Gustavo Petro is impatient, wants results in the short term and trusts a very small circle of collaborators. The president of Colombia has taken to the extreme the idea that ministers are fuses. Without having yet completed two years in power, after the two major cabinet crises with which he broke up the Government coalition and numerous replacements in dribs and drabs, the president has already appointed more than thirty ministers. After the departure of Germán Umaña from the Commerce, Industry and Tourism portfolio, only 5 of the 18 original ministers of the first left-wing president of contemporary Colombia remain. Beyond their different origins, profiles and trajectories, Susana Muhamad (Environment), Gloría Inés Ramírez (Work), Catalina Velasco (Housing), Néstor Osuna (Justice) and Iván Velásquez (Defense) are the last survivors of that first cabinet that It brought together different political currents. They have in common that they have not clashed with a president who rewards loyalty.
Muhamad, a few months away from hosting the world biodiversity conference in Cali, and Ramírez, who has promoted the probable approval of the pension reform in Congress, embody two great achievements of the Government and come from the militant left. Velasco and Osuna, with less visibility, are the last liberal figures left after the fracture of the diverse coalition with which the president began his mandate. And Velásquez, who has until now had the unrestricted support of the president, must deal with the worrying security crisis, which has put him in the target of the opposition.
Susana Muhamad, the host of COP16
Gustavo Petro wants to go down in history as an environmental leader. Faced with his insistent call to tackle the climate crisis facing the planet with a sense of existential urgency, his Minister of the Environment, Susana Muhamad (Bogotá, 47 years old), shines with her own light in the cabinet, one of the people who knows him best and who has worked closer to him. She is in charge of landing his vision for one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet, with a considerable portion of the Amazon rainforest, and she was already secretary of that same portfolio when the current president was mayor of Bogotá, between 2012 and 2015. As a grandfather Palestinian, this political scientist from the University of Los Andes, in Bogotá, with a master’s degree in Sustainable Development from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, has also accompanied the president in his three presidential candidacies.
To a large extent, she will be the host of the enormous United Nations Conference on Biodiversity, COP16, held in Cali in October, under the motto of “making peace with nature.” The great international showcase of the president’s most environmentalist side, which joins next year’s climate conference in Brazil to strengthen the position of the two great Amazonian countries.
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Observers agree that the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development has raised its profile in the Petro Government, under the leadership of Muhamad. “Its political weight is profound,” says analyst Andrés Mejía Vergnaud. “He is a person who with his heart, soul and career is with Petro’s political project, subscribes to that ideology and represents the type of young and urban demographic that was so important in his arrival to both the Mayor’s Office and the Presidency” . One of his main achievements has been to reduce deforestation, but that progress is at risk due to the growing aggressiveness of the dissidents of the extinct FARC guerrilla, to the point that the minister herself has activated all the alerts.
Gloria Inés Ramírez, the conciliatory unionist
Gloria Inés Ramírez (Philadelphia, Caldas, 67 years old), the first communist minister of Colombia, leads a pension reform that is poised to become a legislative milestone for the Government. Graduated in Physics and Mathematics from the Technological University of Pereira, she defines herself as a school teacher, a union leader, a left-wing woman and a feminist. She also has a specialization in labor rights and a master’s degree in social and educational development. In addition to being a senator for the leftist Polo Democrático between 2006 and 2014, she was president of the Colombian Federation of Educators (FECODE) and director of the Unitary Central of Workers of Colombia (CUT), the largest labor union in the country.
Although the labor reform that the Executive aims for remains bogged down, the pension that aims to restructure the defective Colombian system was already approved in the penultimate debate. It is the one with the clearest path of Petro’s triad of social reforms, which completes the already sunk health reform. Locals and strangers recognize Ramírez’s conciliatory and dialogic spirit, which contrasts, for example, with the disposition of Carolina Corcho and Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo, the two Health Ministers who failed to approve the Government’s health reform in Congress.
“The minister has been quite effective in advancing the pension reform,” says Yann Basset, professor of Political Science at the Universidad del Rosario. “She comes from a fairly affirmed left, but at the same time she has experience in negotiating, which has ultimately been very useful for the Government in this situation,” he adds. “Gloria Inés Ramírez represents the unions, which continue to be a supremely important political factor for the Government and took on even greater importance with the events of May 1,” adds analyst Andrés Mejía Vergnaud, in reference to the marches in support of the President Petro, which were only possible thanks to union mobilization.
Catalina Velasco, the lightning rod against the construction cocoas
The person in charge of Housing policy has shown great resistance to criticism from the cabinet. Close to President Gustavo Petro through her husband Eduardo Noriega, one of the politicians who has worked alongside the president for years, Catalina Velasco (Bogotá, 52 years old) came to office with the blessing of the Liberal Party bench and the commission of give a twist to one of the fundamental areas for the economy and that delivers the juiciest subsidies for its beneficiaries.
Secretary of Habitat of Bogotá of the leftist mayor Samuel Moreno, and vice president of the Bogotá Energy Company during Petro’s mayoralty, with two months in office, the minister pointed out that the previous Government had exhausted the budget for the Mi Casa Ya program, which subsidizes the purchase of houses by the poorest families. By 2023 she obtained more resources, but the change she made to the rules to receive subsidies delayed the transfer of the money for more than a semester. “She is partly responsible for the collapse of the country’s construction sector for having changed the conditions for the transfer of housing subsidies,” says analyst Sergio Guzmán. Petro himself has criticized him in public; At the end of January, in an official meeting in Quibdó, he questioned her about the lack of progress in the aqueduct of the capital of Chocó. “The truth is I’m not knowing myself. That is the first thing when entering a ministerial office. “Where are the aqueducts for poor people,” she said, referring to Velasco.
It has not been the only origin of the accusations. The minister has faced debates about political control from the opposition and permanent criticism from Camacol, the union of construction companies that Petro has pointed out as being very close to the right. Its current head, Guillermo Herrera, was Minister of Sports under Iván Duque, with the support of the Cambio Radical party, and worked in the Bogotá mayor’s office of Enrique Peñalosa, a nemesis in the capital’s politics of the current president; Her predecessor, Sandra Forero, was elected councilor of Bogotá in October by the Uribista Centro Democrático. Velasco’s work to confront those critical sectors of the Government, and her loyalty to the president in the face of the resignation of his less political vice ministers, have allowed her to maintain the president’s support.
Néstor Osuna, the liberal who remains firm
The Minister of Justice is the oldest survivor. Néstor Iván Osuna (Bogotá, 62 years old) is an academic without political support or militancy on the left who represents the vision of social democratic values typical of a wing of the traditional Liberal Party more than that of Gustavo Petro. He is not part of Petro’s closest circle and has faced crises and challenges such as the murder of the director of the La Modelo prison in Bogotá or the difficulty in carrying out bills such as the one on agrarian jurisdiction. In addition, he has recently served as a translator or amendment of statements made by Petro or his allies, for example, by denying that he is seeking re-election.
Despite all this, he maintains the support of the president, with whom he shares the alma mater of the traditionally liberal Universidad Externado de Colombia. Without knowing each other, a judicial decision brought them closer in 2014. The Attorney General’s Office under the command of conservative Alejandro Ordóñez had suspended Petro from his duties as mayor of Bogotá, and a flurry of legal actions sought to restore him to office. Among them, hundreds of protection actions requested respect for his rights as voters, and between their comings and goings, the Disciplinary Chamber of the Superior Council of the Judiciary decided to deny them. Osuna, a judge of that Court, opposed it. Petro would remember that name.
Already as minister, Osuna has led guarantee-oriented and progressive initiatives, especially penal and penitentiary ones. He has defended that the Government is ideologically liberal, social democratic, precisely the vision with which this constitutionalist agrees. He has also served as the president’s squire, especially in the fight he had with the previous prosecutor, Francisco Barbosa.
Iván Velásquez, turbulence-proof
Gustavo Petro has closed ranks on more than one occasion in defense – never better said – of one of the key members of his cabinet, highly criticized due to the delicate situation of public order. Placing a renowned jurist at the head of the Ministry of Defense is unusual in Colombia, but that was the president’s decision with Iván Velásquez (Medellín, 69 years old), whom he has supported in his position as he approaches the halfway point of his four-year term. In stark contrast, Petro’s predecessor, Iván Duque, had three questioned defense ministers who did not match the longevity of Velásquez.
President Petro considers him a “just man,” the words with which he defended him when the Guatemalan Prosecutor’s Office attacked him for his recognized role at the head of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICG). The minister, who was also the star investigator of the parapolitics scandal, which made him a nemesis of former President Álvaro Uribe, has been forced to navigate turbulent waters, even though Petro has sought to soften his relations with the military and police since the campaign that brought him to power.
Total peace is one of the president’s most ambitious bets, which represents an additional challenge for the military. His plan has always been to stretch the concept of negotiation to simultaneously dialogue with the ELN guerrillas, the dissidents of the extinct FARC, drug trafficking groups, gangs and criminal gangs, often also in conflict with each other. The tables with the ELN and the dissidents of the so-called Central General Staff face their own crises. The elenos They are reluctant to renounce the kidnapping and the bulk of the dissidents left the table. Petro himself has declared a “total offensive” in the department of Cauca in the face of the recent attack by the EMC. There is a sense of deteriorating security that the opposition largely attributes to Velásquez. “Petro does not trust many people, and everything indicates that he does not trust anyone else to hold that portfolio other than Iván Velásquez,” says analyst Sergio Guzmán.
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