During the campaign, President Gustavo Petro promised a joint government and this morning confirmed three women who will be in his cabinet in the ministries of health, labor and environment.
Only one of them has worked with Petro before, Susana Muhamad, who was already secretary of the environment in the Petro mayor's office.
Only one of them has experience as a minister, Cecilia López, an economist who was already minister of agriculture in the government of former President Ernesto Samper (1994-1998).
And then there is a doctor who still has no previous experience in a cabinet, Carolina Corcho, a psychiatrist and political scientist who has been president of the National Medical Association of Interns and Residents.
Carolina Corcho, the new health minister, is the most striking name of the three, due to the public debate it generates.
She is a doctor who did a master's degree in political studies and whose profile became visible recently, during the pandemic, because she was vice president of the Colombian Medical Federation and from her position she opposed the government on how it was handling the crisis.
She has also been president of the NGO Corporación Latinoamericana Sur.
The biggest debate around it is about what it could do against the EPS, as the intermediary health companies between citizens and hospitals in the country are called.
Cork has spoken of ending the EPS system.
"It could be done with transitory measures that currently exist, such as the universal direct remittance to providers (clinics and hospitals)," she wrote during the campaign, "and the optimization of the ADRES public fund that receives public health resources."
As Petro did in the campaign, Corcho insisted that many EPSs have been liquidated in recent years, leaving clinics and hospitals in debt, and that they see health more as a business than as a right.
But others in the health sector do not agree with this elimination of the EPS, and one of the most visible is the former Minister of Health Alejandro Gaviria, from the political center, who in the elections decided to give his support to Petro for the second presidential round. despite his objections to the president's health proposal.
"I think that ending the health system as it exists, without having a clear alternative, would be crazy," he said in an interview with El PAÍS.
When questioned about his appointment, Petro said on the radio station La W that "we must tell public opinion that coverage is not the same as access to health."
In other words, he insisted that the EPSs are not giving all users more than a card but not good quality health, that many EPSs have been liquidated, leaving the government in debt.
He stated that some reforms to the system are necessary – without delving into which ones.
“You have to do careful processes,” he said.
Corcho has also been questioned for erroneous comments she made during the pandemic, such as stating that the United States was not going to donate vaccines because allies of President Iván Duque had intervened in the elections in that country (which is not true).
The other two appointments generate more expectations than controversy.
The economist Cecilia López, the new Minister of Agriculture, is perhaps the most experienced of the three appointed today.
López was already Minister of Agriculture during the government of Ernesto Samper, worked in the Department of National Planning in the government of Julio César Turbay at the end of the 1970s, at the International Labor Organization at the end of the 1980s, and as director of the Social Security Institute in the 1990s.
She was also a senator from the liberal party from 2006 to 2010, where she promoted important labor laws such as the Care Economy Law, which financially recognizes the work of women caring for others.
Cecilia López, like the new Minister of Finance appointed by Petro, José Antonio Ocampo, was critical of too rapid an opening to the market during the government of César Gaviria and is closer to the left of the liberal party, where he was a member of almost his entire race.
In 2014, when the government of Juan Manuel Santos created the Rural Mission – a group of experts that was supposed to advise the government on the necessary reforms that the countryside needed – she worked again with Ocampo, who was director of that mission.
Now he will come to champion with him the rural reforms of Petro, which are aligned with the objectives of the Rural Mission but also with complying with the agrarian reform that was agreed in 2016 between the FARC government and the Santos government (and which also recommended , recently, the Truth Commission).
Lastly, there is Susana Muhamad, the new environment minister.
She is an environmental activist and political scientist who was already secretary of the environment in Gustavo Petro's mayor's office, and who has been a member of her party for several years.
The environment has been one of the campaign banners of the president-elect, who has promised a transition process towards sustainable energy and less dependence on oil or coal, in addition to stopping the deforestation process.
Muhamad, when he was secretary of the environment, developed a plan in the city in which he sought to replace the buses of the Transmilenio system with new hybrid buses, and which sought to protect the city's wetlands such as the Thomas Van der Hammen wetland, an area that he wanted urbanize former right-wing mayor Enrique Peñalosa.
In an interview with the Blu Radio station, when she was already announced as the new minister, Muhamad spoke of protecting the lives of environmental leaders—Colombia heads the list of the most dangerous countries for them.
“Every time we see that social leadership in the country has to do with the environment,” she said.
"We need a human rights approach in the interaction we have with the communities, and consultation systems that respect the vocations of the territories and the will of the communities."
Muhamad comes with very clear flags against the environment and aligned with the Petro program.
He says he wants to review whether environmental licenses are being complied with in extractive megaprojects, that restoration projects in protected areas such as the moors will be protected, that the chemical glyphosate will not be used to end illicit coca crops, nor will the fracking method. to look for traces of gas.
"We have to trace a path of deep energy transition," he said.
“My entry position is that what we should do is seek resources from the state, from society, and from companies, in this energy transition.”
A moment to give a new opportunity to wind or solar energy.
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