The most recent Yanhass survey says that Gustavo Petro would win the first round for the Presidency of the Republic with 40% of the intention to vote and would also win in the second round once morest Federico Gutierrez.
Of course one thing is the intention to vote and another what happens at the polls. This was the case in Colombia, for example, with the plebiscite for peace (in the polls he won yes and ended up winning no at the polls), and it also happened in the United States when, following all the polls gave Hillary Clinton as the winner, he ended up elected Donald Trump.
However, less than two weeks before the elections, it is worth what the country will be like fromAugust 8thin case Gustavo Petro is elected on new president from Colombia. Perhaps never before has a candidate for the Presidency put forward so many proposals that some have called “delusional” and without a doubt, if applied, they would produce a true earthquake in Colombia.
1. Oil exploration would end
That’s what Gustavo Petro said in an interview with the newspaper El Tiempo. In principle, it must be said that ending the exploration from one day to the next it’s not just impossible if not crazy.
In the last three years alone, the country has signed 39 contracts for the exploration and hydrocarbon production for $4.3 billion. Perhaps for this reason, Petro later modified his proposal and said that he is going to maintain the current concessions but that he is not going to sign new ones.
Stopping oil extraction might mean a serious loss in the productive apparatus. It is estimated that this industry generates 200,000 direct jobs, as well as 12% of the Nation’s current income from the sale of oil and 5% of the GDP generated throughout the production chain.
It would be one of the largest gaps that any country had voluntarily decided to open to its finances. Petro has also said that he plans to fill that gap with tourism. According to his words, his idea is to increase from 4.5 million tourists to 12 millions.
Thinking of increasing tourists by almost 300% from one day to the next or even in four years is also a difficult task, if not impossible. And supposing that it were achieved, according to a mathematical exercise by the newspaper La República, to move the new tourists it would be necessary 390,000 barrels of oil additional daily, that is, more than half of the oil that Colombia produces today.
If the idea of Petro is to stop producing oil to reduce the environmental impact, then the tourism thing does not achieve that objective. With the aggravating circumstance that Colombia would need oil that perhaps it would no longer produce and we would have to pay all Colombians at very high prices.
Today, for example, Colombians pay less than 10,000 pesos for a gallon of gasoline because the price is subsidized. Without subsidy you would have to pay 20,000 pesos. Without oil exploration, where might the 10 billion pesos that the State has given in subsidies come from to prevent all prices from skyrocketing?
For something in recent days Lula Da Silva, former left-wing president of Brazil, told Time magazine that Petro can propose whatever he wants but that his idea of ending oil exploration “not real in the world”.
2. Goodbye to private pension funds
Petro has said that “instead of having private funds (…) you send that money to a public fund, Colpensions. With that money the current pensions are paid, which the State is paying today. So free the state of 18 billion pesos a year in the budget and you spend it on those who do not have a pension”.
As in the case of oil, this move also has a degree of difficulty that can make it unfeasible. How can a saver be told that trusted funds of private pensions that your money no longer belongs to you but goes to the State, and it might spend it at its discretion?
Experts warn that the 358 billion pesos which in 2021 added the savings of 18 million Colombians affiliated with the funds.
“In 2008, in Argentina, Cristina Kirchner nationalized the pension funds of 9.5 million Argentines, and took them to finance inflationary public spending. Result 14 years later? Argentina does not get out of povertythe pension system is still in crisis and has reached 60% inflation”, explains the former Minister of Finance, Juan Camilo Restrepo.
Also, it is curious that Petro is trying to return to “a pension system unified mostly public”, just at this moment in which countries like China realize that they cannot only manage the public sector and announce that they will launch a private pension scheme.
3. Social pardon would free 100,000 inmates
“What Iván Moreno has suggested to us is to build something that I have proposed called the social forgiveness and that is being discussed inside the prisons,” said Gustavo Petro on the W radio station.
And when he says “I have proposed” it is because he had already aired it in Congress where he said: “Jacques Derrida speaks of social forgiveness, of generalized forgiveness. He says that in certain historical epochs very occasionally, a society may have the imaginary act and creative and virtuous of a great social forgiveness for its members”.
If the phrase “general pardon” is taken literally, that would mean that 100,000 prisoners would be released from prison. Or if not, who would you host? since when? for what crimes? It is noteworthy that in recent days Gustavo Petro was one of the people who opposed the extradition of Otoniel, the capo of the Clan del Golfo. Of course, Petro justified it by saying that the victims have the right to know the truth, but that is not what has been happening.
So far, in general, those extradited have confessed to many of their crimes from the United States.
4. The State will attend to health and not the ESP
“The health system will be public and universal – says Gustavo Petro in his government program – for which there will be a single system without contributory and subsidized regimes financed by progressive taxes and equitable contributions”. This has been interpreted as the interest shown by the candidate to end the EPS.
However, in a debate on Caracol TV, Petro once more, lowered the volume a little to the proposal and spoke no longer of ending the EPS but of “restringirlas”. Said the candidate: “We can have a hospital system paid by the budget and not by the EPS, the entities would be restricted to an insurance system for catastrophic illnesses and third level.”
At that moment, Alejandro Gaviria, former Minister of Health and researcher, replied: “He says that the secretaries of health will assume the functions of the EPS. Have you heard of the hemophilia posters and the psychiatric patients? Secretaries have repeatedly failed as insurers. This proposal would increase corruption and attention problems.”
The big problem of this change might be for the common people. A public system, like the one proposed by Petro, was already tried with Social Security (before Law 100) and only 25% of Colombians had access to it. “The vast majority had to queue at public hospitals, go to public charity or die at home,” recalls Luis Gonzalo Morales, former manager of Savia Salud and former secretary of health for Bogotá.
Petro has also proposed to have primary care centers for every 20,000 people, attended by neighborhood doctors. Scheme similar to that of the Barrio Adentro Mission, of Hugo Chavezand that today left a good part of Venezuelans without health care.
In fact, Gustavo Petro tried to do something similar when he was Mayor of Bogotá with his Healthy Territories program, for which he hired 8,000 people, of which only 1,000 were related to health jobs and the rest were used for jobs such as delivering the newspaper of the Mayor’s Office and flyers of the Human Bogotá.
In the Mayor’s Office he also had a public EPS, Capital Salud, and in 2015 when his term ended, he left it with losses of more than 600 billion pesos, of the 22 public hospitals, 12 remained in financial deficit, and lines of people in the streets waiting for an authorization or a medicine.
It is also a paradox that the Colombian health scheme has good international recognition. Colombia according to a WHO ranking occupies the position 22 out of 190 countriesabove Germany (25), Sweden (23), Canada (30), the United States (37), Cuba (39) and China (144).
Perhaps, if Petro puts into practice, the nationalization of health, something similar to the change he wanted to make in the garbage in Bogotá will happen to him. Despite the fact that garbage collection worked like clockwork, Petro wanted to change the model to make it public and produced a crisis that flooded the city with waste for three days. He then had to call the privates once more to help him out of the mess.
5. Employment to whoever wants = 300% bureaucracy
Perhaps Petro’s most unusual proposal is the “Pact for work” according to which, according to the candidate, “the State will act as the employer of last resort offering employment to those who can and want to work.”
In Colombia there are regarding 3 million people looking for a job. And the public sector today employs 1.2 million people. In other words, the employer’s effort would have to almost triple. Where does that money come from? From pensions? No, because those pensions are to pay those who do not have a pension. Of the oil? Not because it would no longer be explored. Perhaps, as Petro has also proposed, will it be his turn to turn on the bill-making machine to pay all those salaries?
6. Will the ticket printer turn on?
The candidate Gustavo Petro proposed several times last year that the Bank of the Republic issue banknotes to face the crisis that was being experienced by Covid. And that the Government distribute that money among the poorest. At the time, the former Minister of Finance, juan carlos echeverryreplied arguing that “to say that on Jiménez with Séptima, a money machine it solves everyone’s problems, it is an easy, populist and wrong solution”.
One of the great tragedies of Venezuela has to do with the way in which it dedicated itself to increasing public spending, for which it printed banknotes and increased in the first fifteen years of this century the circulating currency in 33,000 percent. The bolívar bills were only used to make handicrafts and, worst of all, so that a minimum wage will not even be enough to buy three days of bread.
Inflation in Venezuela, in 2018, stood at more than one million percent. To get an idea, it is enough to remember that in Colombia the alarms have been set off in recent days because it exceeded 10%.
In fact, Venezuela seems to be coming out of the hyperinflation and according to the economics professor at the Central University of Caracas, Luis Oliveros, it is due to the reduction in public spending by the Government that “allowed the pace of money printing to slow down.”
Yes, he will do it?
Just as it is not known if the polls will be right. Nor is it clear that if Gustavo Petro reaches the Casa de Nariño, he will implement everything he has proposed. When he was mayor of Bogotá, he received a down on unfinished 94th streetand the four years passed and neither he nor his government team managed to get it off the ground.