From a tax to attacks: Colombia’s unrelenting unrest

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm Jason Palmer, back as your host. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The BBC is under renewed pressure after an investigation found its blockbuster 1995 interview with Princess Diana was obtained by nefarious means. We ask what that long-ago indiscretion means for an already troubled national broadcaster today. And in Costa Rica, good luck finding a particular building. Addresses don't really exist. There are just directions. We look at how the post and public services can work when it's a matter of "go past this pink fence and hang a right at that tree." First up, though, Riots have been raging in Colombia for more than 3 weeks now. The protests began on April 28th in response to President Ivan Duque's proposed tax reform legislation. Mr. Duque quickly withdrew the bill following a backlash, and the finance minister then resigned. But resentment against economic hardship and the president himself has grown into wider discontent. At least 42 people have died. Hundreds more have been injured. How Mr. Duque responds next will be crucial, not only for the future of his leadership, but also for the future of Colombia.

Cali is Columbia's third-largest city. It's usually a very festive city, but lately it feels incredibly dystopian.

Mariana Palau is The Economist's Colombia correspondent. She's been speaking to the president about the protests.

Stations along the city's public transportation system, they've been destroyed, they've been burned. One thing that struck me is that many petrol stations have been abandoned. And then there's also many street junctions and streets overall that have been blocked by protesters. When I spoke to them, what they told me was that they weren't planning to leave anytime soon. They wanted the country to change and they had seen enough corruption and they'd had enough of being poor.

They want the country to change how, though? What sort of change do they want?

Well, people are mostly out here because of economic discontent. Colombia has experienced economic growth in the last two decades, sometimes as high as 7%. But despite this growth, inequality remains really high. In fact, Colombia is one of the most unequal countries in the world. They want a basic income program for about 20 million people that would cost the government about 6% of GDP. And another thing that is very important is that most of these protesters are young. And, you know, they are the ones that are worst hit by this lack of economic opportunities by the pandemic. Unemployment among Colombia's young is higher than the national average. And even before the pandemic, around 28% of those aged between 20 and 24 were neither employed or studying.

And that's the view from protesters, but you've been speaking with President Duque earlier this month. What's his view of what's happening here?

We met through a video conference, and the president was sitting at his desk with the Colombian flag behind him. And President Duque is a very eloquent man, and so he's very good at explaining what he thinks is behind the protest and what he thinks could be the solutions to all these problems.

We had the negative growth in our economy last year, 6%, -6%. We tried to address many of the social needs, but I think at this moment there is a lot of sentiments that have been compiled over the last year. So there are people who are expressing peacefully their needs. So we're talking about labor opportunities, for the youngsters. We're listening to people that want to have access to more social benefits.

And how is Mr. Duque responding to the protests?

I think the president is trying to balance two worlds. I mean, whether he is doing that successfully or not, I guess it's the subject of fierce debate. But Mr. Duque says he is trying to meet with representatives of the protesters.

So in each of the cases, we want to have the best address possible. For the people who are protesting peacefully, listen and acting. For the people that have been organizing the national strike, we said, okay, let's sit down, let's negotiate, let's see what you have on your table, and we will be able to build a course consensus. On the people that have acted with violence, we have to act with all the capacity of the police bodies and the judicial bodies. And for the people who are blockading the roads of Colombia or some roads of Colombia, we definitely have to act according to the So he says he's listening, he's willing to sit down to negotiate.

Do you think he's also willing to meet the demands that you were talking about?

The president has announced some measures that are meant to appease protesters. So, for example, earlier this month, he announced that approximately 50% of students, those belonging to the lower classes, will receive free education at a public university. And the government will also soon launch this job subsidy scheme in which it covers around 25% of a minimum wage for many 18- to 25-year-olds. And this would last about a year.

And do you think that's enough?

So far, the meetings with Mr. Duque and civil society groups haven't really worked. I mean, these announcements haven't really led to people going home to stop protesting. So, for example, he has met the National Strike Committee, and this is a conglomerate of trade unions and other pressure groups that convened the protests. But, you know, although this strike committee has the ability to summon protesters to the street, it's not clear whether they can do the opposite or send them home because they don't represent everyone out there.

But as you say, Mr. Duque is balancing two worlds here and looks a bit stuck. Where did it go wrong for him? Is this all because of the U-turn on the tax bill?

It's not necessarily all because of the tax bill. So the president hasn't been a very popular president. Before the protests, he had an approval rating of around 33%, and it is likely likely to be much lower now. The president, for example, has failed to deliver on his campaign promise to make Colombia safer, right? In 2018, voters chose him rather than the leftist Gustavo Petro because he came from the Democratic Center Party, and that party is known as the party of security. At the beginning of his term, however, Mr. Duque spent most of his time attacking a peace deal that was signed between Juan Manuel Santos, his predecessor, and the FARC Marxist guerrilla group. And that is a peace deal that was signed in 2016. Many experts say that he should have focused instead on fighting the root causes of crime, like a faulty justice system.

And what about Colombia's politics? How does all of this play into Mr. Duque's political position?

Mr. Duque is politically weak right now, and that doesn't really help the situation.

Before I even gave my victory speech, you saw what the other contenders said. You saw it. He said that he was going to keep people in the streets all of my term, and that he was going to sustain that all of my term. Well, he has been a promoter of many of these things. But I just don't want to engage in politics because I'm not running for office. There's no reelection in Colombia.

His term ends in August 2022, and his party doesn't have a majority in Congress. In fact, his party has stood against him in some circumstances, specifically against this last tax reform bill. They opposed it. Meanwhile, you have Mr. Petro. He's Colombia's most notorious left-wing politician. And he is trying to make the most out of this. He's trying to strike this balance between supporting the protests, which most Colombians also support, and opposing the roadblocks, which most Colombians find objectionable. And he's leading in the polls right now, so if he is able to strike that balance, then he may become Colombia's first, like, first left-wing president. Even if he doesn't, however, it's clear that Colombia has changed. It's a different country from what it was in the '90s and early 2000s, and that is inevitably going to transform the political landscape here.

Mariana, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondents, take out a subscription to The Economist. Get a great introductory deal at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. In Britain, the national broadcaster, the BBC, is under fire for how its documentary program Panorama obtained an explosive interview with Princess Diana in 1995. A report out last week suggested that journalist Martin Bashir tricked the princess into giving that interview. Her sons have given candid views on the finding. Prince Harry remarked on a culture of exploitation and unethical practices in the media, and Prince William reiterated that the interview had wide-reaching consequences. It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBC's failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia, and isolation that I remember from those final years with her. As ever with stories about the BBC, there's a political angle here. Prime Minister Boris Johnson weighed in on the controversy.

I can only imagine the feelings of the, of the royal family, and I hope very much that the BBC will be taking every possible step to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.

Successive Conservative governments have sought to crimp the BBC's scope and its power to raise funds as the media landscape around it grows increasingly competitive. To defend itself, the corporation has relied on a broad and deep public trust. This latest report puts that into jeopardy.

This was a highly significant interview in the story of Princess Diana, the breakdown of her marriage to Prince Charles, and everything that followed.

Anne McElvoy is a senior editor at The Economist, and we should mention, a frequent contributor to BBC programs.

In it, she gave that famous quote that there were three of them in the marriage, referring to Charles's affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. She spoke about her unhappiness in the royal family, her bulimia. The implications of that interview were that her last remaining links with the palace and her relationship with the royal family broke down, and that she was made even more paranoid by the circumstances in which that interview was acquired. That's the charge. That is what is so toxic and so explosive all these years on.

Well, it is some years on. Why was this new inquiry conducted so, so much time later, and what did it find?

A lot of this has come to light after renewed pressure from Diana's brother, Earl Spencer. The BBC itself commissioned this report, and it was conducted by a former Supreme Court judge, John Dyson. So it was a truly independent report, and that basically blew everything open, and we were able to look in detail at the very underhand methods by which Martin Bashir acquired some evidence which it's alleged he used to get access to that interview, which were extremely dishonest, including forgeries.

But forging what? What did he do to secure the interview?

Most astonishing is that Martin Bashir used phony bank documents which he had drawn up by a graphic designer, and he used these to claim that there were payments to officials and aides of Princess Diana, many of whom were very prominent people people at the time, made by a journalist to induce her brother— that's Earl Spencer— to arrange a meeting between Bashir and Diana, in effect to facilitate the interview, that he then lied about doing so, and that even when some suspicions did come to light, the BBC covered this up, or at least refused to take it very seriously at all in an internal review the following year. So there are two levels here. One is the behavior of Martin Bashir, which look very unethical journalistically. But there's also the lackadaisical response of the BBC itself, and that is what has become so highly significant for the broadcasting corporation. The BBC has fully accepted the report and apologized for what happened. Martin Bashir has issued a kind of apology. He has recently left the BBC citing health grounds.

But we know that, that journalists were, uh, going to, to great lengths to, to get the story out of Diana at the time.

There was an absolute frenzy for coverage of Princess Diana and her unhappy marriage. I wrote quite a lot about it myself. I know that there was a briefing war going on. She certainly wanted to get her story out there, and the inquiry concluded that she was happy to give the interview. She wanted to make her pain very clear. Others were certainly overstepping the mark. Her private phone calls were listened into. All sorts of ruses were used in this period in Fleet Street, in the media.

But this, I do think, goes one step further, which is why it sent such shockwaves through the country that this has been brought up again.

I think the reason it sent shockwaves is that you have here two defining British institutions. So you've got the BBC and you have the royals and the monarchy. They are two very big and important outward-facing aspects of Britain PLC, and they have been at war over this issue. And we've seen the very angry response from Prince Harry and Prince William. I think the other aspect that has now come to light very bluntly is that the way the BBC dealt with this back in the day allowed a lot of people to rise and to continue with their glittering careers. So I think there is a lot of soul-searching going on about how that could happen. There's a bit of a culture war here as well about the BBC and how it deals with its internal matters. Some of that is political and some of it is simply about the ethics of journalism.

Well, on the political part of the question, we've spoken on the show before about how in particular Conservative governments have wanted to squeeze the BBC. This, this kind of starts to look like a convenient cudgel for them.

There's been an often uneasy relationship between Conservative governments and the BBC. The The Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said this morning that he felt it needed deep change to stay in tune with the nation. So you can hear he's kind of reflecting there that sense that the BBC is a bit of a liberal institution, which from his point of view doesn't really get what conservative Britain is thinking or reflect it. There's also a bit of attention about the way the BBC is funded, which is in essence a levy on everyone in Britain who owns a television set, and that has, I think, rumbled away for years. One idea that is being floated in Westminster particularly is that there should be more of an independent external editorial board keeping an eye on the BBC. But that does move the BBC closer to looking a bit like a state broadcaster, so that's going to be a very difficult line to tread. So you could say this is a cudgel to beat the BBC, but unfortunately the BBC does appear to have handed some of its foes a very big cudgel indeed.

And what about the international effects of this then? And we've certainly heard also how the BBC is struggling in a far wider media market than it once did.

I think the effects on this for the global reputation of the BBC are quite a serious aspect of this story, but it also has existential threats to its business model, not least from global streaming services and from the fact that the Netflix generation, so-called, or generation of getting their news from clips from YouTube are not turning to the BBC as automatically as their parents did. So it really does need to stabilise its reputation. It needs to clean out its stables. It needs to get back what it thrives on most, which is a reputation for trust and high standards.

Thanks very much for joining us, Anne.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

Costa Rica is brimming with national parks and beach towns and has a reputation for green tourism that brings plenty of visitors. But once they get there, finding a precise destination gets pretty tricky. Few of the buildings have addresses that make much sense to anyone, except perhaps the local veteran postman.

It's very easy to get lost in Costa Rica.

Sarah Burke writes about Central America for The Economist.

It uses this mix of places, landmarks that maybe don't exist, distances and compass directions, rather than street names and postcodes.

I mean, that sounds like a logistics nightmare. How are things identified if there aren't addresses?

The first thing you do is you take a local landmark. Maybe it doesn't exist anymore, but you take a corner shop, a juice bar, maybe even a tree, and then you say it's 200 meters north or east of that place, even if those landmarks have gone. So it's a really sort of archaic method, and it's lovely. It's got lots of local history. It's very very evocative of the neighborhood, and there's actually something similar that happens in Nicaragua. But it has real costs.

What kind of costs do you mean?

I mean, there's obviously a high economic cost. There's no good study on this. One was done about a decade ago by the post office, and they reckoned about $720 million were lost every year just from the delays and the hassle and the time taken to try and find addresses that could be found much more quickly if there were a normal address system. So it's thought to affect public and private services. It's not great if police and ambulances are slower to find the place where they're going to, or— and this is obviously very important during the pandemic and lockdowns— if your food delivery takes longer and comes cold.

But this is about more than just cold takeaway. I mean, is fixing the problem not just a matter of giving places addresses?

Yeah, so the post office is pretty keen to modernise this system for obvious reasons. So 2002, it came up with a plan to name the streets, and that was sort of adopted by the government in a decree a couple of years later. But since then, maybe a third of Costa Rica's municipalities have worked with the post office to actually put that plan into action. Other institutions don't seem terribly interested in change, the post office told me. And even in those places where the change has been made, where there are streets and houses that have numbers— and they do, you know, you walk around Costa Rica and you see numbers and you see some streets that have names— but often the locals still use the old system to say where things are.

You mentioned the post office was behind this modernization attempt. I mean, how do letters even get delivered in the country as it stands?

Well, it's down to the post office being pretty good at using this system. I mean, they're relatively efficient. Only 1 in every 20 letters is returned to the sender because it cannot be delivered. Compare that to Mexico. Lots of places and companies won't ship here. It has a much better system, but it has problems in terms of security and theft of certain letters. So it's really down to the postmen and postwomen who know their areas really well.

So ultimately, the whole system hangs on the tacit knowledge in the heads of those veteran postmen.

Exactly. That's exactly what it relies on. And that works really well until they want to go on holiday, or of course when they get to the end of their careers and they want to retire.

Thanks very much for joining us, Sarah.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review, and we'll see you back here tomorrow.