The first year of the Petro government is completed in the midst of an unprecedented scandal and serious difficulties in its main bets. What is the balance?

Petro against people’s pockets

The only important reform he approved was the tax reform, which hit the middle classes and the food of simple people the hardest. The monthly increase in the price of gasoline, far from hitting “the rich people in Toyotas”, affects in an acute way the economy of those who use motorcycles for transportation and of those who own cars in Colombia, most of whom (80%) belong to strata 1, 2, 3 and 4 (Dane, 2021).

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To this must be added the announcement of the Minister of Finance, who confessed that they have not raised the price of diesel because we are in the middle of the election campaign, but that after the elections they will increase the price of fuel used by the entire transportation chain. The economic script of the Petro government is dictated by the IMF.

And in the same line goes the recent study on Energy Transition, which says that we must replace gas stoves with induction stoves, whose cost is beyond the means of the average Colombian family. And not to mention the cost of the pots that these stoves require!

In environmental matters, Petro does not come out well either, since the great bet on wind energy remains concentrated in the hands of transnationals, with his back to the communities of La Guajira and, as if that were not enough, several of the projects are located in protected areas.

His eloquent silence on the military station in Gorgona, so that a U.S. radar can operate and U.S. helicopters can operate in the Amazon, giving them control over a strategic area, shows that he is more interested in pleasing the northern power than in protecting our natural heritage.

Petro’s government: a soap opera

Politically, the Petro government seems to be a script of Gustavo Bolivar’s novels. The chapter of the suitcases full of money lost by Petro’s former Chief of Staff, Laura Sarabia, quickly went from a robbery to the abusive use of the polygraph and the State apparatus in personal favor, and then to illegal interceptions and chuzadas.

As if this were not enough, this escalated to the revelations of Benedetti, one of the closest to Petro in the campaign, and who upon seeing that his claims for power were not being attended to, exploded in anger and revealed audios in which he points out that in the Coast he managed to get 15,000 million, which allowed them to win. He also warned that if it was revealed who put that money “we will all fall down, hijueputa”. Not even Scorsese’s and Aronofsky’s films have so many turning points.

And to top it off, the new chapter of the novel is global news. The last time we made headlines on five continents was after the capture of the corrupt anti-corruption prosecutor.

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Now, we return to prime time with “the son of the President of Colombia is captured and accused of illicit enrichment and money laundering”. Gustavo Bolivar rightly resigned from the Senate, supposedly to make scripts and because the 44 million monthly salary was not enough for him… but now he is a candidate for Mayor for the Historical Pact.

When the country had not finished assimilating this capture, the President’s son confesses that he did receive illicit money from unpresentable characters, corroborating the thesis of the Prosecutor’s Office that the 20 million salary he earned as a congressman did not justify his expenses, which were around 200 million per month.

From denying everything, Nicolás Petro went on to negotiate a pre-agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office, and in exchange for benefits he said he had proof that those prohibited monies did enter Gustavo Petro’s campaign. From a love affair, we moved on to a political thriller, with narco-novel ingredients.

If it is proven that illicit money entered Petro’s campaign, it would constitute the crime of financing electoral campaigns with prohibited sources (Art. 396A Penal Code), which carries a prison sentence of 4 to 8 years, and for which not only the campaign manager, Ricardo Roa, current president of Ecopetrol, the most important company in the country, but the President himself would be liable. “The same penalty will be incurred by the candidate to uninominal positions (…) who carries out the described conduct”, can be read in the mentioned Article.

The criminal investigation will be long and its results unpredictable, since in seven months a Prosecutor nominated by Petro will arrive. However, the political catastrophe is undeniable, the legitimacy of the Petro government is in crisis, the impeachment is just around the corner and the future of the father depends on a son denied and abandoned to his fate.

We do not know the end of the soap opera, but what is clear is that the country’s yearnings for change have been dashed by a government that has turned out to be a copy of the same old governments.

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