“We are heading into a battlefield where we must win,” President Gustavo Petro told his new cabinet officials today, an hour before delivering a speech to the crowd that gathered on May Day. The President has shown that he wants to speed up his social reforms: agrarian reform for the landless peasants; that of health for citizens who do not have access to preventive and quality care; work for precarious workers; the pension for 75% of those who reach retirement age without this monthly income. These are seven keys to the path the President sees to achieve that victory.
1. The President appeals to the great social mobilization to approve the reforms
“Don’t leave us alone in these huge, cold palaces,” President Gustavo Petro told the crowd listening to him in the Plaza de Armas in front of the Casa de Nariño, mobilized mainly by the country’s major unions. “The great revolution underway requires a working class that is mobilizing, that is fighting, that is organizing, that is uniting: this government wants an alliance with working people, a deep, unbreakable alliance,” he added.
Alluding to the labor movements in England (“the cradle of capitalism”) and the recent decision to reduce working hours in Chile, the President said that social reforms always depended on the workers’ ability to fight and pressure. He therefore called on the social movements (particularly workers and peasants) to mobilize for Congress to approve his reforms of the labor, health and pension systems.
“We have not put aside the banner of concertation,” clarified the President, referring to dialogue with other political parties. He says this after Petro began governing with a grand coalition including right-wing parties like La U and Conservador, which backed last year’s tax reform but had far more concerns about their health. The President could still sign off on this latest reform with support from the Liberal Party, but there is one obstacle he faces on this front: the party leader is not his current ally.
2. César Gaviria, former President and leader of the Liberal Party, is the enemy to defeat
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From the iconic balcony, the President threw several darts at the man who has led the Liberal Party for several years and is one of the biggest opponents of his healthcare reform, Liberal Party President César Gaviria. The latter ruled Colombia from 1990 to 1994 and is mired in an internal struggle within his party as there is a significant segment of his red congressmen who want to support the left-wing government’s proposed transformation of the healthcare system. In fact, Petro acknowledged that Liberal MP María Eugenia Lopera’s vote last week saved healthcare reform.
“The owners of the banks, the owners of capital, have been pressuring one of their biggest spokesmen, former President César Gaviria, to try to oppose the Liberal Party, which had asserted itself as a popular party,” the president told Gaviria As ruler, he implemented several reforms of the state that Petro calls neoliberal mistakes. The President returned to the Gaviria government’s impetus for Law 100 of 1993, which created the current healthcare system with competition between the EPS (Health Provider Companies) as health insurers. “Millions of Colombians have died since Law 100 was enacted,” President Petro said.
3. The President claims to be the defender of freedoms, but not in the neoliberal sense
An hour before addressing the crowd, President Gustavo Petro warmed up with another speech, this time at the Palacio de Nariño. At the inauguration of his new ministers, he reflected on freedom, what it means for some liberal sectors and what it means for a progressive or left-wing president like himself.
“Without need satisfaction there is no freedom,” said Petro. “A people who have been condemned to one of the greatest social inequalities on earth, as they obviously must have many unmet basic needs (…) Our people are a people without freedom,” he declared. And he argued that social reforms were necessary for the Colombian people to meet their basic needs and thus be truly free.
That’s a look Petros believes the ruling Liberal Party has moved away from. “The phrase ‘freedom’ was put on the shield and some political parties appropriated that term for a century and a half of republican existence, the party of liberty, but the word liberty was confused with freedom of purchase, intended only for those who have what to buy; the freedom to produce commodities, which can only be done by those who have the capital to produce them. Freedom was limited to a small world of consumers and especially a very small world of producers,” the President said.
In this sense and in contrast to Gaviria, Petro confirmed some of the great traditional figures of the Liberal Party such as Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, Rafael Uribe Uribe, Gabriel Turbay and above all Alfonso López Pumarejo, the President who in 1936 reformed the party’s Constitution to strengthen social rights .
4. Petro wants to defend the country’s social function, in the style of López Pumarejo, but without expropriation
“We are experiencing the same situation in which López Pumarejo lived and his revolution was underway. Looking back, we would say that if this liberal government could have implemented the reforms and continued the process with a successor like Gaitán, Colombia would not have the democratic shakiness it has today, nor the level of injustice,” says the president.
Petro repeated several times the concept of “revolution on the rise” coined by the former Liberal president as the framework for his social reforms, particularly agrarian reform. Inequality in land ownership was already the cause of enormous conflicts, and López began a reform that remained unfinished, which many consider to be one of the causes of the armed conflict that is ongoing in Colombia.
López Pumarejo believed that private property was not absolute as it had to fulfill a “social function” and that this was the basis for the possibility of agrarian reform and even expropriating fertile land from large landowners. President Petro clarified in his speech that he does not intend to expropriate land but to buy land voluntarily, but insisted that this agrarian revolution is a priority for his government and he hopes to put the accelerator on it: “If this government does not come up with anything on this subject, it interrupted his exchange”.
“We could not buy more than 17,000 hectares of land, and it is necessary to buy at least three million,” the president said. “To be able to do this, the government has to go for the country. They are not offering it to us voluntarily, it is not being offered to us by a privileged sector that has concentrated ownership of fertile land since the days of feudalism and slavery,” he added. The sector that “commits a crime against humanity because in times of climate crisis it is a crime to have fertile land without producing.”
5. The spirit of health care reform will continue
The President coughed and coughed for the more than two hours of his two speeches without having a glass of water or explaining whether he needed or already had medical attention. It is paradoxical considering that one of its central points was the defense of rapid and preventive healthcare in the reform previously led by former Health Minister Carolina Corcho and now in the hands of Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo.
“The change in the Ministry of Health does not change the nature of the project,” said the President. And he pointed out that the essence of the project “is that public health funds are managed by the public” and that this must be maintained so that “Colombia can have basic and preventive care for the first time and ensure that all Colombians can access it “.
6. Petro continues to defend the myth of General José María Melo
When liberals like Gaitán and López Pumarejo had their moment of glory in speech, the one who garnered much attention was 19th-century general and former president José María Melo, a forgotten leader Gustavo Petro frequently claims. Speaking of the wars of independence waged by Simón Bolívar, the president said some elites had betrayed their ideals and that’s why, three decades later, Melo “went to rebuild Gran Colombia.” Melo, supported by the craftsmen and “the working people”. He recalled that the military was resisting “eight months of fighting” against an alliance of politicians whom Petro categorized as conservatives bent on defending slavery.
Although there are historians who explain that Melo came to power thanks to a coup and then sought the support of artisans and that he was not an indigenous president, as Petro points out, the president sees a historical lesson in this episode: “We can teach what we are living in this present: José María Melo was defeated by the armies of slavers”. “Our change is that those who rule are not the heirs of the slaveholders, but of the slaves,” he concluded.
7. Central elements such as M-19, total peace, the broad front and Venezuela disappeared from the discourse
Faced with the August 7, 2022 speech when he took office as president, the great leaders of the left, whose political projects were scuttled by violence, disappeared from his narrative, such as the slain leader of the M-19 Carlos Pizarro or the hundreds of Patriotic Union Party militants exterminated by the military and paramilitaries. He made no mention of his ambitious project for total peace, which opens a new chapter this Tuesday with the third cycle of negotiations with the ELN guerrillas, nor the dialogues with government officials and opponents of Venezuela, which had a frustrated chapter last week.
The President did not speak of the “great broad front” or the “big national deal” to be able to approve the social reforms. The time for the grand arbitration is running out, as is the President’s patience. “Wanting to limit reforms can lead to revolution,” he warned.
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