BOGOTA, August 14 Colombian President Gustavo Petro will celebrate a week in office this Sunday with a different government style than his predecessors and with an intense agenda that includes announcing the resumption of peace talks with ELN fighters, introducing ambitious tax reform and renewing the military leadership.
Despite the fact that he has not yet completed his cabinet as he has not yet appointed Minister of Science and Technology and Minister of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Miri Gutierrez, the new president has already started multitasking. The reforms through which it intends to implement the government’s plan that it will implement for the next four years.
“Gustavo Pietro started out as institutional head,” said political analyst Mauricio Reina in an interview with former Finance Minister Mauricio Cardenas. “The concerns surrounding him cover a wide range (…) but none of that has happened.”
Along these lines, the expert assessed that nothing happened that some sectors expected, such as Petro convening a Constituent Assembly or calling people to the streets to “erode institutions,” but instead sought to forge alliances to ensure governance.
complete peace
One of the pillars of the new government is peace and for this purpose an official delegation led by Foreign Minister Alvaro Leiva traveled to Havana on Thursday to start the rapprochement with the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and to resume negotiations.
Talks were suspended in 2018 due to the ELN’s demand by the government of its predecessor, Ivan Duque, to release all hostages in its possession and to abandon it and all its criminal activities.
In January 2019, after the ELN attack on the Cadet School in Bogota, which left 22 dead and 68 wounded, the Duque government asked Cuba to extradite negotiators based in Havana, but the island invoked diplomatic protocols for not complying with this request. .
The trip of Leva and the Colombian delegation to Cuba quickly re-established these relations, and on Friday the government and the National Liberation Army announced the formal resumption of peace negotiations, which even the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, supported.
Petro showed the will to implement a comprehensive peace policy that includes not only the resumption of talks with the National Liberation Army, but also talking to other armed groups.
“Peace is sought with other types of sectors, with other types of irregularities, but the ELN is moving forward because it is with whom there are more possibilities to resume negotiations,” said former Minister Cárdenas.
Ambitious reform and controversy
Last Monday, on the first day of the new government, Finance Minister Jose Antonio Ocampo presented to Congress a tax reform bill with which the new administration hopes to raise enough funds to reduce the social debt.
The initiative is based on higher tax collection for natural persons, lower tax benefits for corporations, taxation of sugary drinks, export of oil, coal and gold when it exceeds a certain ceiling, and a direct fight against fraud and evasion.
“This reform that we are proposing generates 25 billion pesos annually (about 5795 million dollars today), but we hope that with the fight against tax evasion and tax evasion, this amount will rise to 50 billion pesos annually (about 11,590 million dollars) which is what has been talked about Throughout the presidential campaign,” Ocampo emphasized.
controversial proposal
One of the most controversial proposals made by the Petro government in its first week was to buy gas from Venezuela in the event that the country’s reserves were insufficient, because its intention was not to sign new exploration contracts for Colombia.
“We have gas reserves for seven to eight years. If we need to fill our energy matrix, we can establish a gas transport connection with Venezuela,” the Minister of Mines, Irene Velez, explained in an interview with Radio Blue.
According to Velez, “If it is the case that our reserves were not sufficient for our self-sufficiency, we need solutions, which can be related to other countries.”
This proposal caused controversy, even within the historic alliance, the coalition that promoted Petro’s candidacy. Senate President Roy Barreras wrote on Twitter that “the energy transition is a vital commitment” but “transitions are transitions,” so “gas cannot be replaced from day to day.”
“It turns out that gas is cooking fuel for the poor and there is no cheaper fuel than that (…) And she (the minister) said there was no problem because they would replace gas with solar energy. That’s what former Senator Jorge Robledo, a fierce opponent of Petro, said. More absurd, Madam Secretary: There is no capacity to generate enough solar energy.
Another issue that he immediately got was the renewal of the military and police leadership, whose new leaders he ordered as priorities “to eliminate corruption and not to violate human rights.”
The Petro government has been touting from the start the reforms that the president promised in his campaign, and already in its first week it has laid the foundations for two issues that will be key in the next four years: “complete peace” and social equality.
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