The elected president of ColombiaGustavo Petro, announced on Tuesday the names of three ministers who will form his cabinet, which he promised will be joint, to direct the portfolios of Agriculture, Health and Environment.
During his political campaign, the leftist promised that at least 50% of all public positions would be held by women, in order to have a “real representation” of half the population.
The economist and former senator Cecilia López Montaño will be in charge of the Ministry of Agriculture, a portfolio that she had already directed in the 1990s during her long career in the State, most of it in liberal governments.
Petro proposes to carry out an agrarian reform that helps to enhance the food sovereignty of the country to reduce the importation of tons of food and supplies.
The environmentalist and political scientist Susana Mohamad will lead the Ministry of the Environment. She is currently a councilor for Bogotá for the Colombia Humana party, led by Petro. She has worked closely with the president-elect, she was part of the presidential campaign and during her term as mayor, between 2012 and 2015, she was Secretary of the Environment.
The fight against climate change is one of the banners of Petro, who promises to protect ecosystems and especially the Amazon, affected by deforestation.
It also proposes changing the “policies of death” for those of “life”, which in practice would imply accelerating the energy transition and, therefore, reducing dependence on hydrocarbons by not granting new oil exploration licenses or allowing tests of frackinga technique used to extract gas and oil from deep rocks.
Meanwhile, the psychiatrist and political scientist Carolina Corcho will head the Ministry of Health. The next official is part of a trade association and during the pandemic she demanded better working conditions, biosafety elements and decent wages for doctors.
Petro has promised that he will make changes in the current health system towards a more preventive public model, which does not depend on taxpayers’ ability to pay but which guarantees “timely access” to services.
With these appointments, Petro shapes the team of the first leftist government in Colombia that will begin on August 7. In recent days, he announced as his finance minister the renowned economist José Antonio Ocampo and the conservative Álvaro Leyva Durán to lead the Foreign Ministry.
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