The red rags of the pandemic: a look at economic management in Colombia

As if it were a cry for help, the houses of Colombians began to dress in red rags hanging from their windows. Although the covid-19 pandemic was taking the lives of hundreds of people, confinement was exacerbating poverty in the country and those rags were nothing more than the symbol that represented the lack of resources to even find something to eat.

That was the image that represented the country months after the coronavirus arrived in Colombia. It has been two years since the pandemic began and the management given to the emergency is now analytical for renowned economists. “I made an account of how much each person received for the Solidarity Income program during these years and it is not even a dollar a day,” said Aurelio Suárez, an economic, political and international analyst.

The expert presented his position during a discussion at the Bogotá International Book Fair (FIlBO), in which he was accompanied by Mauricio Cárdenas, who was Minister of Finance and Public Credit and former director of the Department of National Planning.

Although the pandemic was an unprecedented situation and no one was prepared for its arrival, Colombia had a special feature marked by globalization: it focused on responding to its external problems in the economy, rather than on the citizens themselves. “The country took 120 billion pesos into debt and only applied 40 billion pesos to the rescue of companies, people and health,” Suárez explained to this media outlet. “The rest went to correct the country's macroeconomic weaknesses.”

Covid-19 caused Colombia to grow in its foreign debt, but it did not directly respond to the needs of the population. “Out of 5'766,000 microbusinesses, only 447,000 received direct financial aid from the Government,” Suarez said, citing the Dane Microbusiness Survey. For his part, Cárdenas pointed out that the country cannot continue to accumulate more debt because interest will make the value to be paid higher and higher. “We are serious, we are not Argentina, which today decides not to pay. If we pay for it, that costs us more and more,” he added.

Infobae Colombia spoke with an expert on globalization, Luis Fernando Marín, who detailed why this logic is presented. “The pandemic in the last few years what I was expressing in every letter was the crisis of neoliberal policies that had been implemented worldwide for decades,” commented the professor at the Universidad Externado de Colombia. And that took its toll on Colombia, “with the crisis the shortcomings, the precariousness of an institutional order that has never responded to society come to light,” he added.

Along the same lines, Aurelio Suárez said in the discussion that growth in Colombia is exclusive, since it goes “with inflation, unemployment, inequality, poverty and great anger in the country.” This unrest grew with the structural problems that Colombia had and translated into the social outbreak that aroused on April 28, 2021.

“The country had low defenses and the virus came and put him in intensive care,” Suarez said. However, that did not translate into a change in Colombia's structural policies. For Marín, there is no transition to something better because “the power of corporations and the power of globalization monopolized by neoliberalism is very strong” and that prevents precisely what everyone expected from the pandemic: solidarity with the other.

— The lady who sold her products on any corner in the seventh because that lady went to absolute poverty. That was the one with the red cloth.

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