The Colombia Gustavo Petro has in mind will have solar powered mototaxis in the Colombian Caribbean and international airports in the middle of the La Guajira desert. That’s what the President said Thursday as he convened sessions to mark the beginning of the second year of the Legislature, a power organ in which he served as MP and Senator and on which he now depends to bring about the societal changes he proposed but in which he has failed to secure majorities. He has promised, for the first time for a president, to sit down after his speech and listen to the opposition’s response, which also failed to secure a majority. The pulse of the second year will be a battle between the two sides over who can consolidate. Faced with this scenario, Petro once again spoke of “national unity”, a tone more akin to that at the start of his tenure than to the defiant speeches he had delivered from the balcony in recent months in defense of his reforms. The July 20 speech is normally used for presidents to give an account of the year that is coming to an end, and Petro’s message benefited from it too. However, he spent much more time explaining his dreams for Colombia, the country he hopes to turn into a “world power of life” in three years.
“What is at stake in humanity today is life,” said Petro, who spoke with a pencil in his left hand throughout his nearly two-hour speech as if to teach the attending congressmen and senators a lesson. He spoke of the possible sixth extinction of the planet if climate change is not stopped, of the high temperatures this summer in China or Germany, to later defend his proposal to decarbonize the Colombian economy as soon as possible. A proposal that recently “cost an excellent minister,” he said, referring to Irene Vélez, the philosopher and environmental activist who was in charge of the mining and energy portfolio until this week. Petro did not mention Vélez’s name, but said that in this first year of government she has made progress in getting 134 companies involved in clean energy projects and in her “Energy Communities” program: an initiative that allows every home and school in remote neighborhoods to generate their own energy.
“I’m telling Congress: Demand for oil and coal will fall in the years to come,” the president added, making it clear that the push for decarbonization was not a whim of Vélez’s, but that he himself considers it a priority to stop being dependent on these fossil fuels – even if a large part of Colombia’s budget depends on oil exports. Petro says tourism, which he sees as a more sustainable economy, has grown to 5 million foreign tourists in that first year and that he expects a further increase to 7 million. He added that this is one of the economies he hopes will help replace dependency on oil. He also repeated what is perhaps the most important environmental achievement of his first administration: reducing deforestation by 29%.
“You don’t industrialize if you don’t implement agrarian reform,” Petro said of his second major project for Colombia, one of the most ambitious for a left-wing politician who sees land inequality as one of the fuels of war. He asserted that his government had already secured a million hectares (much of it to indigenous groups in jungle areas) and acknowledged that Congress had passed the law recognizing the peasantry as legal subjects in the first year. But this transfer of ownership does not amount to an agrarian reform in which large and unused tracts of land could be allocated to landless peasants. “We’re not expropriating the land, we’re buying it at a commercial price,” he said of the agreement he reached with the National Association of Ranchers to buy three million hectares. However, he said he could not progress fast enough in the remaining three years to match that number by current standards. “I suggest looking into changing the regulations,” he added, so he can more effectively buy 500,000 hectares a year. In his first year, he says, he reached 30,000 hectares.
There was no time to mention the legislative reform that was most controversial in his first year in office, health care reform, which sparked more than a cabinet crisis that saw Education Minister Alejandro Gaviria emerge first, drew harsh criticism from traditional parties aligned with the ruling party, and eventually also claimed the head of the reform minister, Carolina Corcho. The reform requires only one of the four debates required in the legislature. The pension reform, about which there is also only one debate, was not specifically mentioned. The President referred only to labor reform, implying that the media were allies of businessmen, so it collapsed in its first year in office. “In everything else, we’re fine,” he said optimistically. He did not mention other reforms that failed, such as politics.
The peace policy of the government, which wanted to negotiate with rebel groups and find a way out to subject criminal gangs to justice, occupied a special place. He welcomed that there was a ceasefire with the ELN guerrillas that would begin in early August. “The war between the state and the insurgency is ending,” said the president, who was part of the M-19 guerrilla for more than three decades. But now is “the violence of the 21st century,” added the president, violence that comes “from greed, from wealth, from income.” Violence aimed not at overthrowing a state but at boosting the illicit economy, such as drug trafficking, illicit mining, or human trafficking. His mission for the remaining three years, the president said, is “to rally those who wanted to get rich from something that no longer has a future.” He is referring specifically to cocaine, which has fallen dramatically in price and is not widely sold since the fentanyl boom in Europe and the US.
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Petro did not name his bank, those who have declared their independence, or the presidents of the political parties whose support he needs. He ended his speech by calling for a grand national deal. “A national agreement is meant to keep things the way they are? Is a national agreement a thing of the past? Is a national agreement a great democratic and prosperous nation?” concluded the President. “I believe that a national agreement is about creating a more just and productive society.”
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