Senator María Fernanda Cabal spoke on the matter. She did it within the framework of the controversy over the radical speech of President Gustavo Petro. Cabal gave her opinion after the president compared the rich and the poor and attacked the business sector in Antioquia. “Where has he lived? So poor, right? Where has he lived, where are his houses? Where does he live today? Where does he like to walk? In Italy. So poor. Petro, the one from the Ferragamo, with his wife who spends a billion pesos on masseuses, as if she were a beauty queen. Spend it from his money. Of course he is a very rich man, the thing is that we don't know where he has the money. A man who is not rich cannot afford those pleasures nor live where he lives,” she added.
And the fact is that great controversy has aroused the speech of President Gustavo Petro in which he attacked El Poblado, in Medellín, as well as against the businessmen of the region. It was yet another act in which the head of state goes against the Antioquia sector.
At the public event, The head of state mentioned the El Poblado neighborhood of Medellín, associating it with phenomena of violence and paramilitarism. “Well, they are popularly called 'paisas', but they are people from the Andes, from the department of Antioquia, basically from Medellín, people who come to work here and large capitals of Medellín, El Poblado. Medellín is not all of it either,” said Petro.
The paradoxical thing is that President Petro told the Antioqueños in Apartadó, Antioquia, everything on March 18, 2024, and at the same time offered them a “pact for coexistence and reconciliation around drinking water, agrarian reform and the port.”
Petro proposed a pact for coexistence and reconciliation between banana businessmen and the population of the Urabá region of Choco and Antioquia, in which “private capital, national and regional public money come together to address the solution of drinking water in the territory”.
This was stated by the head of State at the 'Actions for Peace and Life' meeting, with the population of Apartadó, Antioquia, during the opening of the 'Government with the Caribbean People' event, which will take place in ten municipalities of the south of that region during this week.
“We are in charge of health and we would have the two basic conditions of life, not the only ones, but the basic ones. Without them, living is almost impossible for all the citizens of Urabá.“said the president, calculating that investment at more than one trillion pesos.
The pact would have, as a first condition, that businessmen develop their activity far from any illegality and the population can live with dignity, said the president. “Here those two things are not antagonistic. In the world it has been solved and here we can solve it,” added President Petro, who compared his proposal to the figure of works for taxes, only that, in this case, the resources would come from “the profits of bananas, a part of the profit that is generated in this region by the work of the people”.
And he advanced his thesis on the phenomena of violence: “That could have been the origin of the conflict and can be its solution, because it is a meeting of cultures, even ethnicities, of Colombian history in this region”.
“How did you find each other? Good? Or did they find themselves in a crash? In my opinion, they were in shock. The capital, the great capital of El Poblado became banana growers in Urabá, used the territory, most of the land, therefore, the water and the sea, and it became one of the big businesses and productive branches of Colombia: bananas and banana exports.”
This would repair acts of violence that happened in the past, when “was betting on death and the massacre of the population“, he said, while urging to put this pact “as first priority, precisely in a region that has suffered a genocide”.
The pact, he indicated, would also solve “a conflict over the use of water, of such magnitude that it has prioritized using water for bananas and not for the human beings who inhabit the Urabá,” a situation that has been experienced for decades.
In this way, he indicated, it would be compensated for the fact that businessmen, “for decades they have obtained a series of profits by using fertile land and the water of this territory and to the population through the workforce”, in compensation, the national government would assume health care.
“With the banana business community – whose lands that produce bananas are not going to be touched – let's make an agreement and help the owners of the other land sell it.”because they are not very productive and we can create a peasant economy, also in Urabá, even generating a way out of monoculture,” he added.
In, several Antioqueños wondered why President Gustavo Petro's hate speech against the inhabitants of the region. Representatives to the House Juan Fernando Espinal, Daniel Carvalho and Julián Peinado gave their opinion on the matter.
“Calculate how much money Petro has earned in the last 20 years to see if he doesn't have money. “He loves to play poor and he loves to continue having that speech of rich against poor to hide his bad management, his bad government and the fact that he is not delivering for the people,” he added.
Espinal, in turn, recalled that Daniel Quintero, Petro's main ally in El Poblado, lives in a house in that area that costs more than 5,000 million pesos. Julián Peinado, finally, said that Petro “He has the resources and the ways to live very well. And he is among the 0.1% of the population capable of having his children study abroad. Furthermore, he has always lived off of State resources. We all know the story of her big house on the outside, of her trips to Florence (Italy), of his wife's trips to the United States to spend her vacations. That is not bad, whoever has to do it, but in his hate and class speech he contradicts himself.”
