerity characterised by prepaid energy trapped these women, forcing them to spend time doing housework instead of social and political activities.Footnote 42
The Subjects of Energopower's Discourse in Medellín
As a platform for launching a prepaid energy system in the country, Medellín is a city that has seen various regimes come and go. Since the late nineteenth century, between 80 and 90 per cent of the gold exported from Colombia was mined in the Antioquia region and sold mainly in the capital, Medellín. The city thus gave birth to the first banks in the country, and a new class of merchants laid the foundation for its industrial leadership.Footnote 43 Up until the 1970s, the city was the epicentre of Colombian textile and coffee exports. During the 1980s, the economic recession created the conditions for the emergence of two powerful business groups organised in a similar way to the Japanese keiretsu, a system of cross-ownership.Footnote 44 The first was the ‘Sindicato Antioqueño’, better known today as the Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño (Antioquia Business Group, GEA), which brought the major industries in the cement and construction sector, the insurance and finance companies and the food industries together in a system of cross-ownership, in which each company owns 30 per cent of the others, and contributes to a large concentration of capital in the city.Footnote 45 The second ‘business’ group was the Cartel de Medellín, a network of drug traffickers who divided up their risks and investments equally, albeit under the leadership of Pablo Escobar, which turned Medellín into the world capital of drug trafficking.Footnote 46 Economic liberalisation arrived in the 1990s, and GEA entrepreneurs – a nucleus of 125 of the top companies in Colombia – accounted for 7 to 8 per cent of the country's GNP. Liberalisation coincided with the war against the ‘Medellín Cartel’ when the homicide rates in the city rose to a point where they were the highest in the world.Footnote 47 To address the violence, the city's elite launched various urban interventions so that each wave of violence was followed by a ‘wave of concrete’, which manifested itself in the form of large urban buildings. The Medellín Cartel was gradually replaced by a network of extreme right-wing paramilitary groups.Footnote 48 This network, working symbiotically with the state, managed to establish a ‘violent protection economy’, responsible for reducing lethal violence.Footnote 49, Footnote 50
In the early years of the twenty-first century, with the reforms introduced by the government of Álvaro Uribe, EPM became the EPM Group and began to define transnational objectives.Footnote 51 As a kind of public keiretsu by its very nature as a multi-service company and in symbiosis with the GEA, its new structure consolidated the group as the leading provider of public services in Colombia. EPM secured a monopoly in the supply of clean energy sources in the Antioquia region, and initiated wastewater treatment and the environmental recovery of the Medellín River and, in the 2010s, it began an ecological recycling programme for the city's solid waste. EPM sales in the country generated huge profits that were transferred to Medellín to start the city´s ‘makeover’, with what was termed ‘Social Urbanism’.Footnote 52, Footnote 53 During the same period, the GEA moved on to conquer markets in Latin America and the United States, and its companies dominated the insurance, cement and food industries across the continent. In the 2010s, following in the footsteps of the GEA, EPM began exporting most of its services to other Colombian and Central American cities and rural areas. During the same period, technical experts and city planners were able to profile Medellín as a global benchmark for urban innovation to the point of recognition for hosting the World Urban Forum in 2014.
Generally speaking, the transformation of the city over a period of 40 years, from its industrial decay to its rise as an urban, energetic benchmark in the Global South, has profiled it as one of the most resilient cities in the world.Footnote 54 The confluence of the three keiretsus: the GEA, the ‘Medellín Cartel’ and the EPM Group, have made Medellín into a distinct example of the ‘interrelationship between energo-political and bio-political systems’.Footnote 55
Subjects to be Dominated by Energopower
The introduction of prepaid energy in Colombia is simultaneously confronted with similar social conditions to those found in other countries that have implemented the system. As was the case in South Africa, Argentina and Brazil, the system was promoted to generate capital for the energy companies. As in Rwanda or Uganda, the system introduced disciplinary measures to regulate the consumer behaviour of the millions of displaced people forced to migrate to the cities because of the civil war.
The emergency caused by the massive internal displacement forced the Corte Constitucional de Colombia (Constitutional Court of Colombia, CCC), to declare a state of emergency in the country. To restore normality, on 22 January 2004, the CCC promulgated an important ruling, Statement T 25/04, requiring the executive power to take urgent measures to protect the population, with the proposed agendas to be communicated to a National Council on or after 31 March 2004.Footnote 56
More than 95,000 displaced Colombians have settled in Medellín and joined the 180,000 people who could potentially have their utilities in the city disconnected or suspended. Despite the CCC ruling, EPM carried out the first prepaid energy tests in February 2005.Footnote 57 The average monthly per capita consumption in Colombia at that time was 1,058 KWh/month, according to the Comisión de Integración de Energía Regional (Commission on Regional Energy Integration, CIER).Footnote 58 To determine the state subsidy to the poorest sectors, the Comisión Reguladora de Energía (Energy Regulatory Commission, CREG) implemented Law No. 812 of 2003, which set the average consumption for prepayment users at over 500 KWh/month.Footnote 59 To test the implementation of the system, in 2005 EPM selected 100 users in Bands 2, 3 and 4 who had a consumption of between zero and 200 kWh/month, then regarded as the level of subsistence consumption.Footnote 60 Also in February 2005, the company installed a meter with each family to study their patterns of energy use. EPM was thus able to determine that the prepayment rate would cost the same as the post-payment rate, lowered the consumption subsistence level from 200 to 165 kWh/month, set the costs per kilowatt to Colombian$ 209 (US$ 0.07) and the subsidy amount for this consumption to up to 40 per cent for Band 2, and up to 15 per cent for Band 3.Footnote 61
In December 2005, that is, almost two years after the CCC ruling, EPM commissioned a survey to obtain a more detailed explanation of the reasons why users defaulted on their payments. The EPM survey was aimed at two groups from across the city. The first consisted of 1,556 families who were connected, but whose ‘utilities had been suspended’ for two to nine months. The second group consisted of 1,673 families who had already been disconnected for over nine months.Footnote 62 The study concluded that the reason that users fell behind in their payments was their lack of income. It also estimated that the number of families who had been disconnected amounted to 70,000.Footnote 63
The ruling emitted by the CCC in 2004 was ratified again in April 2007, this time to protect displaced women, specifically with respect to ensuring safe access for them to ‘(a) essential food and drinking water, (b) accommodation and basic housing, (c) appropriate clothing, and (d) essential medical services and sanitation’.Footnote 64 In addition, the CCC ruled that the authorities must make special efforts urgently to ensure full participation of women in the planning and distribution of these vital services.
Of the four requirements ruled on by the CCC, three directly involved the duties and obligations of companies such as EPM. However, EPM continued with its strategy of refinancing the ‘bad’ debt. Following dispositions from the Energy Regulatory Commission, CREG, EPM subsidised up to 10 per cent of any debt amounting to five minimum salaries (about US$ 1,355 in 2010).Footnote 65 Families could then split the remaining 90 per cent of the debt with a 36-month payment plan, and persons displaced by the war or injured as a result of natural disasters could be given 120 months to ‘pay off the debt’.Footnote 66 These financing plans came to constitute the core of the funding policy of EPM with respect to these disconnected persons.
The battle waged between the executive and the judiciary powers with regard to energy prepayment in Colombia brings one up-to-date with the kinds of tensions and contradictions that reflect what Boyer highlights as being the phenomenological, or Hegelian-Marxist, nature of energopower. Boyer argues that ‘energopower makes sense now because of a series of events that have drawn our attention to tensions, contradictions even, between governmental institutions and aspirations and energetic forces and fuels’.Footnote 67 In Colombia, these tensions were connected to global ambitions and were also reflected locally. On the one hand, on the global level, the legislative and executive bodies worked to instigate reforms promoted by the World Bank, focusing on what Harvey refers to as ‘full cost recovery’ in public utility services.Footnote 68 On the other hand, national government aspirations to implement the prepaid system were challenged by the judiciary power who, under the CCC rulings, acted in response to acciones de tutela (writs for the protection of rights advanced by individuals against state authorities) lodged by legal groups to defend displaced women.
Tensions and contradictions continued to filter down to local level. In the 1990s, EPM was about to be privatised. However, the regional elites chose to keep the company in the public domain.Footnote 69 In 2005, Mayor Fajardo set the privatisation process for EPM's telephone networks in motion while, at the same time, was promoting ‘payment of the historical debt towards the humblest’ as a way of pacifying the city.Footnote 70 Regarding the contradictions and contraindications on ‘the most humble’ as reported by the City Office in May 2007, the city had 55,269 families’ disconnected from electricity supply. EPM's aim was to reconnect 32,000 of these families in 2008.Footnote 71 That year the programme connected 18,500 of them to the grid. By mid-2009, the programme had already brought in 37,522 families who expressed 91 per cent satisfaction with the service.Footnote 72 By April 2010, EPM was reporting that they had installed prepaid energy meters with 42,819 families in the Medellín metropolitan area, benefiting some 280,000 people.Footnote 73 The goal for 2011 was to connect 88,000 of the 95,000 families who were disconnected from service in Antioquia, 30,000 of whom resided in the Medellín administrative area.Footnote 74
As shown in Figure 1, payments made by those in Bands 1, 2 and 3, the poorest in 2010, constituted almost 80 per cent of total revenues and quadrupled the earnings of EPM.Footnote 75 According to the Single Domestic Public Services Information System (SUI), in 2004 the poorest in Band 1 paid similar amounts to those in Band 6. In 2010, the revenues from Band 1 were twice as much those in Band 6. It is important to note here that, although nearly half of the population of Medellín had no formal salaried income, with the prepayment solution, the entire population was forced to pay for EPM energy, regardless of their age or income.Footnote 76 With the ‘inclusion’ of ‘the poor’ in SPD payments, energopower became the most successful paradigm for the amassing of capital in the entire history of the city.
Figure 1. Growth of EPM Funds by Housing Band in 2004, 2007 and 2010
The Prepayment System and EPM Capitalisation
EPM capitalised on the full recovery of costs to promote its voracious colonisation of markets following three strategic actions between 2003 and 2011. In the first action, the company secured its dominant position in Colombia by buying up other utilities to set up the EPM Group. Since 2003, EPM has acquired other regional companies such as CHEC and EdeQ in the Colombian coffee belt. In 2009, EPM acquired a majority stake in CENS and ESSA, which supplied utilities to the Santanderes, in north-east Colombia. With these acquisitions, EPM was supplying services to 12 million people, and reached the 25 per cent share ceiling of the national demand for energy.Footnote 77
In the second action, in 2005, EPM defined its mega goal for territorial expansion to be set to conduct 40 per cent of its activities outside Colombia.Footnote 78 To this end, EPM commenced a vertiginous campaign to purchase electricity companies in Central America, reaching dominance in that market in 2011. In Panama, the company built the 31.3 MW Bonyic hydroelectricity plant and, at the invitation of Panamanian president, prepared to launch itself into other fronts of infrastructural development, such as rural electrification, the provision of drinking water and the recovery of the Bay of Panama.Footnote 79 In late 2010, EPM signed a contract allowing it to acquire the Guatemala companies DECA II and EEGSA.Footnote 80 In January 2011, EPM acquired the Panama company ENSA and, at the same time, the El Salvador company DELSUR.Footnote 81 With these acquisitions, EPM was placed to explore the geothermal potential of the region.Footnote 82 In 2013, EPM expanded the geographical area of its operations in Chile, joining the Danish multinational Vestas in building the ‘Los Cururos’ wind farm.Footnote 83
In addition to establishing itself as a continental energy cluster such as a multi-utility service company, EPM also began to make inroads into aqueducts and water sanitation in Puerto Rico, Mexico and Chile.Footnote 84 Efforts made to integrate regional electricity grids resulted in a very promising outlook for EPM's continued expansion in the region.Footnote 85 With its geographical position as a bridge between the Andean Region and Central America, and the commissioning of two new hydroelectric plants, Porce III (660 MW) in 2011, and the Hidroituango power station (2400 MW), which will be the largest in Colombia by the year 2018, the possibilities of expansion for the EPM Group began to mould it into a continental-sized operator.Footnote 86
In the third action, during the acquisition period between 2005 and 2010, EPM made financial transfers to the city totalling US$ 1.9 billion (Figure 2). Based on these transfers the mayor financed the Social Urbanism project.
Figure 2. EPM Savings Transferred to the City of Medellín
EPM and Social Urbanism
Between 1987 and 2003, 65,154 people, primarily males, were killed in Medellín.Footnote 87 The high toll of violent deaths led to a feminisation of the population; the percentage of women ranged between 53 and 58 per cent.Footnote 88 In the 2003 municipal elections, Sergio Fajardo, the son of one of the most powerful families in the GEA cement and construction industries was elected mayor. Fajardo won over the electorate with an innovative proposal for action against lethal violence, which he called Social Urbanism.Footnote 89 His proposal was to allocate about 40 per cent of the municipal budget to improving the educational and cultural infrastructure, replicating what is known as ‘the Barcelona model’, which advocates a form of area based intervention referred to by the municipal EDU as Projectos Urbanos Integrales (Comprehensive Urban Projects, PUIs).Footnote 90, Footnote 91 The PUIs’ focus was on concentrating the management capacity of all public utility companies in the city in the areas where levels of human development are at their lowest and the levels of violence are at their highest. Such a concentration of effort affords the administration the opportunity to propose a kind of urban acupuncture to temporarily numb the major flashpoints of violence. To achieve this goal, there had to be cooperation with the violent actors who, as some authors have suggested, were also interested in turning Medellín into an exemplar city.Footnote 92 Following this power logic, the first PUIs were set up in conjunction with national agreements for the demobilisation of the right-wing paramilitary groups, and were located in the districts where these groups had the largest presence.Footnote 93 The PUIs put forward proposals for primary and secondary schools, library parks, innovative connectivity systems such as Metro Cable, and socially productive and city beautification projects.
The Social Urbanism plans discussed with regard to the EPM transfers were intended to reduce levels of violence and raise the human development index in the poorest areas of the city. However, even with the massive construction and investment, during the administrations of Sergio Fajardo (2004–07) and Alonso Salazar (2008–11), the percentage of people classified as poor did not decline (see Figure 3). Instead, there was a decrease, on the one hand, in the size of the official population in the municipality, which fell from 2.35 to 2.31 million, while on the other, the feminisation rate also declined from 54.44 to 52.91 per cent. In 2009, the total population of the city declined in 12 of the 16 districts. The size of the decrease ranged from 10,000 to 20,000 inhabitants in districts such as Castilla, 12 October, Buenos Aires, La América and Robledo. However, most of this decline was accounted for by the female population (see Figure 4), implying that the efforts being made to raise the human development index in the poorest areas coincided with the migration of women from these districts. As Figure 4 shows, in the low-income districts of Barrio Popular and San Javier, where the mayor implemented the first two PUIs, the decrease was remarkable. The female population also decreased in most central middle-class districts of the city, but increased in some middle and upper-class districts such as El Poblado and Guayabal or middle and lower-class districts such as Villa Hermosa, or Santa Cruz. On the other hand, working-class, low-income townships such as Alta Vista and San Cristóbal saw a large increase in their female population. The latter, perhaps, was a result of building the Ciudadela Nuevo Occidente proposed by the mayor in the area, to move displaced persons and households affected by fires, who were living in the city dump in Moravia, located near the city centre.Footnote 94
Figure 3. Variation in the Total Population of Medellín by district 2005, 2007
Figure 4. Variation in the Female Population by District 2005, 2007
Prepayment Energy Meters as Behaviour Moulders
The mayor and the managing director of EPM were the motivational force behind the introduction of the prepayment energy system as a measure benefiting families by giving them control over their energy bills.Footnote 95 The following sections will address the issue of how women leaders on community action boards contested the redefinitions put forward by the EPM and the mayor.
Disconnected, displaced persons as ‘bad debtors’
The first of the redefinitions the women objected to is the reference to ‘bad debtors’, which was often made in the press.Footnote 96 For the women interviewed, the ‘bad debtors’ were in particular, disconnected, displaced women. To illustrate this redefinition, some of them mentioned a study of example cases:
Aurora: This was a case of 20 displaced women who were disconnected for various reasons. For example, there were some women who wanted access to legal public services. However, it transpires that EPM imposed a large number of conditions on this, such as having a guarantor who had property that was not inherited.Footnote 97
This meant that to be able to make use of domestic public utility services, the women not only had to be property owners, but also had to have the support of another person who was financially solvent. Given these requirements, women leaders explained to EPM that the women in the study were heads of households, worked in the informal economy, lived in underserved barrios, as well as other details to describe the position of women displaced by war.
Aurora: And they restored to us those rights to petition, with the reply that this is national policy, they could not intervene and that anyone with this problem was to ‘start negotiation’. They have plans … to refinance, which were, what we would call, ‘a lukewarm, damp cloth’, like trying to reconnect families, for example, with the prepayment card.Footnote 98
The national policy that EPM referred to was Law No. 812/2003.Footnote 99 Invitations to negotiate individually with EPM fall into the category Günel called disciplinary energy policy, in which both individuals and populations emerge as units of governance.Footnote 100 As will be seen, this energy policy paves the way for imposing new patterns of affordability and new forms of control.
‘Improved quality of life’ with improved affordability
As for new habits, in the context of the humanitarian crisis the country was facing, the CCC, in its rulings, demanded the universalisation of domestic public utility services. This was to defend women against the vulnerable situation in which the millions of displaced people found themselves. However, in Resolution 067 of 2004 of the CREG, the government claimed that:
In the event of there being users supplied through a prepayment marketing system, unavailability of the service as a result of non-payment shall not be considered as suspension of service’.Footnote 101
This resolution enabled companies such as EPM to register those who were disconnected or suspended from the right to a service to be recategorised as new buyers of a service to be supplied to them by these companies.
Romelia: From a political viewpoint, if we look at it statistically, there are no disconnected persons, the reason being that they're only disconnected because they haven't bought a card, if you get my meaning! If you have no power supply it is because you haven't bought a 1,000 pesos or a 2,000 pesos card. But in the structure aimed to enforce the right there's nothing about the disconnection of such a large number of families from public utilities.
Aurora: The prepayment card makes disconnected persons invisible.Footnote 102
With this ability to redefine the group, disconnected persons have disappeared statistically as subjects for special protection, becoming users to be assisted in accordance with the notion of the ‘universalisation’ of the service, which EPM defined in the following terms:
EPM understands the universalisation of the service as coverage and affordability. It thus prioritises the provision of access networks across the entire geographical area served, and then identifies the impact basic public utilities have on the Human Development Index indicators, particularly in terms of life expectancy and material well-being and, to a lesser extent, access to knowledge.Footnote 103
The article will now examine more deeply what is meant by affordability, material well-being and access to knowledge. With regard to affordability, or purchasing power, in accordance with the notion of ‘universality’, the human development index of disconnected persons was dependent on their access to available networks and to buy their services. Those who could not afford them were not necessarily disconnected from the ability to enjoy them. When families were informally connected, their consumption was, in fact, financed by the state and could be as high as, on average, 1,000 kWh/month.Footnote 104 With the implementation of prepayment energy, disconnected persons went from being ignored as subjects of social protection to being seen as new buyers. This formalisation by forced integration process is, at the same time, a form of privatisation, which David Harvey has argued as being a scheme for ‘full cost recovery’.Footnote 105
In terms of material well-being, the universalisation of affordability was promoted as an improvement in the well-being of disconnected persons, but the women had serious doubts in this regard:
Valentina: What [EPM] say is … that ‘You have to have drinking water and a continuous supply of electricity, and that if you cannot pay for it, the solution is a prepayment account.’ But this turns out not to be the case. They are dismantling, by creating policies for us to believe this story. But at the end of the day, it isn't true that things are created for the benefit of the community. Rather, the opposite – all our rights are being taken away from us.Footnote 106
As for having ‘access to knowledge’, at the time energy prepayment was introduced, the mayor had been strongly promoting his ‘Medellín, the best educated city’ strategy, as part of his rhetoric of ‘paying the historical debt to the most humble’.Footnote 107 The children from the poorest neighbourhoods could have access to the best education in terms of top quality schools and library parks built with participatory design methodologies.Footnote 108 This policy of universality, based on ‘coverage’ and ‘affordability’, was not promoted with the same participatory methodologies, despite its implementation being essential to the initiation of Social Urbanism projects. In this sense, the prepayment system required both forced inclusion and the submission of the population, as discussed in the final two sections of this article.
Forced inclusion as ‘Social Urbanism’
Among those women who were leaders in the East Central districts of the city, some lacked the means to pay their overdue water and energy bills. One of them had already been disconnected. All of them had a history of having to pay high costs to have normal access to their water supply (water and sewage), which qualified them to be part of the city's Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (Land Use Plan, POT). They established their homes during the 1980s as part of earlier waves of migrants and internally displaced people.
In 2004, the number of displaced persons in Medellín was estimated to be 120,000.Footnote 109 Of these, only 84,000 had been registered by the Office for Human Rights Issues.Footnote 110 Between 2000 and 2004, a total of 3,686 displaced people settled in the neighbourhood of Santo Domingo Savio, 3,546 in Manrique, 3,379 in Moravia, and Barrio Popular, Buenos Aires, Enciso, Villatina, Santa Cruz and Aranjuez each received up to 3,000 people.Footnote 111
In 2009, the Office for Human Rights Issues in Medellín had already registered over 160,203 displaced people.Footnote 112 According to the CCC's rulings, this situation qualified families to be resettled in social housing schemes. Notwithstanding these requirements, in 2010 the mayor was still prioritising the building of structures for urban beautification, such as sports arenas and the athletes' village for the South American Games.Footnote 113 In the east-central area of the city, the planning office had proposed a plan to have a household census. The census found that neighbourhoods where the women leaders lived were recorded in the POT as being ‘illegals’. For Victoria, leader of one of the community action boards, delays connected with their actual living situation were constant:
We have now come to ask for a housing allowance because not long ago I asked for it on behalf of 25 families, and to my astonishment the answer was no, as they argued that we were not in the POT. And then I contacted them to say: ‘What on earth are you talking about?! Then the work they were doing on Resolution 0065 (2010) with which we made the models for, where we said where we were going to put the bus terminal, well, there were so many works, how we wanted Medellín to be and how we dreamed our neighbourhoods would be.’ We worked on those projects, and from that, a resolution was issued which was signed by the mayor. Then I said to them, ‘how come you don't know that!? We're in the POT, we're not out of it – we're insiders.’ I find it quite amazing, not having access to public utilities, the high risk that we run of streams bursting, which is what all the outlying neighbourhoods suffer from.Footnote 114
Victoria's revelation stresses the contradictions and tensions that Boyer refers to between local government institutions, the energy companies and the real ambitions of Social Urbanism. The energy forces in EPM advanced with their offensive on implementing the prepayment energy system in the area. However, with the new Social Urbanism works, EDU, and the Municipal Office of Civic Culture sent out invitations to the participatory processes needed to get local support to start the PUI in the district. All these women were invited to take part in ‘imaginary workshops’, where people shared their dream vision of the future development of their neighbourhoods. At these workshops, the women proposed as first priority the drafting of a plan to resettle 3,500 families. But, as they have settled in what are designated as ‘high-risk, irrecoverable’ areas, the city's planning office persisted in excluding this population from the POT in order not to condone building in high-risk areas.
Subjugation to the prepayment system as ‘consensus and solidarity’
All the redefinitions described so far are aimed at implementing prepayment energy in what Günel might describe as an energo-political experiment aimed to regulate new consumption habits among disconnected people.Footnote 115 The way women look at prepaid energy as energo-politics designed to create submission in the population can now be considered.
Victoria: Things happen here and we continue to remain as poor as we were … Imagine, we have nothing to pay for these services with. And EPM says, ‘come on, we'll arrange a meeting and that prepayment meter set up for you’. … and I tell my community: ‘I won't agree to it.’ Saying, ‘install a prepayment meter for me’ is like me saying to the state ‘I submit.’
Matilde: And I'm giving up all my rights.
Angélica: It's quite strange.
Victoria: And what I say is that if I have the means to pay, I have rights.
Angélica: Or else (if I don't have the means to pay), I don't (have any rights).
Victoria: Then I stay out of it. That is what it's like to have a privatised service.Footnote 116
As the women explained, the prepayment system involved signing an individual contract to privatise access rights based on their affordability, indicating that to submit one was subjugating to the conditions unilaterally established by state energopower, represented by EPM and the city administration. Based on this analysis, barrio women could challenge EPM's interests, contest its character as ‘public’ utility and the prepayment system being called an aid to improve their real quality of life.
Angélica: Knowing that EPM is ours. It's presumably owned by the people – it's presumably owned by Medellín! So what is really the truth, what is the truth!? Is it ours or it is theirs by been privatised? So, what they want is for all of us to have prepayment energy. It's true! And we've now bought the electricity – we ‘negotiated’ for it. If we want electricity ‘we have to sacrifice ourselves for it’. And if we don't [pay], ‘we don't get it – that's all!’ And on top of that it's so expensive! It is so for me. I don't personally think one cannot turn on a stove plate. It's just for light bulbs and what else? … for the flat iron occasionally, and the TV. But you turn on a stove plate, and it eats up 5,000 pesos in one go! And who says it's much cheaper? It's not true. It really isn't true!
Elvia: Yes?
Angélica: That's totally wrong, because we have to use gas. What does that tell us, then? That we have to consume twice as much!
Elvia: Well, that's no help…Footnote 117
Elvia is surprised by what Angélica comes out with, and then revises her alleged sympathy towards the energy prepayment system. This needs to be made clear to demonstrate the heterogeneous nature of the women's experiences and situations. Instead of helping, Angélica explained that EPM had made emphatic demands to supply energy to her, ‘And if we don't [pay], we don't get it – that's that!’, indicating that the nature of energy prepayment is a ‘disciplinary energy policy’. As explained by Angélica the system was more expensive, which has been researched in other countries.Footnote 118 Authors such as von Schnitzel have highlighted the nature of prepayment energy as being a technology aimed at introducing a new paradigm of social behaviour to South Africa.Footnote 119 Installing it in Medellín could combine two characteristic aspects of the city: on the one hand, bolstering a new ‘civic culture’ aimed at both overcoming violence and increasing tax payments while, on the other, continuing the long history of social discipline that has characterised the domestic power elites in Antioquia.Footnote 120, Footnote 121
In this sense, Celeste, for example, one of the barrio women's leaders was three months behind with her payments and part of the group of people who could sign an agreement with EPM to have access to electricity. After being suspended she was preparing to pay a penalty of one month of disconnection, while EPM installed a new prepaid meter for her. By signing the access agreement, Celeste was able to settle her debt, such that she would pay 10 per cent of her purchase for each prepayment card recharge to pay off her overdue bills. In addition, women explained, EPM invokes various disciplinary practices:
Angélica: The [EPM] plan is for everyone to have prepayment.
Celeste: … For example, if you are in good standing with your utilities account, don't change to prepayment. You will have to allow for a delay to get connected, but not just one or two months; you may have to wait three months before you can have your electricity reconnected.
Carmen: I was looking forward to that programme …
Victoria: But bear in mind what we sometimes don't realise is what EPM offers as good deals. What Celeste says at the beginning is true. We're given a time, but as we're unable to wait three months ‘we're stuck’, so we go back and get connected by ourselves. Then, when we go to EPM and say: ‘We're going to finance it’, then they reply, ‘yes, well, but you got yourself stuck.’ So! You'll need to pay a fine. And then they say, ‘And as we're going to reconnect you, the connection's going to cost you extra’.
Matilde: Right! Footnote 122
The way EPM has penalised families for having got themselves ‘stuck’ and reached consensus with them on their own electricity austerity has encouraged EPM to fully recover their costs while, at the same time, retaining the framework enabling energopower to continue to dominate their lives.
Conclusion
This article has discussed the introduction of prepayment energy through the performance of three essential tasks proposed for studying the framework for the domination of energopower in Medellín. First disconnected persons were part of the wave of mass displacement that forced the judiciary, through the CCC, to a state of emergency. In this situation, politicians and EPM have exercised their power to redefine displaced and disconnected persons as ‘new buyers’ of energy and other public utility services. Second, the article attempts to show how the introduction of the prepayment energy system coincided with the vertiginous capitalisation which allowed EPM to expand geographically and aggressively take over markets in Colombia, Central and South America and the Caribbean.Footnote 123 This capitalisation generated the resources with which the city's architects and builders financed the Social Urbanism model, a model that in just a few years resulted in the city being promoted as a paradigm of innovation and resilience for the Global South.Footnote 124 And third, the article has looked at prepayment energy as a ‘disciplinary energo-political’ experiment with the aim of establishing the basis for new affordability habits, such as persuading displaced and disconnected populations to subjugate to new forms of affordability of services to which they are entitled.Footnote 125
The women interviewed highlighted these three aspects holistically or divergently from with their barrio feminism. As elsewhere, women are the first to use electricity intensively in the home.Footnote 126 In this role, they are the first both to verify the effects of prepaid energy on daily life and to organise themselves to oppose the introduction of the new system of basic energopower services. Having mobilised, they decried the way the prepayment system renders disconnected and displaced persons invisible, ceasing to consider them as the subject of special protection, while elsewhere equipping them with a prepaid card which can be topped up according to need. In providing households with a prepaid metering device, their poverty issues went from being the responsibility of the state to being individual family responsibility. The prepayment system, acting as a disciplining micro-technology to control behaviour, also renders electricity austerity invisible, which affects women and young girls more severely than it does men and boys.Footnote 127
The women confirmed that the introduction of the prepayment meters moulded their behaviour to the point where the time they could devote to their social, economic and political activities became substantially limited. They also pointed out that the introduction of this system had been proposed without their involvement. In their opinion, EPM campaigns were about providing an ‘efficient service’ with ‘social inclusion’ based on ‘consensus and solidarity’. However, their experience testified to the fact that to implement the prepayment energy scheme, EPM had labelled disconnected persons as ‘bad debtors’, suspending their electricity supply for up to three months, and then imposing fines on them which, in turn, could increase if families become involved in ‘electricity fraud’, or ‘got stuck’ during the month of suspension, pending prepayment. On this carousel, disconnected and displaced persons were induced into a spiral of debt, forcing them to enter into submission or subjugation to unilateral demands defined by the company. By employing all these measures, EPM's aim was to regulate services as a condition for settling the PUIs of Social Urbanism. Disconnected persons were seen both as citizens deprived of their rights, as per the CCC ruling, as well as subjects of social protection for whom the aim of Social Urbanism was to ‘pay off a historical debt’. At the same time, however, EPM also viewed them as ‘new buyers’ of services. As such, the prepayment energy system acquired an energo-political character marked by profound differences and contradictions. On the one hand, the aspirations of energy powers regulating energy use for disconnected and displaced persons handed out punishment to them if they defaulted on their obligations as new buyers of energy and other vital supplies. On the other, the local government authorities received part of the benefits from this policy to conduct a Social Urbanism designed to improve their living conditions.
In short, the prepayment energy system is part of a disciplinary energy policy to bring energopower to the growing displaced population in the cities of Colombia. The use of this energopower in Medellín is interesting owing to the fact that the city had become a platform to expand its prepayment systems primarily to Central America.
