This is what the candidates said about Fecode in the Great Debate

During the Great Debate organized by Canal RCN and RCN Radio, Federico Gutiérrez, Ingrid Betancourt, Sergio Fajardo and Enrique Gómez, a candidate for the National Salvation Movement, attended a debate for the first time. One of the topics was education, with specific reference to the Colombian Federation of Educators (Fecode), a union that generates quite a bit of controversy in Colombia.

It should be noted that Fecode has nearly 250,000 affiliated teachers out of the nearly 320,000 teachers throughout the country.

At many times teachers refused to return to the pandemic face-to-face, which is why the candidates were asked what they would do with the Federation.

In this regard, he proposed creating an educational voucher so that parents can choose the school where they take their children.

Sergio Fajardo, for his part, proposed having a conversation with Fecode “without entering the world of aggression”. In this way, he explained that the guild should not be blamed for poor education in Colombia, “we have to summon them.”

Later, Ingrid Betancourt's intervention began by highlighting the importance of trade unions in the country, however, he clarified that in the case of Fecode it has been politicized and the main interest has ceased to be the good education of children. For this reason, he pointed out that if he is president “I will contact the union base, the teachers”, so that agreements can be reached to improve education in the country.

Finally, the candidate Federico Gutiérrez declared that in the Federation you cannot put all teachers in the same group, given that the vast majority are very good, but that there are some who showed that they had political interests and ended up on lists for Congress.

In the afternoon, Gustavo Petro announced through his Twitter account that he would not participate in any discussion between candidates “until the transparency of the vote is guaranteed”, referring to the counting of votes requested by the national registrar, Alexander Vega and also denouncing that there is no “transparent chain of custody”, for the manipulation of the corresponding votes of the elections held on 13 March.

So things were attended by Federico Gutiérrez, Ingrid Betancourt, Sergio Fajardo and Enrique Gómez, a candidate for the National Salvation Movement who was attending a debate for the first time. Petro's lectern was empty throughout the meeting.

One of the issues was the economic crisis that the country is going through due to inflation, generated by the high prices of imports of inputs for planting and growing food in the Colombian countryside. Sergio Fajardo and Federico Gutiérrez agreed that more inputs should be produced internally for agricultural development, but Gómez - who records 0.3% of intention to vote according to the latest poll conducted by the firm YanHass - blamed the candidate of the Historical Pact for the rise in prices of much food.

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