Confronting Colombia's Inequality

August 31, 2022

By Sam Pizzigati
Inequality.org

The alarm bells are — sort of — ringing, Bloomberg reports, in Colombia’s most “fashionable neighborhoods of Bogotá and Medellin.”

Colombia’s newly elected progressive president has just proposed a wealth tax, on his first day in office no less. In Latin America, the world’s most unequal region, an egalitarian move like that would normally have a nation’s most privileged enraged and frothing. And some of that frothing certainly is showing up since Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first left president, proposed his new levy on grand fortunes.

A top exec with Colombia’s largest financial conglomerate now even says he sees “a significant risk” the nation’s stock market “will practically disappear” under Petro’s reign.

But Colombia’s rich are, by and large, showing little of such hysterics. Simply put, Colombia’s wealthiest just don’t feel their new president can deliver any real squeeze on their considerable net worths. Petro’s “lack of a congressional majority” and Colombia’s powerful constitutional court and central bank, as The Financial Times has comfortingly informed global investors, will most likely “temper any radical impulses” on the new administration’s part.

. . .



The headquarters of Bancolombia, a major Colombian commercial bank, in Medellin. (Juan Camilo Trujillo, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

. . .



A view of Medellin, Colombia, from the Metro Cable. (Pedro Szekely, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

More:
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/08/31/confronting-colombias-inequality/