In the midst of a heated debate, the plenary of the Senate of the Republic gave the green light with 54 votes in favor and 9 against the project to expand the debt quota for the Government of Gustavo Petro.
When everything seemed like it was going to be defined with a proposal presented by Antonio Zabaraín Guevara, senator of Cambio Radical, so that the authorized money would only be exclusively used for the payment of credits and debt, things changed. The proposal had more than 60 signatures, from the Democratic Center, Cambio Radical, Partido de La U and some from the Liberal Party.
The proposal said: “The debt quota covered by this article will be exclusively to meet the commitments previously acquired by the National Government on the occasion of the execution of internal and external public credit operations and operations similar to the previous ones.”
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This was due to the concern expressed by the opposition that the resources were actually used for other purposes and ended up being wasted, leaving the country in debt.
Nevertheless, The intervention of the Minister of Finance, Ricardo Bonilla, changed many senators’ opinions and in the end the proposal only had about 32 votes and was denied with 46.
Bonilla argued: “if we accept Zarabaín’s proposal we would have to ask ourselves where we get the source of the resources, and the source of the credit resources is obtained from multilateral organizations and bond placement.” He said that this would be unconstitutional because the Constitution prohibits State revenues from having a specific destination, and also added that this would make it difficult to help finance public works in the regions.
He defended that the debt quota is being approved by the country and not by a government. “We are going from a public debt size of 49% of GDP to 61% in just one year, in 2020 due to the Pandemic. That is $200 billion miscounted, which increased the public debt,” he indicated.
The minister’s explanation ended up convincing some legislators who initially signed the Radical Change proposal, one of them was Juan Felipe Lemos Uribe, of the U Party. He maintained that he shares a concern with the Democratic Center and Radical Change parties. , but said that the minister’s reasons are serious and valid.
The situation aroused the discontent of the opposition. In fact, Senator Paola Holguín, of the Democratic Center, expressed in to the government”.
The truth is that the project expresses, as of February 24, the available debt quota was 3,667 million dollars. And it clarifies that the debt that the government obtained during the pandemic was not included in the debt quota, so its payment and amortizations do not release quota, so the Government is spending a lot to pay debt without being able to ask for more.
With this, the Senate approved the most onerous debt quota expansion in the last 24 years. It went from 70 billion dollars to 87 billion dollars.
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