"We are heading towards a battlefield where we must win," President Gustavo Petro told his new officials in the cabinet today, an hour before making a speech to the crowd that mobilized on May Day.
The president has shown that he wants to accelerate his social reforms: agrarian reforms for landless peasants;
that of health for citizens who do not have access to preventive and quality care;
labor for precarious workers;
the pension for 75% of people who reach retirement age without that monthly income.
These are seven keys to the route that 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 that came to hear him in the Plaza de Armas, in front of the Casa de Nariño, mostly mobilized by the country's big unions.
“The great revolution underway demands a working class that mobilizes, that fights, that organizes, that unites: this government wants an alliance with the working people, a deep, unbreakable alliance,” he added.
Alluding to the labor movements in England (“the cradle of capitalism”), and the recently approved reduction in the working day in Chile, the president said that social reforms always depend on the struggle and pressure capacity of the workers.
That is why he called for social movements (particularly workers and peasants) to mobilize so that Congress approves his reforms to the labor, health and pension systems.
“We have not set aside the banner of the concertation,” the president clarified regarding dialogue with other political parties.
He says this after Petro began governing with a large coalition, including right-wing parties such as La U and Conservador, which supported the tax reform last year but have had many more qualms about health.
The president could still approve this latest reform with the support of the liberal party, but on that front he has an obstacle to overcome: the party director is not currently his ally.
2. César Gaviria, former president and head of the Liberal Party, is the enemy to defeat
From the iconic balcony, the president threw several darts at the man who has led the liberal party for several years and who has been one of the biggest opponents of his health reform, the president of the Liberal Party, César Gaviria.
The latter governed Colombia from 1990 to 1994 and is immersed in an internal struggle within his party, since there is a significant sector of his red congressmen who want to support the transformation of the health system proposed by the leftist government.
In fact, Petro recognized that the vote of the liberal representative María Eugenia Lopera saved the health reform last week.
"The owners of the banks, the owners of the capital, pressured one of their biggest spokesmen, former President César Gaviria, to try to oppose the Liberal Party, which had affirmed itself as the people's party," said the president over Gaviria, who as ruler led several reforms to the State that Petro frames as neoliberal errors.
The president returned to the impulse of the Gaviria Government to Law 100 of 1993, which created the current health system with competition between the EPS (Health Provider Companies) as health insurers.
"Millions of Colombians have died since Law 100 was issued," said President Petro.
3. The president claims to be the defender of freedoms, but not in the neoliberal sense
An hour before his speech to the crowd, President Gustavo Petro warmed up with another speech, this time inside the Palacio de Nariño.
In the act of inauguration of his new ministers, he reflected on freedom, what it has meant for some liberal sectors, and what it means for a progressive or left-wing president like him.
“If there is no satisfaction of needs, there is no freedom,” Petro said.
"A people who have been condemned to one of the greatest social inequalities on earth, since obviously they must have many unsatisfied fundamental needs (...) Our people are a people without freedom," he explained.
And he argued that social reforms are necessary for the Colombian people to have their basic needs satisfied and thus be truly free.
That is a look from which, in Petro's opinion, the ruling party of the Liberal Party has moved away.
"The phrase 'liberty' was put on the shield and some political party appropriated that term for a century and a half of republican existence, the party of freedom, but the word freedom was confused with the freedom to buy, which is only for those who have what to buy with;
the freedom to produce goods, which can only be done by those who have the capital to produce them.
Freedom was circumscribed to a small world of consumers, and above all to a very small world of producers”, said the president.
Along these lines, and contrary to Gaviria, Petro vindicated several 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 Constitution to strengthen social rights.
4. Petro wants to defend the social function of the land, in the style of López Pumarejo but without expropriation
“We are experiencing the same situation that López Pumarejo lived and his revolution underway.
If we look back, we would say that if that liberal government could have made the reforms and continued the process with a successor like Gaitán, Colombia would not have the democratic rickety it has today, nor the levels of injustice”, says the president.
Petro repeated several times the concept of "revolution on the march" that the former liberal president coined as a framework for his social reforms, particularly the agrarian one.
Inequality in land ownership was already the cause of enormous conflicts and López began a reform that was left unfinished, something that many consider to have been one of the causes of the armed conflict that persists in Colombia.
López Pumarejo considered that private property was not absolute, since it must fulfill a "social function", and that was the basis for the possibility of carrying out an agrarian reform even expropriating fertile lands from large landowners.
President Petro in his speech clarified that he does not plan to expropriate but rather 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 around this issue, it has broken its word exchange".
"We have not been able to buy more than 17,000 hectares of land, and it is necessary to buy at least three million," said the president.
“To be able to do it, the Government has to go for the land.
They do not offer it to us voluntarily, it is not offered to us by a privileged sector that since the times of feudalism and slavery has concentrated possession of fertile land ”, he added.
That sector that "commits a crime against humanity, because in times of climate crisis, having fertile land without producing is a crime."
5. The spirit of health reform will continue
The president coughed and coughed in the more than two hours of his two speeches, without having a glass of water or explaining whether he needed medical attention or had already had it.
It is a paradox if one takes into account that one of his central points was the defense of prompt and preventive health care in the reform that was previously led by former Health Minister Carolina Corcho and is now in the hands of Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo.
"The change of Ministry of Health does not change the essence of the project," said the president.
And he pointed out that the essence of the project "has to do with the fact that public health funds are managed by the public" and that this must be maintained so that "Colombia can have primary and preventive care for the first time, and guarantee that all Colombians can access it" .
6. Petro continues to vindicate the myth of General José María Melo
If liberals like Gaitán and López Pumarejo had their moment of glory in the speech, the one who got much of the attention was the general and former president José María Melo, from the 19th century, a forgotten leader who Gustavo Petro frequently claims.
The president spoke of the independence wars led by Simón Bolívar, said that some elites betrayed his ideals and that is why three decades later Melo "went to rebuild Greater Colombia."
Melo, supported by the artisans and "the working people".
He recalled that the military resisted "eight months of battles" against an alliance of politicians, which Petro summarized as conservatives who wanted to defend 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 the slavers”.
"Our change is that those who govern are not the heirs of the slaveholders, but those of the slaves," he concluded.
7. Central elements such as the M-19, total peace, the broad front and Venezuela disappeared from the discourse
Faced with the speech of August 7, 2022, when he took office as president, the great leaders of the left whose political projects the violence aborted disappeared from his narrative, such as the murdered leader of the M-19 Carlos Pizarro or the hundreds of militants of the Patriotic Union party exterminated by the military and paramilitaries.
Neither did he mention his ambitious project for total peace, which this Tuesday opens a new chapter 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 "great national agreement" to be able to approve the social reforms.
The time for the great conciliation is running out, and so is the president's patience.
"Wanting to restrict the reforms can lead to revolution," he warned.
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