One day before meeting with the Police Director, Major General Henry Armando Sanabria Cely, the Mayor of Envigado, Braulio Espinosa, rejected on his Twitter account the announcements made by the National Government, ensuring that these measures leave the mayors struggling “like islands.”
On Sunday night Espinosa wrote that “the thought from Bogotá is not to build more prisons, not increase the number of police officers, get bandits out of jail and legalize drugs. We mayors continue our struggle as islands and without being heard”.
The president of Enviga was referring to the announcements made by the Minister of Justice, Néstor Osuna, who specified a couple of weeks ago that the current government will change its criminal policy and in the midst of this new approach it will not invest more money in the construction of more prisons.
“If building so many prisons has not solved our crime problem and has not allowed us to resocialize people deprived of their liberty, if we continue in the same strategy, we will obtain the same result, then we have to change, we have to look for other forms of sanction: remedial sanctions, renewal sanctions, that is what it is all about”, said the minister.
The government has also reiterated its intention to strengthen restorative justice, which, according to Osuna, seeks to guarantee that the victims feel that the justice system listened to their needs and remedied them, and this is not always achieved with punitive punishment against the aggressor, which, moreover, many times does not arrive or takes years to occur.
But Contrary to what the mayor of Envigado affirms, the National Government denied having the intention of legalizing the cocaine “Cocaine is not going to be legalized. If there has been any information that could have been understood in that sense, it must be clarified, cocaine is not going to be legalized in this government,” Osuna said on August 23.
In the middle of the meeting held by the mayors of the Valle de Aburrá metropolitan area with the Police General this Monday, Espinosa reiterated the “request for a greater foot of force and our willingness to pay for the course to 200 Police to render their services in Envigado. We not only demand, we also contribute. We hope that our petition will not be forgotten,” he said.
The local president referred to an old debt from the Government of Iván Duque, as he himself denounced on several occasions. Last March, the president recalled that Envigado had a strategy to pay for the training course for 200 policemen and that once they took office they could serve in the municipality for three years.
The municipal administration launched the program together with the Ministry of Defense, to be the pioneer of this strategy in Colombia, but in an incomprehensible way, the president stressed, the Ministry, headed by Diego Molano, ended up prioritizing other municipalities in the country.
At that time, he regretted that despite the municipality’s efforts to strengthen security, delivering a new police substation in a rural area, renovating the police fleet with new motorcycles and installing more than 70 state-of-the-art 360-degree cameras, the National Government did not reach out to the municipality by increasing the foot of force and forcing it to maintain only 228 police in one of the fastest growing municipalities in the country.
Although the security claim is legitimate and long-standing, the question that remains is whether the mayor of Envigado is taking a public position in opposition to the National Government, Well, in addition to the comment he made about security positions, this Monday Espinosa used his Twitter account again to criticize President Gustavo Petro’s announcement to increase the price of gasoline.
“By increasing the price of gasoline, the increase in the prices of freight and passenger transport, the increase in inflation and a severe blow to the prices of the family shopping basket are inevitable. It is not something that only affects the richest, it is a social bomb,” Espinosa said.
It should be noted that this same Monday the cargo transporters union said they felt calm after the announcement of the guarantee given by the president of not raise the price of ACPM.
By deciding not to raise the price of ACPM, according to Juan Carlos Bobadilla, president of the National Association of Truckers, Freight transportation costs are prevented from increasing and therefore prices to final consumers of food and other inputs are not affected.