The presidential candidate for the left-wing coalition Historic Pact, Gustavo Petro Urrego, referred from the city of Medellín to the unbinding comments that the president of the Colombian Congress, Conservative Senator Juan Diego Gomez, made against the vice-presidential formula of this movement, Francia Márquez Mina.
It should be recalled that Gómez had accused Marquez on Wednesday of receiving support from the National Liberation Army (ELN), an organized Colombian armed group.
In the capital of Antioquia, where Gustavo Petro arrived to hold his second session of the Petro Te Escucha event, the former mayor of Bogotá suggested that Gómez would be using the presidency of the legislature “criminally” and that, “he is committing crimes, I don't know what kind of advice he will have, he already has several”. He pointed it out of having committed insult and slander against Marquez.
Petro even dared to compare Gómez's management with that of Ernesto Macías, former president of Congress and senator of the Uribist Centro Democrático party who will leave the corporation because he did not get enough votes for the next parliamentary term. The candidate noted that, “Macias was left in diapers” to President Gomez.
Finally, the senator invited the population of Antioquia to reject racist stigmatisations such as that made by Gómez during the political control debate against registrar Alexander Vega.
After giving this statement, Petro shared with the people of Antioquia another of his controversial proposals: a wealth tax to allocate resources to education.
According to him, the current investment for this sector in Colombia is four billion pesos, but it is not enough to offer more benefits than that of the transition from high school to university. So, Petro proposes to create a tax that would have to be paid by the four thousand richest people in the country — and only them.
In addition, the candidate pointed out that they will not be taxed on their productive companies, “but on their unproductive assets. So, here is a quick list: dividends, transfers abroad, tax havens.”
With this tax, the percentage of which he did not specify during this intervention, Petro would aim to raise 14 billion pesos, with which he would launch the projects he has in mind in the area of education, which include quality and free basic and higher education, with an emphasis on culture, and a rescue plan for the current debtors of the Icetex.
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