Colombian senate rejects Petro reform

April 4, 2024

A Colombian senate committee rejected a health reform bill proposed by President Gustavo Petro, yesterday. It was the latest legislative defeat for a government that has struggled to advance an ambitious reform agenda, reports Reuters.

The reform was aimed at stripping power from insurers and expanding access to healthcare, according to the government, while detractors warned it would open the door to corruption.

“This initiative of the president’s, which some people around him consider to have become an obsession, provokes a lot of resistance in Colombia, making it almost inevitable that Petro’s months-long battle would reach a dead end,” according to El País.

Yesterday the government stepped up its campaign against private medical care by taking over the country’s largest insurer, reports Bloomberg.

More Colombia

• Colombia’s AGN recently entered peace talks with the government. The country’s largest armed group is motivated by “a strong desire for legitimacy” and “judicial leniency,” International Crisis Group’s Elizabeth Dickinson told InSight Crime.

---

Political will key to reducing deforestation

Burned forest in the Ñembi Guasu conservation area in Charagua, Bolivia. The expansion of soya farming led to a surge in forest loss for a third year in Bolivia. Photograph: David Mercado/Reuters

Political will has significant impact on environmental preservation, according to the latest Global Forest Watch report, which highlighted significant reductions in deforestation in Brazil and Colombia. (El País)

Brazil and Colombia recorded large drops in forest loss of 36% and 49% respectively, under the environmental policies of presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Gustavo Petro, though the gains were offset by big increases in Bolivia, Laos, Nicaragua and other countries, reports the Guardian.

While Brazil had significantly slowed its rate of forest loss, the country remained one of the top three countries for losing primary rainforest, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Bolivia. Together, they accounted for more than half of the total global destruction.

Brazil

• As miners ravage Yanomami lands, combat-trained environmentalists work to root them out. More than a year after the Lula administration vowed to eliminate illegal mining, efforts are foundering. Jon Lee Anderson reports on the Specialized Inspection Group for the New Yorker.

• “Brazil has issued its first-ever apology for the torture and persecution of Indigenous people during the military dictatorship, including the incarceration of victims in an infamous detention centre known as an ‘Indigenous concentration camp’,” reports the Guardian.

Mexico

• Two months away from Mexico’s presidential election, this year’s campaign season is already the country’s bloodiest in recent history, with 27 candidates assassinated since June of last year. Laboratorio Electoral reports that there are also dozens of cases of threats, kidnapping and attempted assassination. (CNN)

Regional Relations

• Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro claims the U.S. has secret military bases in Guyana’s Essequibo region — which his government has claimed. Maduro further alleged that violent attacks on Venezuelan territory are being planned in the secret bases. (EFE)

• He also claimed that his counterpart, President Irfaan Ali, "does not govern Guyana" and that "Guyana is governed by the Southern Command, the CIA and ExxonMobil,” reports AFP.

Venezuela

• The outcome of Venezuela’s July presidential election hinges on whether opposition leader María Corina Machado can reach an agreement with presidential candidate Manuel Rosales, a member of the Unity Platform that many government opponents consider overly cozy with Miraflores Palace, reports Americas Quarterly.

Migration

• Amnesty International is calling on the government of the Dominican Republic to end immigration policies toward Haitians that the agency says include mass, discriminatory expulsions and racial profiling of Black Dominicans of Haitian descent — Miami Herald.

• Organized crime has built up a lucrative business trafficking Honduran women for purposes of sexual exploitation in Frontera Comalapa, a Chiapas town on the Mexico-Guatemala border, reports El Faro English in collaboration with Quinto Elemento Lab.

Argentina

• Argentine economic pessimism is reinforcing and confounds policymakers, but it is not irrational, writes Brian Winter in Americas Quarterly. “Everyone in Argentina, bar the odd centenarian, has witnessed primarily stagnation and decline in their lifetimes. At the first sign of trouble, they stop investing, pull their cash out of the banks, and stuff it under their mattresses or in accounts abroad. There is a reason Argentines have an estimated $246 billion in deposits outside the country—an amount greater than half their country’s GDP. Sadly, over time, the pessimists have almost always been proven right.”

Bolivia

• Efforts by the international left — led by Grupo Puebla — to mediate between Evo Morales and Luis Árce leaves Bolivia’s ruling party split and headed to electoral collision, reports El País.

Futból

• The “Salvadoran-American factor” is crucial to the meteoric rise of El Salvador’s national women’s soccer team, reports El Faro English, more than half the team grew up in the U.S. “By having such a bi-national component, they also are a fine expression of El Salvador’s enormous American diaspora, an estimated 2.5 million in the United States compared to the population of 6 million in El Salvador. They redefine what being Salvadoran is, even if some of the players don’t speak Spanish at all.”