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International Perspective is published under the duty of the Office of the Fourth International. Signed articles necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with an acknowledgment of receipt and a direct link if possible.
Friday, August 5, 2022, through Daniel Libreros C
On Sunday, June 19, Gustavo Petro elected President of the Republic at the circular moment of the presidential election. Colombia has a population of 50 million and a voting population of just over 39 million. Petro won 11,281,001 votes and right-wing coalition candidate Rodolfo Hernández 10,580,412, raising the percentage of the electorate to 58 percent, one of the highest figures in the country’s electoral history.
Petro had received 8,527,768, expanding his votes by 2. 7 million with respect to those received in the first round, of which one million were received in the localities, part in Bogotá, and the rest basically on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. depressed spaces and deserts of the country, won Historical Pact, the motion headed by Gustavo Petro. The deprived and bourgeois neighborhoods of the villages voted in the same way. had the maximum impact, the mark gave the impression in the votes of the communes that lived the greatest degree of confrontation and lived the impunity deployment of state terror that claims dozens of dead.
The electoral effects through power verify a socio-territorial map that includes the inequalities in the source of income that have been repeated since the 2016 plebiscite. Indeed, in the powers won through the Historical Pact, which represent 40. 37 percent of the national population and represent by 29. 04 cents of GDP, the percentage of vote 66. 35 cents compared to 31. 88 cents, while in the branches won by Rodolfo Hernández, which add up to 44. 27 cents of the population and have a GDP percentage of 44. 91 consistent with cent, the vote 62. 19 consistent with cent opposite to 35. 51 consistent with penny.
As soon as the result of the elections was known, popular jubilation erupted. Thousands more people flocked to the streets and squares of each and every village to celebrate the victory, while videos of others sharing the same euphoria for “historic change” circulated in prime audience. remote corners of the country. As soon as the afternoon fell at the Movistar Arena, a theater in the northwest of Bogotá, thousands of voters and members of the Historical Pact gathered to applaud the presence at the level of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez. [ 1]
It deserves to be highlighted the prominence of France Márquez. Es the first Afro-descendant woman to reach the vice presidency and was the electoral phenomenon of the “interparty consultation” held on March thirteen with only about 800,000 votes, the third in a long list of applicants who are executed on that date. opportunity. It comes from the coastal territories of the Pacific where mining extractivism continuously displaces communities. This vote expresses the rejection of patriarchy and racism through the popular sectors and makes imaginable the emergence in public life of the so-called “ethnic minorities” in a country where the culture of the colonial “ethos” has entrusted “the exercise of government” to a small circle of white men of high social rank who still maintain a circle of family ties (“Oligarchic Republic”, thus came a well-known historian of the twentieth century to characterize it).
In the middle of Petro’s speech, Dilan Cruz’s mother made an impression on stage. Dilan Cruz, was an 18-year-old teenager who was murdered in the middle of Bogotá by one of the members of the ESMAD (Mobile Anti-riot Squads) of the national police, during the mobilizations of November 2019. This homicide still remains. UnpunishedArray portrayed his son and took the microphone to ask for justice for him and for all the victims of state terrorism. It was a recognition of so much pain accumulated through the enjoyment of the victims throughout decades of homicides, torture and disappearances that continue without the faces of the guilty appearing. In short, it was confirmation, both in this room and on the street, that the outrage at “the existing state of affairs” had taken the form of a political triumph. Outrage at construction in poverty, at the millions of unemployed youth and women who wander aimlessly and who have participated in the recent “social explosion” in the face of state terror and open repression, at the millions of displaced people, at enjoyed by those killed by the Covid-19 pandemic that showed the negligence of a government that abandoned them to their fate while handing loose public money to large companies.
Meanwhile, political analysts and hounds of foreign media denounced the arrival of a “progressive” to the presidency of a country where the elites were unconditionally subordinated to the United States, ceding military bases in its territory and accepting the direct interference of the army in the execution of Plan Colombia to cite the most recent cases, an abject international relationship that dates back to the early twentieth century with the capitulation of Panama.
In that same scenario, Petro announced the central objectives of his government, objectives far removed from this popular sentiment. The first of these, he said, is to “develop capitalism”, because that means the progression of the productive forces and makes imaginable the end of the “feudal waste” and mansions that in our unequal geography. This thesis, coming from the foreign policy of the former Soviet Union in the 1930s, and which accompanied the emergence of communist components in Latin America, is a component of the programmatic legacy of the majority of the Colombian left. Petro comes from some other tradition, that of the M-19, an urban guerrilla with a nationalist purpose.
This thesis leaves aside the millenary crisis of capitalism synthesized in the fresh mixture of economic, food and environmental crisis and the cautious prediction of the long term of the human species generated through a form of accumulation of wealth that is consolidated by destroying nature.
It also leaves aside the existing crisis of capitalism, which is expressed in the concentration of wealth, the suffering of millions of human beings condemned to hunger, the precariousness of cadres and unemployment. Similarly, it ignores the difficulties that the form of capital accumulation in the neoliberal period, which produced an expansion of fictitious capital, poses to the monetary elites the current situation, in which the foreign economy is heading towards one of the worst crises in history.
It also ignores the existing foreign labor department which, organized through transnational corporations through price chains and sources, allows them most of the investment and distribution of wealth to the point that in the existing foreign industry environment, the maximum industry is carried out between those companies; therefore, such “national capitalism” is impossible. [2]
In an interview granted through Petro to the magazine Cambio a few days after his electoral victory, he further qualifies this characterization with well-tuned arguments, presenting capitalism as the “great cause of the productive forces of a society” as if this progression, given the demands of capitalist accumulation, has not produced a brutal destruction of nature that threatens the very survival of the human species. [3] He also promised the advance of “a democratic, regulated capitalism, respectful of the environment and the dignity of human labor,” as if a peripheral country could transgress monetary deregulation, the backbone of the profits of transnational groups since the 1980s, when it “gains productivity. “they fall and as if wages in a peripheral country could be programmed outdoors to meet investors’ demands for profits.
It should be added that the economic characteristics of the president-elect are accompanied by the acceptance of neoliberal institutions. The first detail that confirms this characterization is the popularity of the 1991 Constitution, in which the M-19 had already played a leading role in its drafting, as a “map” of its political assignment, as well as the insistence that the charter formalize neoliberal regulations in the country on key problems such as the foreignization of the “market economy”, the privatization of public services, the inclusion of fitness and schooling in the catalogue of “transnational services”, the consolidation of a technocracy akin to foreign technocracy that defines plans for progression and fiscal policy as well as promises of payment to portfolio investors.
Moreover, this card is not only neoliberal: it is monetarist. It has formalized a type of central bank in line with angelestion monetary deregulation whose main function is to ensure low degrees of inflos angelestion, which has serious consequences. The turmoil lately in the global economy has led central banks, coordinated through the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), toward restrictive policy that results in higher interest rates, contrary to what they have done in recent years. In Colombia, the Banco de los Ángeles República has just raised the benchmark interest rate to 7. 5%, the highest in the history of this organization. [4]
In a country where unemployment, chance and poverty rates are maximum and where the inflation of the value of food exceeds 20 percent, this policy of calling for contraction will aggravate the deterioration of the living conditions of the population. In addition, the challenge is limited to that at the domestic level, since the Fed’s interest rate hike in the US. has caused a flight of capital, pushing the dollar up as well as greater difficulties in the external debt that reached $ 101,557 million in March of this year with an annual expansion of 14% and greater difficulties in foreign trade.
In addition, Petro accepted the Requests of the International Monetary Fund for this period. In an interview published by the newspaper El Tiempo on May 14, he admitted that he had committed to this establishment of credits “to reduce the budget deficit. ” [5] This is unprecedented and refers to demands that are not limited only to the alleviation of the budget deficit, which lately stands at 6. 8% of GDP (the accumulation of public debt, which went from 36% to 57% of GDP between January 2019 and being relevant in the same month of 2022) still to maintain the imf’s economic policies.
Precisely, a few days before the departure of the then candidate, the head of the IMF project for Colombia, Hamid Faruqee, claimed to have approved “a new two-year agreement with Colombia under the bendy credits line (FCL) program of 9,800 million US dollars”, since all the candidates who competed in the first circular agreed on “political commitments in the sense that there would be a policy of continuity, to maintain forged political frameworks. “[6]
The FCL is an IMF financing program created after the 2008 currency crisis. Its objective is to facilitate access to the agency’s resources to countries that it considers to have regulatory aid and sound macroeconomic guidelines. In principle, the allocations of this programme are not accompanied by needs. for “structural reforms”, they come with the framework of economic policies that do not jeopardize the Fund’s resources:
In September 2020, the government of the day requested an amount of US$17. 2 billion under the guidelines of the FCL, requesting an advance of US$5. 3 billion. “As a component of the IMF program, Colombia has embarked on an ambitious fiscal adjustment program in the coming years. . Between 2021 and 2023, the country is expected to achieve a combination of increases in the source of revenue and spending cuts of 7. 4% of gross domestic product (GDP). If there were a “post-Covid-19 austerity World Cup”, the country would occupy a place of honor on a global scale. The budget objectives position Colombia in the 5th position in fiscal adjustment systems among the 81 countries that won IMF credits in 2020. . . ” [seven]
Based on this commitment, in April 2021, then-Finance Minister Alberto Carrasquilla presented Congress with a tax reform proposal aimed at raising $26 billion (2. 5% of GDP) while maintaining the “pro-rich” bias of past policies. Basically punishing the middle and poor categories, it provoked the social explosion that ended up preventing the approval of this law and precipitating the departure of Minister Carrasquilla. At the same time, two of the threat rating agencies operating in the country, Fitch Ratings and standard
At the time, Duque’s government imposed a less ambitious $15 billion (1. 5% of GDP) tax reform and pledged to defer the amount of failed debt to 2022-2025, which was set as a (mandatory) fiscal rule in a new budget. law. . Mauricio Cárdenas, who was the finance minister at the time in santos’ government, commented on this rule:
“A short paragraph defines the ceiling of the budget deficit, which will be imposed on the government of the day on August 7, 2022. The law establishes that from 2026 a mechanism will work according to the point of indebtedness. 2022 and 2025, the peremptory numbers indicated in this transitory paragraph will prevail. fall to 3% of GDP on average in 2024 and 2025. This means an adjustment of 7 percentage points of GDP, or just about 80 billion pesos in the next 3 years. Who will have the ability to make this adjustment?. . . ». [8]
Taking into account the projections of tax revenues due to the transitory rise in the cost of oil and those of the complementary tax reform, the new fiscal rule contemplates that until the end of 2023 the budget deficit will be minimized through 2 GDP emissions (from -5. 6 to -3. 6 themes) that will condition governance, social policy and macroeconomic decisions. As in these cases, the IMF’s official statements delivering such agreements come with the macroeconomic outlook:
“Colombia has very strong economic fundamentals and policy frameworks anchored in a credible inflation-targeting regime, sound medium-term fiscal rule, a flexible exchange rate, and effective monetary sector supervision and regulation. The government is firmly committed to maintaining macroeconomic policies. There is also a broad consensus on the desire to maintain the wonderful soundness of economic policy frameworks. . . ” [9]
Risk score (Fitch and Standard
To mark these commitments, it was mandatory to choose a user from the world of economic technocracy for the position of Minister of Finance. A user who can carry out the adoption of a large-scale tax reform, who also has the resources to be able to execute social expenses. The user selected to meet this objective was José Antonio Ocampo, an eminent economist and historian, identified in the country and in the region, who was Executive Director of ECLAC in the 1998-2003 era and Deputy Secretary General of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs. . United Nations (2003-2007) and proposed through Joseph Stiglitz as a candidate for the head of the World Bank in 2013. [10] He was Minister of Agriculture in the government of César Gaviria and Minister of Finance in the government of ‘Ernesto Samper in the 1990s. and co-director of the Banco de los Angeles Republic the era 2017-2019. Once his appointment was formalized and consulted on the next tax reform, Ocampo said that “social spending will have to be increased, but respecting the fiscal rule. ” [11] Then came the “tranquility of the markets”, the application went through all the economic teams and the doors of sectoral negotiations were opened.
Similarly, Ocampo clarified that the amount projected to comply with this new tax reform is $ 50 billion (5% of GDP), which will be received basically with the accumulation at the source of the income tax of other people with an index of increase according to wealth, adding the “upconsistent with middle class”, that segment of the population that earns a consistent $2,500 in income per month and that, according to official statistics, represents 10% of the population. This tax stance is supported by recent OECD reports that Colombia is the OECD country with the lowest taxation on the individual source of income despite a higher concentration of wealth. [12]
The reform would come with a review of exemptions for corporations and “all complemented through a wealth tax that also seeks greater equity. “rents, whose collection has been prevented by the political weight of landowners and ranchers.
In the same triumph speech and at the same level of the Movistar Arena on June 19, Petro endorsed some other of the “strategic lines” of his Government, on which he had insisted in the campaign, which is to sign up for foreign campaigns. in favor of the decontamination of the planet through its link to inequalities of responsibility, much more vital in the case of dominant countries, for environmental damages. “You are polluting and we will have to take care of the Amazon,” he said and called on the “progressive governments” of the region to coordinate activities in this perspective.
COP 21, the “Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”, held in 2015 in Paris in which 195 countries and “non-state actors” committed to reducing emissions of greenhouse fuels (GHG), basically those similar to carbon dioxide, was ratified at other summits, the last one in Glasgow in November last year. Beyond the discussion about the non-compliance with these agreements, which has been recurrent, it is vital to highlight that they have opened a segment of the capital market, that of the “green markets”, vital domain of the “financialization of nature”.
Given that in the Amazon there are gigantic sinks of herbal carbon and that part of the Colombian territory includes this jungle region, the country has signed protocols for the decontamination of 51% of the carbon until the year 2030 in which the prevention of deforestation of the jungle and the recovery of the component that has been changed to grasslands is one of the key elements to comply with the protocols. [14] The Duque government has made institutional adjustments to this attitude and, in accordance with the Uribe tradition, has designed zones of coordinated action by the army as a component of “Operation Artemis” with the justification of “curbing deforestation in the country, recovering the jungle and persecuting those who are the slash and burn of the forests. “
It has also opened up the supply of green corporations in the Amazon to major foreign investors. In March of this year, the president himself flew over Chiribiquete Park with Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, to show him the environmental systems promoted through the national government and the advances in the fight against climate change. Chiribiquete Park is the largest domain in the country and has been declared by UNESCO as an herbal and cultural heritage of humanity. (. . . ) In addition, it has 62 types of ecosystems that bring similar benefits to climate regulation, water supply, air purification and carbon storage. . . ” [15]
It will be necessary to emphasize the form of integration of the ethnic and peasant communities selected to realize projects aimed at the “green economy” in the territories. An example is REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation Averted), a program explained under the agreements of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is a program that “provides reimbursement from countries of the North that have committed to reducing emissions in the Kyoto Protocol to countries of the South to maintain their forests. REDD has become REDD through adding conservation, sustainable forest control, and expanding carbon stocks as climate replaces mitigation functions. It is established that such certificates can enter secondary markets and can be sold and bought as many times as necessary, including in speculative markets. (. . . )
REDD+ is a tool to stimulate and expand carbon markets. These markets exist even without REDD+ and are part of the privatization of a common good: the air. Under the guise of science fiction, industrialized countries are buying the capacity of these forests to capture carbon from the countries of the South through purchase-sale contracts. In other words, they buy and sell air. (. . . ) One of the greatest dangers that concerns REDD+ is the collapse of the governability of the territories assigned to the Program, since it is the access of actors outside the life of the forest communities, such as officials of multilateral institutions, organizations foreign conservationists, investors and companies, and environmental managers or consultants. In addition, to respect carbon sequestration commitments and to know and measure its stocks, REDD+ implies a greater presence of the other levels of government…”. [16] Resistance to these policies throughout the world through organized peasant and indigenous movements and environmental associations has been constant and has been expressed in various ways. Ahead of the summit and in the streets of Glasgow, campaigners spoke out against tools such as carbon credits and the “financialisation of nature”. We quote the applicable sections of one of them:
“These planned business methods divert attention from the pressing and undeniable need for fossil fuel emissions;
They mask the duty of big business and elites for their carbon emissions, as well as the duty of governments to them; and
– Deepen the financialization of nature, reducing the diversity of our planet’s forests, grasslands and wetlands to marketable carbon and unleashing a new and broad appropriation of resources through indigenous peoples, peasants and local communities, basically in the Global South.
– Forests, land, ecosystems are much more than the carbon stored in them. They are living and breathable ecosystems, cultural and non-secular sites, life resources for millions of other people on the planet. (. . . )
– But offsetting emissions does not reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2). At best, it does not lead to a net accumulation of atmospheric concentrations.
However, global emissions and CO2 concentrations continue to rise at a fatal rate. . . ». [17]
To these anti-systemic demands, in one of the sections on the Amazon of the presidential crusade program “Gustavo Petro for President”, we can read:
“We will make the most of the carbon credits with the guarantee of the Amazon rainforest to its herbal border. Concessions will be created for peasant families recently living in the Amazon, who will be able to produce sustainably as long as they have the forest in the grasslands. . Rural communities will be linked to the rehabilitation, conservation and sustainable control of forests through the payment of environmental services. . . ” [18]
Translated through David Fagan for International Viewpoint.
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[1] Vice President-elect Francia Elena Márquez Mina (born December 1, 1981) is a Colombian lawyer and environmental and human rights activist.
[2] This knowledge has been accepted through UNCTAD since 2013, “The 80th of trade takes place in the ‘value chains’ linked to transnational corporations.
[3] Revista Cambio, June 25, 2022 “Petro, if we isolate ourselves they knock us down”.
[4] Banco de los Ángeles República raised interest rates through 150 foundational issues to 7. 5%. This is the largest accumulation of Angels in the history of the institution. 9. 23% in April and 9. 07% in May” (emphasis ours) “Banco de los Angeles República increases interest rate to 7. 5%”.
[5] El Tiempo, May 14, 2022 “Gustavo Petro: I committed myself to the IMF to reduce the fiscal deficit. “
[6] El Espectador, May 4, 2022 “Political guarantees in elections allow renewal of IMF credit to Colombia. “
[7] Daniel Munevar, December 20, 2020, “Colombia: The IMF is here to stay in Colombia: post-Covid 19 austerity. “
[8] Mauricio Cárdenas, El Tiempo, August 6, 2021, “La Cuadratura del círculo”.
[9] Press Release 22/135, “IMF Executive Board Approves New Two-Year Agreement for Colombia for $9. 8 Billion from the Flexible Credit Line. “
[10] Statement via Fitch Ratings Senior Director Richard Francis and Manuel Orozco Escudero, Standard Senior Analyst Director
[11] Revista Cambio, “Social spending has to increase but complying with the fiscal angels reglos”.
[12] “Dian records show that 51% of the gross source of income reported through Americans is concentrated in the highest income source decile, the 10th decile, and not only, the source of income of the richest 1% is 294 times greater than the source of income of the lowest source of income, those of decile 1, and the source of income of the richest consistent with a thousand is 13 hundred (1300) times higher than that of decile 1. . . ” Booksellers
[13] The Ministry of the Environment of Colombia, using traditional criteria, defines them as “the economic incentive identified by those interested in environmental facilities to the owners or possessors of homes for conservation and recovery movements in strategic spaces and ecosystems, through the conclusion of agreements (Array . ) The MA classifies ecosystem facilities into 4 (4) categories: source facilities, such as food, water, timber and genetic resources; regulatory facilities, such as climate regulation, herbal errors and water purification; facilities here.
[14] The countries that occupy the Amazon territory have formed the “Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization -ACTO-” (Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela) in which they have assumed environmental commitments in the same perspective. .
[15] La República, Friday, March 4, 2022, “Amazon’s founder turned his attention to Chiribiquete and will support environmental goals.
[16] “REDD and indigenous and peasant territories,” Centro de Estudios para el Campo Mexicano (CECCAM), Mexico, August 2012.
[17] “In Search of Carbon Unicorns”, Friends of the Angels Earth International, La Via Campesina, Indegenous Enviorement Network, Corporate Accountability, Asian Peoples, Movement on Debt and Development, Third World Network, Corporate Accountability, Asian People, Movement on Debt and Development, Third World Network, GrassRoots Global Justice Alliance, Climate Justice Alliance Environmental Justice. Here.
[18] Program-Territories-Amazonia, “Historical Pact”.
Proposed petition through the European Network of Solidarity with Ukraine.
Declaration through Samajawadi Janatha Sansadaya (Socialist Peoples Forum)
This joint political statement was issued through left-wing organizations in Ecuador. CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador / Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) is the largest indigenous rights organization in Ecuador.
The repression of the national strike through the indigenous movement in Ecuador has intensified since President Guillermo Lasso first declared a state of emergency and curfew on Friday, June 17.
It was issued through the NPA on Monday, June 13 and will be distributed as a brochure through local NPA committees.
International Perspective is published under the duty of the Office of the Fourth International. Signed articles necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with an acknowledgment of receipt and a direct link if possible.