Gustavo Petro has turned this Tuesday the inauguration of three high-ranking officials in his Government into an exercise in reflection on power, the efficiency of the administration and the temptation of corruption as the apple that officials bite quite regularly.
Anyone else would have resolved the event with a rigorous speech and gone on to deal with larger matters, but the president, sometimes, likes to theorize and display the conclusions he has reached after his 30 years of public service.
Firstly, he questioned the event itself, wondering if it made sense to hold an inauguration at this point in the Government, which is just over a year and a half old.
Laura Sarabia, his right hand, listened attentively;
Gustavo Bolívar, who took office as director of the DPS;
the new legal secretary of the Presidency of the Republic, Paula Robledo Silva;
and the now Minister of Sports, Luz Cristina López Trejos, who has had to endure with stoicism that Petro questions the very existence of his position.
The president recalled that she is the third woman to hold this portfolio since he came to power.
“What I find in the Ministry of Sports, which has been criticized, is what the ministry has become.
I am not an enemy of that thesis (...).
I haven't exactly seen the goodness of having done that, I can't find it.
It seems more like a waste of time to me”, she has started at the lectern.
Next, he has said in every letter that the main function of this ministry, financing public works, makes it the perfect place for corruption to nest.
“The more bricks that are contracted, the more corruption there is.
We believe that sport is the stadium, the infrastructure, let it not be said that it is not needed, but it cannot be the priority.”
The president criticized what it means to host the Pan American Games, which Colombia lost, although they were assigned, for not making payments on time.
He questioned whether event managers have to pay for travel with companions and accommodation in five-star hotels.
“You don't think about athletes.
It is not seeing how our athletes are going to compete or win (...).
That's not sport, that's business.
The truth is what we do and the message we have given to the three ministers, now to you—pointing to the new minister—is more education, less cement.
That physical education be provided in all public schools.”
The minister attended, a few meters away from him, with a face of restraint.
Hard to know what she was thinking.
If something stirred inside her, she hid it elegantly.
She came to look like a wax statue.
Others would have broken out in cold sweats.
The head of state, in what is surely the most exciting moment of his career, has no other idea than to be sincere in an act that should have been limited to protocol.
Petro is prone to these dissertations, there is something of a pedagogue in him.
Some pass him off as a dilettante.
His work team justifies his delays in appointments by these digressions in which he embarks with his interlocutors, who may be an African president or a street vendor he passes on the street.
This time Petro came out cruder, without tact with his own officials.
Subscribe here
to the EL PAÍS newsletter about Colombia and
here to the WhatsApp channel
, and receive all the key information on current events in the country.