2024-03-09 17:03:48
Last Thursday, March 7, there was a parade of armored Toyota trucks and extensive security schemes on Carrera 13 and Calle 26. That is the headquarters of the National Planning Department. It happened just one day after Alexander López took office at the Casa de Nariño as the new director of the National Planning Department (DNP), amid criticism from various sectors that question him for not being an economist and not having sufficient experience in public policy. .
“I am not an economist nor did I aspire to be one, because mathematics hit me very hard, it is the truth, these being the first route or the first path to advance, to understand such a complex science. But I know below, where public policy has to be directed. I want to see just one of those cadres who rest in National Planning who knows this country as I know it; Let him know the tragedies of the Colombian people as I know them,” said López in a tribute prior to his inauguration in Congress that his colleagues from the Historical Pact paid him.
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López is a lawyer from the University of Buenaventura and has a specialization in Public Policy from the Javeriana and Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, according to his Congress Visible resume. He was elected senator on the list of the Historical Pact, but the Council of State annulled his election in November 2023 for having supported the candidacy of a candidate for the House of Representatives for the Green Party in Santander, which was configured as double militancy.
The parade of vans did not obey the former senator’s scheme, but rather the escorts of his colleagues, senators María José Pizarro and others, along with governors and mayors who a day later were already visiting the Planning offices on the 15th floor, where It houses the room of the National Council of Economic and Social Policy (CONPES), and the 32nd floor, López’s new office, which previously corresponded to some of the most renowned people in the Colombian economy: Jorge Iván González, Luis Fernando Mejía, Gloria Alonso, Luis Alberto Rodríguez, Alejandra Botero, Santiago Montenegro, Juan Carlos Echeverry and José Antonio Ocampo, among many others.
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EL COLOMBIANO learned details of the first days of López’s agenda at the head of the DNP, which help to understand what the route will be for the most important entity of the State in the creation of public policy for the next three years. On March 7, the director called the deputy directors and decision makers to a meeting to begin to materialize a “Shock Plan for Government commitments.”
The idea was to structure an action plan to have results to show to President Gustavo Petro in the short term. There is already a first noise because those who know public policy understand that implementations can take between 6 and 10 years to be able to measure the results. However, López now wants to bring the ideas of the Development Plan to the territory so that the president can see in real events several of his transformation plans.
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That day, the DNP officials were in a difficult uncertainty, after all the messages against the technicians who have been training for years in the Treasury sector and who today are the public policy makers of the entity. That day to present the Shock Plan was attended by the senator Ivan Cepeda, Senator María José Pizarro, some representatives of unions and other leaders of indigenous communities. All the vice ministers and heads of planning of the Government entities were also present. One of López’s challenges will be to be able to articulate the agendas of the ministries, after in a forum with other former ministers, his predecessor, Jorge Iván González, questioned the Government’s plans and said that it was problematic that the cabinet today was made up of activists . “It is incredible to see how we go from a council of ministers of rulers to a council of ministers that is increasingly made up of activists and that is brutal. What is more important, the president’s word or the articles of the Development Plan? That is my distressing question,” González said with a vehement tone in a forum of the Colombian Academy of Economic Sciences.
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And, he added, “suddenly we are going to fall into activism that destroys what powers a transformation.”
On its Twitter account, the DNP published a list of points to comply with in the so-called shock plan that López drew up: “the DNP shock plan seeks to define the goals of the Implementation Framework plan, conclude the process of defining tokens techniques of the indicators, update the record of progress of the goals, identify alerts to meet the Government’s goals.
On the other hand, a source who preferred to remain confidential, said that López’s arrival caused a pause in a series of resignations that were on the table with the assignment of Daniel Rojas, director of the Sociedad Activos Especiales (SAE) and who was in charge of the DNP since González’s departure. One of those resignations was that of the deputy director general of Decentralization and Territorial Development, Higo Guerra. “He resigned due to the poor progress of the multipurpose cadastre, which is supposed to be the president’s priority,” said the source. His letter has not been accepted by the Palace.
At that first meeting of the shock plan, in addition to several congressmen from the Historical Pact bench, there were also mayors of Bolívar, Magdalena and Sucre.
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