The Colombian Government ensures that your wishes for 2023, in the mission they have embarked on to achieve total peace in the country, the thing is the village, who is the one who is really building that peace, be heard by all instances.
(See: Colombia’s roadmap in the education sector for 2023).
“The wish for 2023 is that the people, who are deliberating here and who are everywhere building peace, be heard, not by the Executive power, but by the courts and the Legislative power so that they understand why they they want and are building total peace“, said to EFE the high commissioner for peace, Danilo Rueda.
Rueda visited the municipality of El Tarra, in the heart of the troubled region of Catatumbo (Norte de Santander), precisely to listen to the “townIn this case, the peasants and coca growers of this area, which is the one with the most coca plantations in the country, were heard to build a new drug policy that in turn contributes to peace in the regions.
(See: The country’s plan to stop persecuting small coca growers).
The Government’s position
Drug trafficking, which finances the country’s armed and criminal groups, is one of the aspects that the government of President Gustavo Petro wants to address and where policies diverge the most from previous administrations.
“I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth“, Petro began his first speech before the UN Assembly, last September, to talk about how in these lands beauty is mixed with death, due to the criminalization that has been made of coca and not from other Colombian resources, such as coal or oil.
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“The opinion of power has ordered that cocaine is the poison and must be prosecuted, even if it only causes minimal deaths due to overdose, and more due to the mixtures caused by its ruled clandestinity“, the president dared to say, in his desire to formulate a new anti-drug policy.
President Gustavo Petro, at the UN.
At the moment little is known about this new policy, beyond that it will not seek to criminalize small producers, because, precisely, the Government wants to consult peasants like those of Catatumbo to see their ideas at a time when Colombia has broken all records for hectares cultivated with coca.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), coca crops in Colombia grew by 43% in 2021, the year in which they were registered. 204,000 hectares planted, while in 2020 that figure was 143,000 hectares.
(See: The largest FARC dissident group announced a ceasefire by the end of the year).
And since the Government wants to base its public policies on the opinion of the people who suffer the most from violence, exclusion and conflict, “next year we have a lot of mechanisms for the direct participation of the population, which is the people who suffer and suffer from violence, so that they speak, become stronger and build the new countryRueda considered.
Namely, Colombia wants to listen more and better to the puebloblo “for peace to come”.
EFE
