Federico Gutiérrez had to explain to Rodolfo Hernández what the Escazú Agreement was: “Where is that?”

Despite the fact that presidential candidates Federico 'Fico' Gutiérrez and Rodolfo Hernández have shown themselves to be 'political enemies' during the electoral contest, the former mayor of Medellín ended up throwing a lifeguard at the former mayor of Bucaramanga when he was unable to answer for the Escazú Agreement.

It turns out that this week a presidential debate took place at the Bogota Book Fair (FiLBO), in which presidential candidates participated Gutierrez, Hernandez, Ingrid Betancourt, Enrique Gomez, Luis Perez and John Milton Rodriguez.

During one of the segments, the moderator of the space, journalist Claudia Morales, asked what the candidates for the presidency thought about whether to ratify Escazú in Colombia. This, after President Iván Duque himself ordered it to be debated in 2020, but to date the Congress of the Republic has not been able to agree on the issue.

All candidates raised palettes with Yes and No to get their opinions on the matter. However, the former president of the capital of Santander had no idea what they were talking about in the compound and had to ask Federico Gutiérrez for help to explain what they were referring to.

The event did not go unnoticed by the moderators of the event, the attendees of the debate, and much less by Internet users, who questioned Hernández for, again, not knowing such a conjunctural issue for the country.

After Fico explained to him what Escazú was, the Santander engineer chose not to respond, which caused several other criticisms against him on social networks.

The song generated such an impact on public opinion that the BluRadio station contacted Hernández to give its version of the song and, in effect, showed that it had no idea what they were talking about.

Moreover, he even said that those who questioned him for not knowing one of the elementary issues for the next government “had it mounted” and remembered when he forgot that Vichada was a department of Colombia.

It is worth mentioning that the Escazú Agreement is the acronym by which is known the 'Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean', which was signed in 2018 in Costa Rica and which aims to guarantee environmental rights in the continent. Although several nations around the world have implemented it, in Colombia there have been a series of works that have not allowed its ratification.

In fact, this Wednesday, April 20, in Chile, the first Escazú Summit was held, however, Colombia was not present at the meeting, amid criticism that points to the national territory of being the most dangerous place in the world for nature and being the second most biodiverse nation. This agreement had President Duque in the midst of the controversy when the processing of it, in Congress, was rejected during the first attempt at approval.

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