What did his tenure as Mayor leave Rionegro?
“Rionegro is a great city. It is not because I had been mayor there, but Rionegro also has a particularity and that is that it is the municipality of Colombia, even above the capital cities Bogotá, Barranquilla, even Medellín, which has the most per capita income and the most per capita investment in people”.
“Well, we did a lot of things, but let’s say that you don’t realize your own hump. There are some very important infrastructure works there. There are about thirty kilometers of dual carriageways, with platforms and routes. We went from six outdoor gyms to 70, we went from two sports units to ten, we went from one child development center to ten”.
“But what really fills me the most and makes me proud is what was done in favor of early childhood and children who are in school. Universalization Early childhood care not only with the infrastructure, but with quality programs that the most important social investment, the one that takes place even when it is going to be pregnancy and universal, is in the School Feeding program”.
What do you think of the second runway at the José María Córdova de Rionegro airport?
“I think it is a very important work to move forward, perhaps more important than the second track, which could wait a few more years. Not much being the second terminal, but I think that the national government, which is competent to advance to the second runway, is wrong. In what sense? In that it mistreats the owners of the properties necessary to make them”.
“The owners are going to adjust seven or eight years with a declaration that their properties are of public utility without the properties being bought from them, without really defining what they can do in X. Then their property rights are violated because they are not even They buy them, but they put them in great legal uncertainty because they can’t develop them either”.
What can you tell us about the investigation that the Attorney General’s Office has against your management for the plan to modernize public transport in Rionegro?
“All of us who are in the public sector, we have investigations of all orders and this, in particular, is one that took place, as you said, due to the restructuring of transportation that we undertook and the connector of the Sonrío program that was not a whim in which we embarked simply because we were stubborn, but because we wanted to and it is the claim that today the current mayor has to reduce the out-of-pocket cost of transport for citizens, to renew half of it precisely through the integration of public transport”.
“And many lies have been told about this, because generally when it comes to doing things that benefit the majority, the minority that is affected tends to be very expressive and almost noisy when it comes to defending their interests, which are not necessarily the that coincide with the interests of the majority. They came out to say that we call 50 billion pesos spent on studies, when in reality it was not 3000. Even putting together what this administration has spent and they came out to tell all kinds of lies, which of course is necessary for the control bodies investigate this.”
What is the proposal to make the resources of Antioquia independent?
“Colombia suffers from a suffocating centralism. It has been that way for over 100 years. The Constitution of 1991 did not correct it and that has left the departments without the capacity to respond to the needs of the people, who today have a very critical demonstration. For example, in the case of Antioquia, where millions of Antioquians enduring hunger, roads destroyed, schools down.
“Not to mention the problems of insecurity and public order. We Antioquians all sent to the nation last year as a result of the different taxes that we paid close to 30 billion pesos and they returned 1/6 a little more than 5 billion that I am proposing, that we change the way the departments are financed and that the income and patrimony taxes that belong to the Nation become the departments so that already before and that it does not correspond to them alone, I include in the long run, but between 12 and 15 billion pesos ”.
Wouldn’t this affect more than all the departments that do not have as much income as Guainía or Amazonas?
“Of the 32 departments that the country has, there are only four or five that would need to be compensated for a period of time determined by the National Government, because through this scheme that we are proposing they would receive less resources than they receive today via the General System. of participations, but only for a certain period of time that those places spend that we did not leave the side of the federal scheme because we wanted departments like Chocó, Guainía, San Andrés, La Guajira, to get out of the situation of poverty that they have ”.
“But what we have seen is that every day they are poorer. So the path we have adopted is not the one that has led to overcoming situations of poverty in those places. Among other things, because when a country has autonomy, its regions, the citizens choose better, since they are very clear that the level of development that is provided in the territory is financed with the money that they pay through their taxes, not like today through transfers that reach the Nation, to which they end up paying very little attention and that is why sometimes they are worth the same five as 80 who governs them”.
Do you think there are too many candidates for the Governor of Antioquia?
“There are four blocks for the Government, a block that is the one that represents the Quintero Petro axis, with some candidates and let’s say, only for the block that we are forming with Mauricio Tobón, Eugenio Prieto, Juan Diego Gómez and recently we invited Dr. Luis Fernando Suárez, where I have no doubt that the governor of Antioquia will come out to prevent the claims of Quintero and Petro from ending up destroying Colombia and, of course, Antioquia”.
How would you rate the management so far of President Gustavo Petro at the helm of the country?
“President Petro has caused major disasters, not just saying, not just doing things that he has had very little opportunity to do. Can you imagine what is going to happen now with Colombia the day that Mr. comes to implement the accumulation of such wrong ideas that you have in your head. It would be very unfortunate for the country.”
How would you rate the management of Mayor Daniel Quintero, Calle?
Disastrous, that’s all I want to add. Well, I think that word is illustrative enough.
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What is Federico Gutiérrez’s concept of what he did with his Medellín mayor’s office and what he also did in his presidential campaign?
“I have the best opinion and a great affection for the form. In addition, how Dr. Federico behaved with Río Negro, when he was mayor of Medellín, Río Negro bought from him a public service company that had been managed with very little technical criteria and, consequently, never had the capacity to provide drinking water to the residents. hatcheries or to clean up the Ríonegro and its tributaries, and to accumulate investment needs of more than half a million pesos”.
“Dr. Federico instructed EPM to buy that company from Río Negro with an investment commitment of more than 550 billion. Today figures of more than 400,000 have already been invested. We already owe colorless, odorless and tasteless water. The Negro River and its tributaries were cleaned up and when I asked him why he was doing that, he told me because that is what the PMT should have done a long time ago, not only in Rionegro, but also in Urabá, Antioquia, for example. , who do not have water, instead of having left, he declared, to throw away the money in Antofagasta, Chile, Central America. So I will be happy to agree with Dr. Federico, he being Mayor and I Governor, because we will be able to make EPM a true engine of development for all of Antioquia”.
In what concept do you have the management of Aníbal Gaviria in the Government of Antioquia?
“I think that the efforts must be assessed in light of the facts that we have in Antioquia, insecurity growing again illegal armed groups challenging the State, that is, with public order problems of millions of Antioquians enduring hunger. According to data from DANE, one in three Antioqueños lives on less than $12,000 a day, 26,000 kilometers from schools collapsing and we could have the longest list”.
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Do you think there should be a coalition or consultation with the right-wing candidates?
“We are assembling as a block, that is why the invitation to Luis Fernando Suárez and hopefully there will be a popular consultation that should take place on June 4 and this is the mechanism to decide who of all of us can be the only candidate.”
What do you think of Julián Bedoya and Esteban Restrepo, other candidates for the governorship of Antioquia?
“Well, they are in that block Quintero, Petro and I think that today they constitute the candidacy that will have to be overcome. Esteban Restrepo is a faithful disciple of Mayor Daniel Quintero, who has done so much damage to Medellín and also Antioquia”.
“This October 29, Colombians will have the opportunity to build a retaining wall so that Petro does not destroy Antioquia and the rest of the country. So the invitation is to win the local and regional elections to everything that has hints in the historic pact so that we preserve the institutionality and Colombian democracy”.
Why not run directly as a candidate for the Democratic Center?
“I helped build the party. I was a councilor for the Centro Democrático, which was the branch of the Liberal Party that President Uribe had run in Colombia for many years, more than 20 years ago. And I’ve known the president since I was 16 years old. I helped create the party. I collected signatures, but I also understood that the President did not want to locate the endorsement of the party in a candidacy at such an early stage, the campaign like this, a solitary candidacy, but rather in one that came out of a great coalition”.
“So I couldn’t wait for that to take place over there in July. To say by the signatures that it is an instrument to stop the Colombian democracy from activating itself in the campaign to listen to the citizens. And in parallel I am building the coalition. I hope to be the winner of that coalition and receive the endorsement of what has been my party and many other communities.