2023-08-16 07:01:00
A few weeks after two months have elapsed since President Gustavo Petro installed Vice President Francia Márquez as head of the Ministry of Equality, little or nothing has been seen of him in command of the new portfolio that seems rather shelved and The one that until now has not been heard more than the controversy due to the bureaucratic pressure that it brings gets one of the positions with a role of power that France has been demanding since the campaign. Precisely, congressmen close to the project told EL COLOMBIANO that in reality the process seems stagnant with a minister who has been rather relegated to her own commitment to the “government of change.”
What is known so far is that at the end of June, the president stuck out his chest and took advantage of his speech about inequality in Manaure, La Guajira, from where he governed with the commitment to address the crisis in that region, to give importance to that Ministry after almost six months from the enactment of the law that created it. “In the face of this crowd and these diverse peoples, Francia Márquez is sworn in as the first minister of Colombia of the Ministry of Inequality so that she becomes of Equality,” exclaimed Petro followed by a hug for the vice president.
Likewise, the first thing the President did was grant him the task of taking the State to the “excluded”, referring to the population of La Guajira and the precarious conditions in which they live. “The Ministry of Equality has to help solve that. It has to go to the most excluded of the excluded. The most excluded is women, ”he added.
On June 29, from Riohacha, Petro signed three decrees that gave the green light to one of the biggest bets of his Government to eliminate political, economic and social inequalities. With this step, the stipulated time to regulate the project was fulfilled. In October 2022, the creation of the Ministry was filed in Congress to become Law 2281 of 2023, which was sanctioned in January 2023.
With this, it could be deduced that the Ministry of Equality is firm and with the commitment to attend to these inequalities of the excluded, but the truth is that within these decrees the vice ministries and plant personnel were established, which unleashed a rain of criticism because they are more than those who have a portfolio. Likewise, former officials complained about the bureaucracy that creates the new portfolio.
The discontent and skepticism around the new portfolio was such that authoritative voices such as that of the former Minister of Finance, José Antonio Ocampo, resounded to make an alert call. It is not for less, because the Ministry of Equality is not as equitable as it sounds: although the structures of the ministries are usually made up of between 2 and 3 vice ministries, and between 6 and 8 directions, the new portfolio of the vice president raises the creation of 5 vice ministries, 20 technical directorates and 32 departmental directorates.
On the other hand, there has not been much action regarding the attention to the marked inequalities that Petro and Márquez promised to attend to, even the opposition senator Carlos Fernando Motoa assured that the Ministry of Equality is a clear symbol of the ineffectiveness of the Petro Government since nothing is working yet. “As we have already denounced, this is a bureaucratic whim without defined powers. There is no implementation (…) Everything remains in announcements”, said the congressman.
In any case, other people close to the project told this newspaper that France has lost prominence and they have kept it away from the project and pointed out that “it is disconnected from the national and territorial agenda.”
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