Bogota.- The leftist Gustavo Petro celebrates his first year in the Presidency of Colombia this Monday clinging to total peace while his exchange reforms have remained stagnant and under the shadow of the scandal unleashed by the alleged illegal financing of his campaign.
Petro’s first year has been one of symbols: since the first presidential order was to draw Bolívar’s sword to give space at official events to the Indigenous Guard, going through governing for a week from La Guajira, the department with the highest rates of poverty.
Symbols necessary to value the population that has been made invisible accompanied by eternal speeches -its hallmark- that reveal the wounds and scars of the country and its causes, but that have not been grounded in concrete policies.
“The Government has shown a willingness to change, it has been a stubborn and obstinate government in approving some reforms to health, pensions, the labor market,” the professor of Political Science at the University of Rosario Mauricio told EFE. Jaramillo. “The bad thing – he points out – is that the Government has not been able to specify the mandate of the people and achieve that change.”
The main reforms have yet to be approved in a Congress where the traditional parties began supporting him but he no longer has majorities and the scandal involving his son could reduce his support.
THE CASE OF NICOLAS PETRO
The anniversary coincides with the accusations by the Prosecutor’s Office of his eldest son, Nicolás Petro Burgos, for money laundering and illicit enrichment.
The Prosecutor’s Office assured on Thursday that Petro Burgos confessed that part of the money received from a drug trafficker and a businessman ended up in the presidential campaign, but his son was emphatic yesterday in an interview with Semana: “neither my father nor the campaign manager, Ricardo Roa, they knew about the money that Daysuris (his ex-wife) and I received from Santander Lopesierra and Gabriel Hilsaca.
Petro is a leader who precisely made a career denouncing the traditional political elites and their links to drug trafficking and paramilitaries, and although Congress already has an investigation in its preliminary phase, he is not expected to step aside.
“Nothing and no one can stop the fight of a lifetime against all forms of corruption, and the Government will continue its work and commitment to a better Colombia without distractions,” said the president.
«What is the problem that Petro takes a step back, recoils, makes an act of constriction? That in some way it will be assumed as the acceptance of guilt, of responsibility, “says the university professor, who thinks that the president will remain in” the line of – which is true – that there is a politicized Prosecutor’s Office » and an “establishment” that does not want him as president.
WITHOUT MAJORITIES
“It will be difficult for Petro to recover,” says Jaramillo, who does not believe that it will impact the government’s agenda or make it lose support.
Petro began his term with the idea of a national agreement, with ministers who came from different political currents of the center and the left, but in 12 months eleven of them have changed – and one more is expected on the anniversary – and they have come out critical such as Alejandro Gaviria (Education) or José Antonio Ocampo (Treasury).
That first union and the support of the traditional parties allowed it to approve a tax reform that gives good economic results to the Government, but the disunity began with dissensions in social reforms, especially in health, with which it is intended to bring better services to remote areas but which takes power away from the companies that now manage it.
According to former Minister Gaviria, it has led to the “failure of the idea of a plural cabinet and the idea of a coalition government (…) and there is no alternative, there is still no clear idea of whether there will be a return to coalition in Congress and that puts a question mark over some of the reforms that the government wants to approve.
PROGRESS IN PEACE
Where Petro has achieved the most is in his other great flag: total peace. The president will begin his second year with the largest bilateral ceasefire agreed with the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and, after some bumps, with the intention of pressing the accelerator in the negotiation to achieve a peace agreement before his term ends in 2026.
In June, in Havana, he set a date for the end of the conflict: May 2025, but the government’s chief negotiator, Otty Patiño, believes that the signing of peace with the ELN could be in 2024 to have time to start implementing the agreement and it does not happen as with the FARC, that a government arrives that does not believe in it and does not implement it properly.
However, peace in Colombia is a complex field and Petro’s ambition put him to negotiate at the same time with five large armed groups and many other criminal and urban gangs, in a scenario where massacres and assassinations of social leaders continue to take place. almost daily and the communities continue to be the main ones affected by the conflict.
