02:55 PM
Journalist Juanita León, director of the journalism portal La Silla Vacía, was invited to the Asobancaria congress, which closed on Friday, June 7 in Cartagena, where she gave a speech in which she spoke about the political situation in the country.
Juanita León spoke about Gustavo Petro, and made a psychological and political profile of the President of the Republic, of whom she mentioned his propensity for storytelling and propagating it full of emotions and little veracity. Below we reproduce her conference.
Good morning, and thanks to Jonathan Malagon, Asobancaria and its affiliates for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today about the role of journalism in this situation.
Two years ago, during the Simón Bolívar journalism awards ceremony, Gustavo Petro gave a revealing speech. He said he saw his role as president as equivalent to that of a social communicator. And to the extent that both the president and the journalists moved in the same discursive space, confrontation would be inevitable.
This definition of his position explains, in part, the little interest that the president has shown in inaugurating works or in demonstrating improvements in poverty or security indicators. Theirs is to change the paradigms, the lenses through which Colombians understand progress, the relationship with the private sector or the climate crisis.
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Petro is in the fight to impose his story. In all fields and particularly, with respect to the pillars that support power in Colombia.
The argument I want to make today is that only the data kills the story. In other words, the correct verification of information will always overcome the narratives and stories that are created around the situation.
To that extent, I believe that the main contribution that the media can make to Colombian democracy today is journalism based on the reporting of facts and that is done against our own ideological prejudices because it is an important counterweight to left-wing populism and right-wing and an essential nutrient of much-needed sanity right now.
Some things we have understood at La Silla Vacía based on our reporting on the events of this government:
1. The president governs for the most excluded 20 percent of Colombians, and if he can improve their living conditions he does not care how much he threatens the stability of the remaining 80 percent.
His indicator of success for the pension reform is that the 400,000 dispossessed old people do not go hungry; for health, that a girl living in the rural area of the Pacific has access to basic medical care; for education, that a young man from Catatumbo can go to university near her house.
What happens with the capital market, with the mandatory health insurance built over years or with the education that Colombians need to not be left out of an economy marked by artificial intelligence, is a secondary concern for him. That explains, I believe, his reluctance to agree to the changes.
2. The president understands that his mandate does not come from the polls but from the social outbreak: He says this in the preamble to the negotiation agenda with the ELN and has highlighted it in several speeches. That is why he believes that the National Agreement is already incorporated into his reforms, which he sees as the solution and alternative to the golden social outbreak.
3. The president is not a crazy person. Many think that Petro is delirious when he talks about cosmic ethnicity, constituent power or degrowth. But in reality he draws from left-wing intellectual currents, about which we know little in Colombia. Constituent power, for example, as he conceives it, had already been defined a few decades ago by his great intellectual influence Antonio Negri as “a kind of catastrophe that intervenes by opening and marking possibilities for a new Constitution, that is, a new constituted power.” ”.
Even his insistence on calling for street mobilizations corresponds to the strategy of the “popular shield” that Harvard professor Aníbal Pérez Liñan defined as the defense path of left-wing Latin American presidents to defend themselves against hostile congresses and moves by the Establishment to remove them. of power through judicial means. The famous soft coup that they talked about at the last congress in Puebla.
4. Petro is incapable of feeling fear and will pressure its officials to make structural transformations, straining its relationship with the IAS to the maximum. The president is a revolutionary. He does not aspire to gradual changes or marginal reforms.
He aspires to change the power structure and as he said in a Council of Ministers, he believes that the way to achieve them is confrontation, not agreements and negotiation.
5. But, paradoxically, the execution of its programs faces serious implementation problems. For example, its commitment to giving social programs to the popular economy has led the Icbf to not renew hundreds of contracts with NGOs that care for children, which while the new policy is implemented, have been left unattended.
The energy transition is tangled. While the president travels the world warning about the climate crisis, the transition roadmap is unclear and renewable projects face delays in licensing procedures and consultations. And so on, in the different energy sources. And in other sectors.
6. Petro may want the Constituent Assembly to make these transformations, but the legal institutional paths are closed and he is not looking for them. He will try to create the incentives or paths so that the part of the people that follows him provokes the political event that gives birth to the legal act, but in that purpose he also faces political and constitutional limitations.
A first attempt was to include in the statutory education reform that students must have direct participation in the university government, including the election of the rector.
It is an aspiration of the university constituents that are already moving in the National and the District and that if they multiply they could converge in the constituent that Petro wants, re-editing a political process like that of the Seventh Ballot.
However, the opposition managed to negotiate with the government the elimination of that article from the reform approved yesterday and even in the National there is a lot of reluctance that university autonomy would be violated in this way.
The other path is the mechanism of participation in the negotiation with the ELN. But the Constitutional Court has repeated in several rulings that a peace agreement is a political mandate that Congress must translate into laws to make it a reality. In other words, the president does not have an easy path for his constituents.
The emphasis of journalism, then, should perhaps focus less on the fear aroused by the proposal and more on understanding the nature, threats and strengths of the institutions that prevent the possibility of a constituent assembly through a non-institutional path.
7. Colombian democracy has counterweights that have been shown to work and the president will not have control over them. Petro will only be able to appoint one more magistrate to the Constitutional Court. The others will be nominated by the courts and elected by the Senate, two bodies where the Historical Pact does not have a majority.
In the Bank of the Republic, in January of next year, two co-directors will be able to change, which in principle would give it a majority of four counting the Minister of Finance. But co-director Olga Lucía Acosta, appointed by former Minister Ocampo, has demonstrated her independence of judgment.
The Congress of the Republic, even if it is proven that they bribed congressmen to approve their reforms, has exercised its role as a counterweight.
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The challenge that journalism faces with a president who relies above all on the story is not to fall into the temptation of abandoning reporting journalism and limit oneself to reproducing other alternative stories to the president’s based on opinion and one’s own ideological inclinations.
The temptation is great because fueling polarization is at the basis of the current business of some media, as described by Andrey Mir in his great book Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. According to him, the failure of the media business model around the guideline and its transition towards subscriptions has led many media to go from “manufacturing consensus” in order to make people feel that the world more or less works and you feel inclined to buy what advertisers sell, to manufacture hatred and polarization. We all know that nothing unites a group like being able to hate another.
If we journalists can learn anything from what happened in Venezuela with Chávez, it is not to lose focus on our fundamental reporting work. There, the day when journalists stopped telling the truth and, faced with growing fears, gave in to the temptation of turning to opinion and political militancy, Venezuela was left without journalism. And it lost one of the fundamental counterweights of democracy.
