The leftist president achieves the restart of peace dialogue with the ELN this Monday, winning the acceptance of his biggest critics for the “coherence” of his education, health, housing and environment policies
The first hundred days of the reign of Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing president, could not be celebrated this Tuesday as the president had wanted. A strong winter wave has battered many communities across the country, leaving 300 dead, nearly 6,000 homes destroyed and some 700,000 homeless.
The president was pleased because during those first 100 days he had launched the development of many of the projects promised during the election campaign, demonstrating complete agreement between the facts and the promises. Congress approved the promised tax reform, agreed to buy 3 million hectares of land from livestock farming to promote agrarian reform, land that will be delivered to farmers and that will fulfill the first point of the agreements agreed with the FARC . He also signed law 418 which considers the legal framework of the long-awaited “total peace”, which will allow negotiations to be reopened with several dissidents, including the ELN (National Liberation Army) guerrillas, whose dialogue table will begin this Monday.
But death seems installed in Colombia, and when peace is negotiated, nature opens fire. The climate crisis has devastated rural schools and colleges in more than 700 municipalities. The relief plans for all these populations became most urgent for Petro, which will have to allocate about 580 million euros to repair the education infrastructure alone.
Convinced that Colombia must be a world power of life, Petro tries to lay the foundations of climate justice in his government, which he has already proclaimed in various international forums, and social justice. The financing of the latter takes place in the adoption of the tax reform. According to Finance Minister José Antonio Ocampo, the reform will generate an additional 20 trillion Colombian pesos (nearly €4,000 million) in social investments by 2023, rising to 26 trillion pesos by 2026, which will be invested in the social needs of the country, such as programs against hunger, and investments in education, health care, housing and aqueducts for citizens who do not have it. It is clear that people with higher incomes will pay more rent and equity.
The oil and coal sectors will be the ones that will contribute the most resources. The income tax that the oil and coal companies will have will range from 10% in the first year, 7.5% in the second year and 5% in the third year.
As Petro itself has stated, the central axes of the reform are: income surcharges for oil and coal exports; the adjustments to the simple tax regime that will promote the formalization of companies; taxes on the financial sector, sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods and a boost to exports from free zones. Bread, dairy products, sausage are excluded from this tax. Similarly, there will be no effect on income or wealth for people earning less than 13 million pesos a year, which is 98% of the population.
During these hundred days, Petro managed to meet his most critical opponent, Álvaro Uribe, and even get positive statements, who said that “the president is consistent with what he has put forward during the campaign”. On paper, the left-wing leader’s government shows a new style of respect for his opponents, which makes it possible to strengthen democracy while boosting the president’s popularity.
Perhaps the most critical of this Historic Pact coalition government are those in the wealthiest sectors, who will see for the first time how they will have to pay higher taxes that will allow them to fund capital expenditures in the world’s poorest country. . But he is convinced that he has initiated the programs of home improvement and health prevention, that the total peace law has been ratified, relations with Venezuela have been restored, that he has started transferring money to head of household mothers with children under 18 years.
For Petro, the first of his three great challenges is to achieve total peace: «here, the second world power in terms of biodiversity, in one of the most beautiful countries on earth, let’s not kill each other, let’s not destroy ourselves if if it it is the intoxication of life itself that leads us to raise arms, one against the other,” he recently stated. The second challenge is to build a carbon-free economy and create a climate environment through clean energy to realize, to be able to offer something to the world, which is his third wish It sounds like a utopia, but during these 100 days, Gustavo Petro manages to convince many of the Colombians in whom he did not give so much confidence.
Source: La Verdad
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