Remarks: Public Lunch - Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia
Remarks: Public Lunch - Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia
Access the transcript of remarks by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos during a public lunch hosted by Americas Society and Council of the Americas.
Public Lunch: Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia
Welcome:
John Negroponte,
Chairman,
Americas Society/Council of the Americas
Speaker:
President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia
Location: New York City, New York
Time: 12:30 p.m. EDT
Date: Thursday, September 22, 2011
His foreign policy has strengthened regional relationships and greatly enhanced Colombia’s position within the hemisphere. He has resolutely continued the battle against the FARC and corruption, and further strengthened national security through increased funding for security forces and the appointment of new military commanders.
Pursuing a growth path with an emphasis on social inclusion, President Santos has begun the work of reducing poverty and generating formal employment. Under his leadership, gross domestic project has surged to 5.1 percent in the first quarter of this year. And because of a strong expansion in credit and consumer confidence, GDP in 2011 is expected to grow between 5.5 and 6 percent.
There is enormous optimism as regards the future of Colombia. And as we can see through the participation of everyone here today, Colombia is a significant investment destination.
And one final word on the free trade agreement: As we have discussed many times, we at the Council of the Americas will continue to work to ensure that Congress finally acts on the FTA – (applause) – for we see this as very important not only for Colombia and the United States, support of one our chief allies in the hemisphere, but also for jobs and growth in our own country.
Again, it is with great honor and satisfaction that we welcome President Juan Manuel Santos. Thank you for agreeing to speak to us. Mr. President, the floor is yours. (Applause.)
PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS: Thank you very much, John, for this generous presentation. I thank all the members of the council, all the sponsors for this opportunity, and of course all of you for being here and giving me the chance to very briefly tell you about what is happening in my country.
It’s been a bit over a year since I took office, a year since I spoke here at the council when I came to the General Assembly of the U.N. And it’s been a very interesting and successful year.
People ask, why is Colombia doing so well? Why is Colombia signaled as a case of success? How can you explain that in a difficult region, difficult situation internally? The damage that the flooding caused has been unprecedented in our history. More than 3.2 million people were affected by the flooding, by the rains. So why is it that we’re doing so well?
And I think the key to that answer is political. It’s a word that I have always cherished very much. It’s called governability, the ability to govern, the ability to deliver. You have no opportunity to govern; you have no ability to deliver.
And since that campaign I made this an issue, and that’s why I called for a government of national unity, a call that was answered, answered positively by the major political parties. And that allowed us to have the political basis and the political power to approve a series of reforms that has generated a whole process of optimism and of positive expectations for our country.
It’s a government of national unity that became so successful – modesty apart – that the Green Party, which was the party that confronted me in the elections, recently joined the National Unity a couple of months ago, and now we only control – a bit embarrassing to say – only 95 percent of the Congress. But that has a very important aspect about it. That allows us to produce reforms and deliver on the campaign promises, and that’s what we have been doing over the last year.
When I came here to the council last year, I made a series of promises of what we expected to do in our government. I said we would reform the constitution in order to distribute more evenly, with more justice, the royalties that we are receiving from the oil and the mineral exploitation. Some people said that was impossible, but we did it. We approved a change in our constitution which will allow us to invest much better the product of those royalties.
And, as a matter of fact, we introduced a clause in the constitution saying that 10 percent of all the royalties has to go directly to research and development, to technology and innovation, thinking about the long-term future.
Another very important reform that we managed to approve was a law called a victims and restitution of land law. It was a very controversial law. It’s a very audacious law. But what that is trying to seek is, for Colombia, that we have had 40, 50 years of violence and we have accumulated a lot of resettlement, and we have many, many open wounds.
This law will allow us to start healing those wounds by repairing the victims, hundreds of thousands of victims, and by giving the persons that were displaced by the violence the opportunity to go back to their land and become dignified and productive citizens again.
And this law has created tremendous expectations, and I think this will allow Colombia to start a process that will permit us to look to the future with more optimism and not going after each other, claiming justice.
I say that I want to avoid the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo claiming justice for what happened to their sons in every single plaza in Colombia, and I think this type of approach and this law will allow us to do that.
In the middle of this very difficult economic situation the world is going through, we managed to approve a constitutional reform that introduced, in the Constitution, the criteria of fiscal sustainability. And one month later we had a law approved called the fiscal rule, which forces the government to behave fiscally within certain limits and prohibits, in a way, expanding your fiscal deficit more than X percent.
These reforms, the two – the constitutional reform and the fiscal rule – immediately had an impact, a very positive impact, in the world markets. We were rewarded with the investment grade by the credit agencies, but, much more important, we were rewarded by the markets because we issued – we made a bond issue, the biggest in our history, more than double than the biggest one we had made before.
But the most important thing is that we did it at the lowest cost in our history. And today, the spreads of the Colombian debt are even below many of the G-8 countries. And I can go on with other reforms. We made one of the most voluminous, legitimate years of our history, reforms on anticorruption in law that is probably state of the art.
It’s very, very tough to fight corruption with effective means. After 19 attempts we managed to approve a law that allows us to organize the country by regions and plan the development of the county by regions, which was a very big step in organizing our development plan.
We approved other laws in other spheres that have given the Colombians, and for investors, the sensation that Colombia is going in the correct path. And that is something that I cherish very much, and I think it’s extremely important, especially in today’s world – optimism.
John was mentioning the polls about my popularity. That could be way (off ?). My kid, Martín, who is here with me, says, Dad, congratulations. And I said, well, don’t be so optimistic because it can only go down from now on. (Laughter.) And it will certainly go down.
But the thing that is very important is the result of the polls that I think are the important results is that the people think that the country is going in the right direction. They’re optimistic. Seventy-eight (percent), 79 percent of the people think that the country is going in the right direction, and they think that their kids are going to be better off in the future than themselves.
This, in today’s world, is a very, very important asset, and that’s what we want to maintain and stimulate and protect. And that’s, in a way, what we’re trying to do every single day, because optimism for society is like – I compare it to a sun with the plants. Without the sun the plants don’t grow. Without optimism, a society cannot grow.
And, in a way, this is what is happening, and I’m sorry to say, here in the U.S., in Europe or Japan. You ask them if you think the future is going to be better and they start doubting, and they say, probably not. This must be – it must be changed because a society without optimism is a much weaker society, and that’s what we’re trying to do in Colombia, to strengthen the optimism.
And if you have those two elements, optimism and unity – political unity in order to deliver – then the ability to govern becomes much easier. And then you can put in place the correct public policies, the correct economic and, in general, the correct decisions to progress.
That has allowed us also to be very proactive in the international scene, something that I also said I would do in the campaign and here in the council when I came a year ago. And we have been successful. We have – I’m today here with my foreign minister, María Ángela Holguín, who has been extremely effective in positioning Colombia with a new face, with a new attitude.
As you all know, we made peace with our neighbors. We now have a normal diplomatic relationship. We have a proactive and a useful communication, respecting our differences.
When I sat with President Chavez a year ago, I said to him, listen, I don’t expect you to become a liberal democrat and you cannot expect me to become a bona fide revolutionist – (laughter) – but let’s speak to each other because we have a border of 2,200 kilometers and we have the responsibility with our people, Venezuelans and Colombians, to cooperate on common issues.
And that’s what we have been doing in the last year, with very good results. Same thing with Ecuador. Relations with Ecuador are much better. And that allowed us to play a more proactive role in the whole region, and allowed us to do a mediation, for example, with the problem with Honduras.
That allowed President Chavez and myself to mediate with the two factions in Honduras to resolve that situation, and now Honduras is again an official member of the OAS, and the situation there is normalized. That allowed Colombia – who would think that that would happen, to have the Secretary General of UNASUR in the group of South American countries.
That has allowed us to create what we call the Alliance for the Pacific – Mexico, Chili, Peru and Colombia. We decided to integrate ourselves more in order to project ourselves as a group vis-à-vis what is happening in Asia and to attract investment. And that has created a lot of interest in many – in many areas of the world.
So, the ability to govern and the combination of optimism and political unity has opened the doors to many of the decisions that have been made with good results in Colombia. The economy is going through a very positive path.
You mentioned 5.1 percent the first quarter of this year. I just received, this morning, the figures on the second quarter. It’s 5.2 percent. And we expect to grow over 5.5 percent, or around 5.5 percent this year if nothing extraordinary happens in the world. But the internal demand is very good.
We identified five what we call “locomotives” to push economic growth, and all of them are doing very well. All of them are growing at a very fast pace – agriculture, housing, the mineral and energy sector, infrastructure.
In infrastructure, what we are doing is planning correctly. Colombia had a very Latin American problem, which was we tried to do things in a hurry, and the projects many times were not well structured. And so problems always emerged in the middle of the project and things were delayed, and many of the projects simply were suspended halfway, and that’s the worst and the most expensive project, ones that are never finished.
Well, we decided to sort of take a breath and project the country infrastructure with a solid base and solid studies and structure the projects correctly, and that’s what we’re doing and there’s going to be a huge, huge investment in infrastructure in the next years that – and we’re going to need a lot of foreign investment and foreign participation in the upgrading of our infrastructure.
And last but not least, we are giving a lot of importance to that magic word called “innovation.” The Latin American economies in general have a very low productivity. There is a tremendous amount of space to grow through improving our productivity through innovation.
And that’s why we are financing part of the innovation with the royalties but, again, attracting foreign investment and stimulating our own universities and schools to adopt the culture of innovation.
We have been very aggressive also on the free trade agreements. I believe in free trade. We believe in free trade. And the free trade agreement with Canada went into effect last 15th of August. The trade agreement with Switzerland went into effect last July.
We are expanding our trade with all the region. We want to negotiate a new agreement with Venezuela, which has been our very important trading partner. Today our trade is very, very reduced, very limited, but there’s a tremendous potential there.
With Mexico, we renegotiated our trade agreement with Central America. We have free trade with the three northern countries of Central America. We’re in the middle of a negotiation with Panama. We’re starting negotiations with Costa Rica.
We are expanding towards Asia. I made a trip last week to Japan and Korea. Japan decided to start a process called the EPA, Economic Partnership Agreement, with Colombia, which is one step beyond a free trade agreement. There is a tremendous enthusiasm in the Japanese businessmen in Colombia.
And we went to Korea. The Korean president surprised us, quite frankly, saying, we want to put the relations with Colombia at the same level we have with Japan and with the U.S., at the highest level possible. And the free trade agreement, which we had wanted to negotiate – wanted to negotiate for many, many years, we’re going to finish negotiating the free trade agreement hopefully by December.
With Europe, this morning I received the news that the commission approved the final version of the free trade agreement. It should go to the European parliament the beginning of next year, and hopefully she will be approved in the first quarter.
And the U.S. free trade agreement, which, as you know, it’s in the hands of God. (Laughter, applause.) I am optimistic, regardless of the political polarization that one is seeing in the U.S. Congress, that around the issue of the free trade agreements with Colombia, with Korea – with Korea and Panama, there is an agreement.
We have the votes. And if things continue to flow as they have flowed in the past days, I am confident that we will have a free trade agreement finally by the middle of next month. I sincerely hope so. (Applause.)
By pure coincidence, yesterday when we were going out from the U.N. Assembly, we bumped into each other with the Korean president and the Panamanian president, the three together. And the three of us said, let’s make a little prayer. (Laughter.) And then we continued. So we’re in good hands.
So things are going, I think, in the correct direction. What a coincidence. A year ago – a year ago exactly today, I went, as I did this morning, to run in Central Park very early in the morning. When I came back a year ago, I was surprised by the director of my police, that called me urgently. They had shot down the symbol of terrorism in Colombia, the Mono Jojoy. He was the most sought, most wanted terrorist in Colombia. That was a year ago.
And that, in a way, was also a tipping point in this very long struggle that we’ve had with the FARC, with the ELN, with terrorism, with these illegal groups. The security situation has continued to improve. All the indicators say so. But they are – there’s still some work to do there. We’re trying to do it in the most effective way.
Our success in terms of security has brought new problems. For example, we have gone to areas that had never been touched by the Colombian armed forces, and we’re going into the traditional areas that the FARC has dominated for 40 years.
This has forced them to go out of those areas and try to finance themselves by other means. So they go again to try to extort or try to even kidnap. And so we are going after them in that respect. But all the indicators in general are improving.
We have to protect much larger areas of Colombia. Three years ago, four years ago, for example, in the oil exploration there were 8 million square kilometers that were protected by the armed forces. Now it’s 39 million, and with the same amount because the army has not grown. There are logistical internal problems in terms of that we don’t have enough officers because the growth before was very big.
And so we have to adapt to these new circumstances. The illegal groups have gone into – because of their weakness to terrorist activities – as you know, these terrorist activities are easy to do, and they have a lot of – they do – they raise a lot of noise. It has no military effect. It’s a show of weakness. But we have to persevere, and we are persevering, and we will win. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind about that aspect in Colombia.
So, in some we’re doing well. We’re going on the right path. We have political support. The international arena is a bit shaky. We don’t know what was happening with the economy. We have to protect ourselves. We are in a much better shape than we were in the year 2008 when the crisis came. Colombia was very little affected comparatively speaking.
We are now in a much better position in the year 2008. We have more reserves. The quality of our financial assets is even better. The debt is lower. The fiscal situation is sounder. It’s healthier. The growth is higher. So we are well protected.
Of course, nobody is completely protected against what could happen internationally. That’s why we again reiterated with the Brazilian president yesterday afternoon the need to create a much more coordinated effort among the South American and Latin American countries.
The more we trade with each other, the more we coordinate our policies, the better off we’re all going to be. If something happens and we decided to instruct our ministers that – they are today in the IMF meeting in Washington – to get together next week and put in place policies and study policies that would allow us to protect ourselves better from any unpredictable situation in the world economy.
Politically – in the U.N., as you know, the issue is Palestine. There Colombia has a very clear option – a very clear position. Our position is we are in favor of the Palestinian state. We support the right of the Palestinians to have a state. And we support the right of Israel to have a state and to live in peace.
And the way to achieve that is through negotiations and through a peace agreement, because the ultimate objective is not to have a state. It’s to live in peace. It’s a fundamental right of any citizen of the world, and we defend that right. And we defend the way to achieve that right.
So we support the Palestinian cause, but we do want that state to be the consequence, the product of a peace agreement with Israel, because both the Palestinians and the Israelis have a right, and they should negotiate how they can live in peace. That has been our position for the last 60 years.
It’s a problem that is not 60 years old; it’s 2,000 years old. And we must understand that you cannot impose on any of the two sides any solution. The solution must come from a negotiated agreement on both parties. And that’s what we support and that’s the position we will continue to support. Hopefully the world can find a solution to this problem, which is today’s problem, the one that is being discussed in the U.N.
So, to sum up, let me just given you an example of how Colombia has changed.
John Leguizamo is a very well known, by many of you, actor. He’s Colombian. He left Colombia 44 years ago. He came back last week, and he went to the palace and he said, I want to become, if you allow me, Mr. President, your ambassador in all the acting industries around the world, because I want to pay back to Colombia what I missed in these 44 years. I went because there was no opportunities in Colombia. My mother was very scared. She lived with me – and she’s still alive – and she said to me a year ago, when they shot Mono Jojoy, we must now go back to our country because it’s now the country of opportunities.
And so I said to John, you, from now on, will be our ambassador in Hollywood and the rest of the acting world, but please play a positive role. And he promised me that he would do that. But that shows how things are changing, and very fast, in our country. I hope that we can continue that path.
I was in the navy some many years ago, and I learned that when you have a port of destination and you sail, what you need to do is to use the winds that – they change very frequently, but use the winds to get to the port. I think Colombia has identified a port, and we’re using the winds, some good, some bad, but we’re advancing every day in order to achieve that port.
That port is nothing different from a country with less poverty, with more employment, a country that will give more opportunities to more people. That’s what we’ll work for 24 hours a day from now on until my mandate is finished. Thank you. (Applause.)
MR. NEGROPONTE: The president has kindly agreed to take some questions, so if we can have questions from the audience. We have a microphone. I can’t see extremely well, but when you do ask your question, if you could stand up, wait until you have the mike, and identify yourself and then ask your question.
Yes, right in front here.
Q: Mr. President, Mike Skull (ph) of Skull & Cerna (ph).
How do you react to the prediction by many in the oil community that Colombia will, within a very few years, surpass Venezuela in the production and exportation of oil?
PRESIDENT SANTOS: Well, how do I react? I react very favorably. (Laughter.) If the trends continue, that might certainly be a fact, even though Venezuela has huge, huge reserves, they discovered even new reserves that make Venezuela apparently – with big reserves in Saudi Arabia.
But we in Colombia are trying to increase our production. A lot of Venezuelans have come to Colombia with technology that has allowed us to increase the production substantially. Our objective in terms of production was for the four years we were planning to reach 1 million barrels a day. We are, in this first 12 months, already at 957,000 barrels a day, up more than 20 percent.
So we will achieve our objective of four years probably at the end of this year, beginning of next year. And if that trend continues and the Venezuelan trend continues, that may happen. Of course, it would be temporarily because the reserves in Venezuela so far are huge and much, much bigger than Colombia’s.
MR. NEGROPONTE: So, the lady right here.
Q: Thank you very much, Mr. President, for your remarks. This is Carola Sandy from Credit Suisse.
Here in New York we’re all very concerned about what’s happened in the U.S. economy, the European countries. At the same time, we’re very glad to know that the economy in Colombia is doing quite well. However, as you said, no country is going to be immune to a significant slowdown of global growth.
So my question is, is your government already considering measures on the fiscal front to shield the Colombian economy from a global slowdown if it were to be severe in the future? And if not, what do you think the Colombian government should do and how much margin does it have to execute more spending?
PRESIDENT SANTOS: The answer to that question should be another question: What are the risks? Where are the risks? What are they and where are they? What risk could Colombia have at this moment? First, the financial markets, that either the cost of financing or the availability of financing is affected.
We have ample reserves. We have, so far, enough credibility to go to international markets with no problem. As a matter of fact, we did a swap in our debt two days ago. I asked the foreign minister – the finance minister, I said, the markets are too volatile. Why don’t you postpone it? And he said, have confidence, Mr. President. This will be successful. It was demanded 12 times at a very low cost.
And so, the confidence in Colombia is still there. It might go away. But we have – we have sources of finance that will allow us a long time without having to go back to the international markets if something of that nature happens.
The other risk is a crisis of confidence, which will translate into lower demand for our goods, maybe the prices of our commodities coming down. There’s very little we can do against that if that happens. The way to shield yourself from that is exactly what we discussed with Dilma Rousseff yesterday: Let’s start trading much more among the economies that are growing, and are growing at a high rate.
And that’s what we’re going to try to do, have a much more dynamic South-South cooperation. Hopefully the North will fix, but we cannot simply wait to see that happen because, unfortunately, what we’re seeing is that they’re running out of ammunition. We don’t see the European economies with audacious plans. We don’t see an end to this crisis. And we cannot simply sit and wait to see what happens. We must be proactive, and that’s what we’re doing.
We have to be very careful on the quality of our financial assets, and I think our financial institutions and our financial system today is very, very solid. So that’s the way you protect yourself from an eventual international crisis, but, again, complete protection, that does not exist.
MR. NEGROPONTE: We have time for one more question. Here, the gentleman in front. This will be the last question.
Q: Good afternoon, Mr. President. I’m Hunter Carter with Arent Fox and with the New York City Bar Association. I thank you for coming, and I salute you again for all of your amazing accomplishments. As both a New Yorker and as a part-time Colombian, I have benefited enormously in the last year on these improvements.
Mr. President, on top of all these extraordinary improvements, are you prepared today to tell us whether you or your representatives are in negotiations with the representatives of the FARC to demobilize? And if not, why not? And if so, when do you think – what kind of results could demobilization with the FARC produce for Colombia in the immediate future?
PRESIDENT SANTOS: Don’t you have an easier question? (Laughter.)
Listen, what I’ve said on this issue is the door to a negotiation is not locked and the key is not in the bottom of the sea. The key is in my pocket. And until I see a real willingness of these groups to reach an agreement, there will be no negotiations and we will continue to persevere on our military strategy, which has been very successful.
I will give you some figures of the last year: 2,200 members of the FARC demobilized, 1,150 captured, 500 killed. In some it’s 4,500 in one year. Many of their leaders, strategic leaders, have been shot down or captured. And we will continue that until they realize – and I hope that they have already realized that through violence and through their strategy of terrorism, they will achieve nothing. They will only find death or jail.
And if they realize that and they want to negotiate, we’re open and we will be generous. And I will take the key out of my pocket and I will open the door. But until I see that, we will continue our military push. (Applause.)
MR. NEGROPONTE: Mr. President, on behalf of the Colombian American Association, the America Society, and the Council of the Americas, thank you very much for being with us this afternoon. And please know that you have many, many friends, not only right here in this room and in this city, but throughout the United States of America. And thank you again for being here. (Applause.)
(END)
