Buenaventura Regional Port Company: committed to the people of Buenaventura

The Board of Directors of Buenaventura Regional Port Company has announced the election of Liborio Cuéllar Araújo as the new General Manager. We had a meeting with Mr Cuéllar Araújo, who told us that he wants to present his mission and the organisation. His object is to use the organisation to work for the local economic and social fabric. Buenaventura Regional Port Company (RPC) is an active member of AIVP. An ambitious sustainable development agenda AIVP - You have just joined the Buenaventura Regional Port Company as General Manager and you have discovered AIVP as part of working your way into the job. In an introductory meeting, you reminded us that this Port Company is not a Port Authority, as is the case of many of our members, but a company that owns one of the biggest multipurpose terminals in Colombia and the Pacific Region. The fact that you are a private company means that your commitment is especially clear. So what motivates the company and what factors lead you to act in support of sustainable development and the port’s citizens? As a company, our motto is to support competitiveness and to be the Number One multipurpose port in Colombia. But this orientation goes further, because as a company we also have a commitment to the social environment in which we operate. So contributing to the sustainable growth of the city is one of our priorities; we work to ensure that people have access to education and job opportunities, and that is why 95% of our employees are from Buenaventura. We are the main generator of employment in the city. By the same token, through our Foundation we launched the Bahía Buenaventura College, a space with innovative, sustainable infrastructure, including experimental laboratories and a package of elements specially designed to stimulate the innovation and creativity of the children of Buenaventura. Furthermore, we constantly seek to carry out actions like cleaning-up days, tree-planting, meetings with young people, business visits for pupils, etc., in order to contribute to the integrated development of the community, since we are the country’s Number One shipping terminal. A multipurpose terminal of the Sociedad Portuaria de Buenaventura (Source : Sociedad Portuaria de Buenaventura, 2022) The concrete actions AIVP - In an interview with AIVP shortly before you took over, your predecessor, Mr Gustavo Florez Dulcey, explained to us that Buenaventura RPC was in a position to "take concrete measures to make Buenaventura the port city of tomorrow and the centre of the country’s economic development". Can you give us a few examples of concrete actions to make this aspiration…