“They won’t let us govern”
In reaction to the Procuraduría General’s three-month suspension of Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva, President Gustavo Petro paranoically pointed to a conspiracy against his government. But events may suggest other conclusions: a mishandled bidding process that led to a probably successful suit by the sole bidder to produce Colombian passports. Petro, posing as the victim, tried to spin away from his minister’s blatant incompetence and lack of character. Colombians will eventually have a hard time obtaining their passports, due to the Petro administration’s lack of experience in managing this bidding process. This was a completely avoidable crisis. The shameful corollary to this silly saga: the Foreign Ministry had to extend the old contract with the original company, anyway, to at least temporarily keep passport production in place.
This scandal arrived weeks after the Minister of Sports, Astrid Rodriguez, failed to pay the fees necessary for Barranquilla to host the 2027 Pan-American games, the most important sports event in the Americas, second only to the Olympics. This led to the cancellation of the event in Barranquilla, despite Petro’s personal intervention. A third impasse occurred as the Environmental Licensing Agency (ANLA) stopped the much-needed construction of two additional lanes of Bogotá’s Northbound Highway, one of the most crucial projects for reducing traffic congestion in the capital. Bogotá was recently named in an international ranking as the most congested city on earth. But the environmental bureaucracy put ideology ahead of practicality.
We could go on enumerating these types of decisions, revealing either philosophical conflicts, crass incompetence or fear of contradicting the president. Many progressives who voted for Petro claim that this is the natural result of people in the administration lacking experience in running the state apparatus. Their historical responsibility had been to criticize everything that (neoliberal) governments did in the past. They never imagined that public officials should be particularly savvy in administration; for them, success in government should depend just on fresh ideas, and a different ideology. To paraphrase Petro: imagine for a minute if “they would really be freely allowed to govern.”
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