A new Petro appears on the horizon. The president of Colombia has returned to dialogue with the opposition after a few months in which he had stuck to his positions, especially after the departure of three centrists who balanced his left-wing government. He returns to a Petro more similar to the one at the beginning of his presidency, the one who appealed to national agreement and sought majorities to carry out his reforms in Congress. The other, the one he later became, has experienced a kind of paralysis that has put him on alert. “The president is worried about his legacy, he feels that things are not moving at the speed he wants,” explains someone close.
With this new attitude, he has fired someone of his utmost confidence, the Peace Commissioner, Danilo Rueda, who was criticized by the opposition for his management of total peace, the project of ending all the armed groups in the country by the way of negotiation. Rueda encountered obvious obstacles in a country that has been in conflict for decades, and for a time he had the president’s full support, but this week he unceremoniously dropped it. He dismissed him coldly, with just a brief tweet in which he announced the name of his successor, Otty Patiño, an old M-19 militant who has participated in other peace processes and has a lot of credit.
In this new opening, he also met last night with former President Álvaro Uribe and members of his party, the Democratic Center, to discuss the issue of health reform, the change that generates the most resistance in the Colombian political class, which argues that For better or worse, the mixed public-private system worked during the pandemic, unlike other countries in the region, which saw their hospitals collapsed. “I would tell you that last night there was no dialogue, there was a debate, frank, clear, of argumentative discussions, an intense debate in good language,” said Uribe Vélez.
It was clear that they were not going to reach an agreement. Petro wants to carry out this reform – it has become something personal for him – and the right does not want it to happen: there is no middle ground. But the most important thing was that they sat down at the table and talked after months of distancing and disagreements. The representative to the Chamber for the Democratic Center Andrés Forero recognized that the health system can be improved, but it shows great social progress in the last 30 years: “We can say that it is a solidarity system, it is a system that is financed, obviously , partially by the general budget of the nation, but also to a large extent by the contributions of businessmen and taxpayers,” Forero said.
Petro did not make any statements after the meeting, preferring to remain silent. This is the fifth time that she met with Uribe, to whom she has given credit since he came to the Government. Uribe, trapped as he is in a judicial process for buying witnesses, receives an oxygen tank from the president, which places him on the political front line again. Surely this will not be the last time they see each other and, although it will be difficult for them to reach concrete agreements, they will not lack effort. Although Uribe has viewed Petro with great distrust throughout his career, he is a great defender of institutions and respects him as president of the Republic.
At the meeting they let Petro know that there is a possibility that the health reform could be stalled in the Senate or in the Constitutional Court. If that were to happen, he said, he is willing to present it as many times as necessary. That’s how stubborn he is. Analysts consider that Petro could focus on other more pressing reforms and leave this one, which produces so much resistance, aside, but it does not seem that that is going to happen. Dialogue and openness have marked limits.
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