By Entorno | 2025-07-29

The horror unfolded in broad daylight.

Mary Pineda, a 25-year-old Venezuelan woman, was viciously stabbed inside a house in Yomasa, a working-class neighborhood tucked into the hills of southern Bogota.

The building, neighbors say, doubled as a clandestine spa. Inside, a security camera captured the moments of the attack on July 23.

Five stab wounds, three to the abdomen, one to the chest, one to the head. The footage, later leaked online, triggered an outcry across the Colombian capital.

Pineda fought to stay alive. Locals rushed her to a nearby vehicle and drove her 30 minutes through the city's congested streets to the Hospital de Meissen, which has the nearest public emergency room.

Doctors tried to stop the bleeding, but her injuries were too grave. She died of massive hemorrhaging shortly after arriving.

Police identified a suspect from the video. He is still at large.

A hospital stands empty

Tragically, if Chinese builders had kept their word years ago, the Samaritans would not have been forced to race 30 minutes to a distant hospital.

Just five minutes' drive from where Pineda was stabbed, another hospital looms, brand new but empty.

The Usme Hospital, a multimillion-dollar project intended to provide critical care to one of Bogota's most underserved districts, has remained idle for months.

A Chinese state-owned conglomerate, PowerChina International Group, leads the consortium contracted by the city in 2019 to build the facility. The hospital was supposed to open in 2023. It did not. And it still has not.

PowerChina has now missed eight deadlines. Construction delays, poor coordination and what Bogota officials call a persistent pattern of noncompliance have kept the hospital from opening.

The Usme Hospital project "has faced several months of delays and had a final deadline of June 30," Andrés Domínguez, director of health oversight at Bogota's Comptroller's Office, said in a video posted to X on July 27.

With that "final" deadline now in the rear-view mirror, the city quietly granted one more extension, to the end of 2025.

"The project, valued at over 290 billion pesos ($70 million), still lacks 5% of its construction," said Domínguez.

Promises, delays and frustration

Meanwhile, residents of Usme continue to wait. More than 1.3 million inhabitants reside in Bogota's southern districts, most of whom have limited access to quality medical care.

For years, officials promised the new hospital would be a game-changer: a sprawling $70 million facility with maternity wards, trauma units and high-tech surgical equipment.

The delays in completing the hospital are not a rarity. Across Latin America, Chinese construction firms, including PowerChina, have faced criticism for missing deadlines, under-delivering on key infrastructure projects and operating with limited transparency.

In countries like Ecuador, Colombia and Argentina, watchdogs and civil society groups have raised similar concerns about cost overruns and questionable labor practices in Chinese-backed developments. The delays in Usme match a broader pattern of unmet expectations across the region.

For Pineda, the Chinese foot-dragging may have been fatal.