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Iván Duque: Always contributing for the good of Colombia
Outgoing Colombian President Iván Duque speaks with The Jakarta Post’s M. Taufiqurrahman about his time in office and what he considers to be his legacy in this excerpt of an interview in late July.
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Colombian President Iván Duque addresses the closing session of a virtual World Health Assembly meeting via video link from the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO), as seen in this screenshot taken on May 19, 2020 from the WHO website. (World Health Organization/AFP/-)
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he first and only four-year term of Colombian President Iván Duque is to end this week, with Duque slated to hand over the presidency to his successor, leftist politician and former Bogota mayor Gustavo Petro. Considered one of the most democratic nations in Latin America, the Colombian constitution mandates that a president may serve only a single term.
Media and think tanks have hailed Duque’s presidency as a success, noting in particular his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and expanding trade, especially with the United States, which provided his administration with enough cash to deliver broad social programs. Yet despite these and other achievements, voters elected a left-wing politician to succeed conservative Duque, with The Atlantic titling an article in its early June edition about the outgoing president: “The President Who Did Everything But Got No Thanks”.
Late last month, outgoing President Duque spoke with The Jakarta Post’s M. Taufiqurrahman about his time in office and what he considers to be his legacy. Below is an excerpt from that interview.
Question: What do you believe to be your legacy after four years in office?
Answer: History will see that I had to deal with a pandemic during 30 months of the 48 months of my administration, the world’s biggest crisis in recent history. But we were able to massively vaccinate the Colombian population and we ended up on the Bloomberg [Covid Resilience Ranking] as the number one country in Latin America, second in the Americas and 12th in the world, and that [showed] we did the right thing. Also, not only we were able to recover the jobs we lost, but we were [also] able to create the biggest social safety net ever in Colombia’s history.
Even [during] the pandemic we continued accelerating our national development plan. We were able to give Colombians free public university education to the emerging middle class and the poorest of the poor, build more than 300 schools, increase minimum wage at a historical record in real terms for more than 50 years. We also [had] the lowest homicide rate in 40 years.
We also accelerated our energy transition, we put Colombia in the eyes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution around the world, we have reached a record high in agricultural exports and also in goods and services. We managed the migration crisis from Venezuela, providing them with temporary protection status.
