In a message posted on his social network account X, the president indicated that an unemployment rate of 8.2 percent was registered in November, the lowest in 2024, and described it “as a theoretical slap in the face to the experts who through the traditional press want to make us believe that their ideologies, generally neoliberal, are science.”

He considered that the dogma stipulating that the lower the salary, the more employment and development is generated, clashes with reality.

“In 2024 we raised the real minimum wages, and the economy and employment rose, and at the same time the inflation rate dropped by half,” he said.

Petro estimated that food inflation of around two percent annually, countered by minimum wage increase rates of four to six percent annually, must be causing a great collapse of hunger and poverty in Colombia.

“This is what the figures for the year 2023 indicate, as one million 600 thousand people were lifted out of poverty and two million 500 thousand left behind food insecurity,” he said.

Petro foresees funds for Education in 2025 of 70 billion pesos (about 16 billion dollars at the current exchange rate) with Health accounting for 63 billion (more than 14 billion dollars), well above Defense, which will swallow 37 billion (about eight thousand 500 million dollars).

He said that most of the spending on health and education is not executed by the nation, but by municipalities.

In his words, this means that many more teachers are teaching children, and considered that the increase in municipal health spending and the substantial growth of direct transfers to clinics and hospitals, will lead to a reactivation of employment in health activities.

“This are very good news. Spending on education is what generates more equality and the increase in health personnel shows that our health reform is correct,” he said.

He also praised the fact that agriculture is the activity that grows the most in Colombia, with 10 percent annually.

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