At the beginning of this month the truckers handed over to the Government a series of petitions that have been discussed and resolved, but the Government insists that it cannot comply with all the demands.
After 1:00 in the morning on Tuesday and after 14 hours of dialogues, the meeting between the Ministry of Transport and the freight transport unions that declared themselves unemployed concluded.
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The ministry presented transporters with a 29-point agreement proposal “as a roadmap to guide the work and advance with solutions framed in a vision of the country,” said the Ministry. The union spokesmen asked to schedule a new meeting tomorrow to discuss it again after socializing the document with the truck bases.
At the beginning of this month the transporters handed over to the Government a series of petitions in which they appear subjects like the policy of replacement, the price of the fuel, the installation of more tolls, among others.
The Minister of Transport, Ángela María Orozco, highlighted the government’s progress to improve the lives of cargo transporters and sought new consensus, but clarified that in some of these requests they cannot be processed from the portfolio because they do not correspond to the competences legal and constitutional that the entity has.
“We cannot change the rules overnight. Several of the petitions are the authority of the Congress of the Republic or of territorial entities, including the judicial branch and in that sense the role of the Ministry will be to coordinate with the other entities of the national and regional government, as well as with the other branches of the public power, ”Orozco pointed out.
Between May 2020 and May 2021, more than 300 work tables have been held with the freight transport sector, including 44 in recent weeks, 4 national and 40 regional, between face-to-face and virtual.
Representatives of the Ministry of Transportation, the Superintendency of Transportation, the National Road Safety Agency, the National Institute of Highways, the National Infrastructure Agency and the Directorate of Traffic and Transportation of the National Police participated in the work table. There were also spokesmen for the unions that were declared unemployed: the National Transportation Assembly, which brings together the Fuerza Camionera Association, the Andean Association of Light Cargo (Asolivianos) and Renacer Camionero; the National Union of Drivers and Owners of the Transportation Sector (Sinalco); the National Transport Assembly Federation (Fanaltrans); the Colombian Truckers Foundation; the Fundación Familia Camionera Unida de Colombia (Facun), the Colombian Union of Transporters (UCT), the National Chamber of Transportation (CNT) and the Camionera Consciousness Movement (Asocamioneros Chiquinquirá).
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsThere were also other associations that are not unemployed: Colombian Association of Truckers (ACC), Association of Cargo Transporters (ATC), Colombian Federation of Road Freight Transporters (Colfecar), Federation of Freight Transport Entrepreneurs (Fedetranscarga) , Association for the Promotion and Security in Physical Distribution (Defencarga), National Association of Cargo Transport Companies (Asecarga).
To grant all the guarantees to this meeting, the Ministry of Transportation requested the presence of the Ombudsman’s Office, and recorded the meeting in its entirety. In addition, the space also had the accompaniment of a delegate from the Attorney General’s Office.
