Cargo transporters and truck drivers in Colombia blocked several main roads in the country, including the main accesses to Bogotá, in protest against the increase in the price of a gallon of motor fuel (ACPM) or diesel.
The protesters, who argue that the increase represents an additional expense in their operations, They began to take to the streets on Friday in caravans, but the government did not back down on the measure and since Saturday, the price of diesel has increased by the equivalent of 0.46 cents per gallon to cost 11,360 pesos (about 2.79 dollars).
According to the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá, the city where traffic chaos has worsened, more than 500 vehicles blocked several points in the city, which is why the entity provided a team of 800 managers to talk with the transporters.
Official statistics also indicated that more than 600,000 users of the TransMilenio public transport system were affected.
The situation was repeated in more than 50 municipalities in the country, including the departments of Santander, in the northeast, Antioquia, in the northwest, and Cundinamarca and Boyacá, in the center of the country, where approximately 2,300 people protested with their vehicles, generating 29 permanent blockades and 37 intermittent ones, the police detailed to the press.
Santos Sáenz, a 70-year-old driver, was stuck in the south of Bogotá on his bus transporting children, who he was unable to transport as usual after more than five hours of waiting due to the blockage.
“I am affected by the demonstration, because in reality these are things that are getting out of control… I don’t know what Mr. (President Gustavo) Petro wants by taking more taxes from us, this is a robbery,” Sáenz told The Associated Press.
Petro explained Previously, on his own account, X stated that since 2019 “the country has not raised diesel prices because prices were frozen without taking into account that they rise and that Ecopetrol, by law, uses the international price of oil to produce diesel and gasoline.”
The deficit caused by this diesel subsidy reached millions of dollars. “If these debts are paid with budgets, there will be no public investment… I have to pay the debt to Ecopetrol and it will not be done with the money that goes to hungry and unhealthy children,” said Petro.
He also said that “the country will not allow itself to be blocked” and that “the rise in diesel prices is fair because it is only recovering the money from a subsidy that should never have been given and which already accounts for a large fraction of Colombia’s public debt.”
With an eye on dialogue
The Ministry of Transport agreed to meet with transporters’ spokesmen on Tuesday in an attempt to reach an emergency agreement, despite having held talks for several months without success. Meetings were held in the morning and part of the afternoon, without reaching an agreement.
María Constanza García, the minister in charge of the portfolio, said that the government has been open to dialogue and that they have “expressed the need for this increase.” “We have gone 56 months without making this increase,” she added.
However, truckers said the diesel price increase is a blow to their economy, and they are not sure they will be able to deal with it when the government orders two more increases to reach a dollar and a half more per gallon of diesel.
“I am a truck driver and the increase in a normal trip we make is more than 100 or 120 thousand pesos (29 dollars). We are at a loss,” he told AP Diego Torres, member of the Bogotá brick truck drivers association.
For Torres, the rise in diesel prices was added to other complaints from transporters such as the lack of security on the roads, where they consider there is little presence of public forces, and the poor condition of the road network.
“We are ready (to protest) if we have to wait one, two, three days, because we are really tired of the abuse, we are waiting for an agreement to be reached,” he warned.
For its part, the National Trade Union Council, which brings together economic unions from various sectors of Colombia, rejected the strike, through a letterand invited the protesters to dialogue: “Within the framework of the exercise of the right to peaceful protest, other fundamental rights of society cannot be violated, such as freedom of movement, the right to work, access to food and essential services.”
Regional authorities also urged the government to sit down and talk.
The Petro government has set out to close the deficit in public finances that has been created over the years in the Fuel Price Stabilization Fund (Fepc) with which the government covered the difference between the value of fuels in the country and the international price of oil.
[Con información de AP]
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