05:50 AM
In the Government of President Gustavo Petro it has been difficult to comply with the order of the Constitution that states that the powers must work in harmony. But it has been much more so within his own cabinet and in the divisions of the executive entities that make the most important decisions.
The discussion between the Minister of Health, Guillermo Jaramillo, and the president of Fiduprevisora, Mauricio Marín, is just a sample of what has been happening for several months and that has generated an atmosphere of tension in the high-level meetings, the communications between officials and determinations in the absences of the president himself.
“Then we do what the president says, now there is no need to tie things up (…) If you blame me, I will blame you (…) let the Minister of Finance come too and put your ass on,” Jaramillo told Marín in an audio that became a scandal in all the media in a meeting on May 7, when the Government was barely a week into the transformation of the system that covers the health of around 900,000 teachers, apparently without the necessary training.
The recording exposes a lack of coordination between portfolios to guarantee the care of hundreds of thousands of people in all regions, due to the lack of capacity of the Fiduprevisora and the Teaching Fund.
In the context, the Government decided to start with a new model for the provision of health services as if it were an experiment and to do so it ended the contracts that the independent teacher system had with operators who acted as intermediaries such as the EPS to define the networks of hospitals and clinics that serve teachers.
The consequence is that from one day to the next the teachers were left without authorizations for services and medications because the Fiduprevisora was not in the capacity to define the networks, concentrate the information and guarantee care. Complaints quickly arrived, the system was overwhelmed and protests came. After that first phase, came the discussion between Jaramillo and Marín that also involved the Minister of Finance, Ricardo Bonilla, in charge of resources.
But it is not the only fight. Before Laura Sarabia returned to the Government as director of the Department of Social Prosperity (DPS), it was clear that there were specific differences between Carlos Ramón González, then head of the Administrative Department of the Presidency (DAPRE) and one of the former co-presidents of the Green Party, and the young advisor to the president who quickly ended up succeeding González in Dapre.
Sources assure that Sarabia considered that González was not organizing the Government well. Armando Benedetti’s former advisor ended up taking that position in the Palace alongside the president whom she closely accompanies and she once again established herself as the most powerful woman in the administration. In that castling González went to the National Intelligence Directorate (DNI) and ended up mentioned in the scandal of the National Risk Management Unit.
When the corrupt contract for the tank trucks for La Guajira was being made and executed in October of last year, González was at the head of DAPRE and in the Chamber the health reform was being debated, which ended up passing in plenary with Congressman Andrés Calle as president of the corporation. Calle ended up accused by Sneyder Pinilla of having received 1,000 million pesos from the Unit’s contracts. Until now, the current director González has not left the executive, although he has already gone to testify summoned by the Supreme Court of Justice in the case.
The other major fight is between the Minister of Finance, Ricardo Bonilla, and the current director of the DIAN, Luis Carlos Reyes. Although this has not been so public, sources in the sector confirmed that both officials do not have the best impression of each other and do not communicate in a coordinated manner.
This is important because the DIAN is the entity in charge of collecting taxes, whose allocation then defines the Treasury portfolio.
That is why harmony between both officials and clear communication should be the rule. In the last few hours it was learned that the Minister of Commerce, Germán Umaña, one of the most respected officials in the Government, will leave his position. And Reyes would arrive at that portfolio leaving the DIAN. It’s the same story. The Ministry of Commerce needs to work closely with the Treasury to guarantee sufficient budget, for example towards ProColombia and other entities in charge of doing business with the private sector and selling the country brand.
Along the same lines are the current director of the National Unit for Risk Management, Carlos Carrillo, and the former mayor of Medellín, Daniel Quintero, who also has Gustavo Bolívar, the current director of the DPS, as an enemy within the Government. Both Carrillo and Bolívar have accused Quintero of wanting to carry out irregular dealings with political quotas in Executive entities.
Specifically at the UNGRD, it is clear that several people who worked in the Medellín administration ended up with contracts for the provision of services or advice in the Unit in a revolving door without any explanation, in addition to the transfers that ended up in Corantioquia and CorpoUrabá where Julián Bedoya and Carlos Andrés Trujillo have great political power.
Although the former mayor is not part of the Government – he has said that the president offered him to be ICT minister – he does have a proven influence in the Palace and several congressmen from his movement add up to the votes that the president needs in the discussions of the reforms. . Some of them are Alejandro Toro, Álex Flórez and Susana Boreal.
Fights within the Government are not new. At the beginning of the president’s term there was a huge crisis due to the discussion that broke out between Laura Sarabia and the then Colombian ambassador to Venezuela, Armando Benedetti. Both left their positions due to scandals that today continue to be investigated and returned, in the case of Sarabia, to the Casa de Nariño, and, in that of Benedetti, far away in the embassy to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Agriculture in Italy.
Benedetti, in turn, had a public controversy with former Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva who called him “a drug addict who should not be believed.” And then, Hollman Morris and Nórida Rodríguez staged another fight for control of RTVC that Morris ended up winning and getting Rodríguez’s head. That fight left the state’s public media system and dozens of employees in uncertainty for several months.
The sequence of disagreements is not normal in the development of the Government and, for many critics of the president, reveals an inability of the president to exercise leadership and organize a team that can consolidate, while in the middle are the country’s systems such as that of health for teachers, today in a growing crisis due to the discussions of the president’s officials that have no end point.
