President Gustavo Petro has just given a rudder to the left that has us Colombians walking on eggshells. In two kicks, he ended the government coalition that was not even nine months old. Without blinking an eye, he liquidated it after three of the center and center-right parties that made up the coalition —the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party and De la U—, which, moreover, represent the worst of clientelist politics, announced that they were not going to to support his health reform, a project that has found serious reservations among various sectors of society. There was Troy.
On Twitter, an angry Petro called for the resignation of all his ministers and in a thread that he himself wrote in his account, he considered that the decision not to support his health reform was sufficient evidence that the “invitation to a social pact for the change had been rejected” and that it was time to forcefully rethink his government. Within a few hours, the president published, again on his Twitter account, the names of the new ministers and made it very clear that from now on he was going to govern with people like him, who preferably came from his political bases and of Human Colombia, the left-wing party with which he became mayor of Bogotá in 2011.
Many things surprise the new cabinet, but, above all, the departure of its star minister, the Minister of Finance, José Antonio Ocampo, who had managed to weather this hard start to the year by achieving a reactivation of foreign investment, reducing the fiscal deficit and lower unemployment. Petro took it out just four days after Congress approved the Development Plan, the Government’s road map in terms of social policy, a task that Ricardo Bonilla, the new minister, a renowned economist who has he could sit to the left of Ocampo without any problem.
With the Ministry of Agriculture, key in the development of rural reform, a similar story is happening. Cecilia López, an expert and courageous left-wing liberal who championed rural reform and witnessed the fiasco that resulted from the agreement between the State and the National Federation of Cattlemen, a right-wing union that opposed the peace agreement with the FARC. The agreement sought for the State to buy three million hectares from the ranchers so that they would be delivered to the landless peasants, but the owners of the farms delivered arid lands and in areas where they were not required. She is replaced by another brave woman, Jhenifer Mojica, a land expert who comes from the left and who knows the problem of property concentration in Colombia like no one else.
Petro took Ocampo and López out with the thesis that they had been appointed to represent a coalition that was already dead and that is why he had to do without their services. They left without honors, but they left the foreign minister, Álvaro Leyva, who was responsible for the resounding failure of the meeting held in Bogotá in recent days with a view to unlocking the negotiations between the Venezuelan opposition and President Maduro. The meeting ended without a joint declaration because the Colombian Foreign Ministry did not present the corresponding draft that must be circulated among the participants beforehand. It was an announced diplomatic disaster and left the role of facilitator that Gustavo Petro wants to have between the Venezuelan opposition and the Maduro government damaged. That spectacular meeting only served to reinstate Juan Guaidó, the ousted leader of the Venezuelan opposition who suddenly appeared in Bogotá with the purpose of boycotting the meeting.
Nor is it true that this coalition was going through Petro’s reforms like a dead mule. In less than eight months, this had helped him to pass a harsh tax reform, the Escazú treaty, the agrarian jurisdiction and had stopped all the motions of censure that the opposition had presented against the Minister of Mines, Irene Vélez. And although it is true that many parties in the coalition opposed the health reform from the beginning, it is also true that the aggressive and dismissive strategy adopted by Minister Corcho did little to allow the country to hold a debate without passion. Petro, in addition -in an inexplicable way- put all his cartridges in defense of a reform that was never well received in public opinion and burned his ships before the debates began. The good news is that the Minister of Health that she appointed, Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo, is an even-tempered man with whom one can debate without having his head cut off.
newsletter
Analysis of current affairs and the best stories from Colombia, every week in your mailbox
RECEIVE THE
With this helm that buried the coalition in advance, Petro also buried the national agreement, that proposal that he made on the day of his inauguration when he promised that he would be a president who would weave a new country so that we would not continue killing each other. Now we are heading towards a government that seeks to lead with its Petrist base and that once again plunges us into polarization, intolerance, and stigmatization. Have we lost our sanity? The good sense?
Petro justifies this change of charges, because he says he realized that the Colombian establishment, so reluctant to the transformations, is not going to allow him to make the changes and that is why he has to appeal to the streets and to the social movement because from there force transformations. The way to carry out the reforms can never be to set fire to the streets with proclamations that exacerbate hatred and agitate heavy stigmas. Let’s return to calm, because that’s not how you get to total peace.
I voted for Gustavo Petro, believing that he was the candidate who best read the country. Today I see him lost in power.
subscribe here to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the key information on the country’s current affairs.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
#Petro #lost #power