Rising Violence and Crime in Colombia

Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Tuesday, june twenty third. And this is your FT news briefing We'll take a look at what a post Kure Starmer UK looks like And we've got another signal that private equity is struggling. Plus, Colombian voters are fed up with the return of violence in their country Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day Pieter Starmer announced yesterday that he's stepping down as UK prrime Minister Qion my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election I have heard the answer And I accept that answer with good grace A Labor partarty leader made the call just days after the crucial Makerfield by election Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham won that seat in Parliament And it looks like he'll make an uncontested bid for PM Burnham's main competition, former Health Secretary West Streeting backed down yesterday The FT's political fix podcast talked about all this. You're going to hear an excerpt from Monday' S showow where the FT's political editor, George Parker and deputy political editor Jim Pickard joined White Hall editor Lucy Fisher. They broke down what this all means for the future of UK politics Here's Lucy George, some sense of anxiety even within labour about whether Berham will be properly tested. And it springs to mind for me, with Theresa May, it was said one of the failings of her administration was that she hadn't been put through her paces properly in a leadership contest when she got down to the final two and her rival Andrea Ledsom dropped out People in hindsight thought maybe if there'd been more scrutiny of her policy platform, that would have strengthened her. Is Andy Burnham going to fall into the same trap quite likely, I think, because He will enter number ten pretty much untested. We know from the last few weeks as we've started to ask questions about Andy Burnham and his slightly sketchy policy propectus that if you poke some of his ideas enough They start to fall apart. You know, the idea of excluding defense from the fiscal rules abandoned that. There's a whole load of things that Andy Burnham has said that he'd like to do from advantage point of Manchester, but he will soon be In the next few weeks when he becomes Prime Minister part of the Westminster elite, which he's been decrying for quite a long time and facing exactly the same political economic constraints that Kirst Aam has And there are a lot of people nervous about him arriving untested without a team U And some of his ideas really fully formed to put it politely. Jin, it feels to me there's going to be a period now of soul searching in Westminster where people really try and engage with this question of whether the UK has become ungovernable I've really detected a sense of quuite a lot of regret, even among some opposition MPs that we're now about to see our seventh prrime Minister in ten years, likely to be our eighth Chancellor, our tenth foreign secretary in that time. It's not good for the future of the country, is it? No, and one of the things that Kir Starmer ostensibly promised was that he said there would be stability. We wouldn't have all the constant churn that we had under the Tories when I think they had something ridiculous like fifteen housing mininisters in fifteen years and that there would be a period of stability. And I think there is a danger to the labour brand that the one thing they still kind of had going for them was that things could have been a little bit more stable I've been thinking about this this morning and I've thought for quite a long time that we as a country or as a political Westminster Bubbleble are far too led by opinion polls I'll hope political system is obsessed with if you're behind in the opinion polls, even midtererm, when political parties that are in government are always less popular So that was just one thought I had. I also thought as well that there is a sense to which we the media are part of the process in which once the idea takes hold that a premier is done for, we write more and more about how done for they are to the point where cabinet ministers are reading what we the media write and they think, well Yeah, maybe these columnists are correct and he's done for well, maybe I do need to start sucking up to Andy Burnham and it starts to possibly become somewhat a self fulfilling Profhecy You can listen to the full political fix podcast on Starmer, Burnham, and the future of UK politics. J check out the link in the show notes Private equity executives are attempting to borrow against their personal shares of future profits from successful deals It's another sign that the industry is struggling London broker Enis Global told the FT the number of inquiries for this type of loan has more than tripled this year compared to the same period last year Those requests are coming from buyout dealmakers across Europe Now this type of borrowing isn't new, but the broker said it had never seen such high demand Private equity has been in a downturn that was initially sparked by interest rate hikes in twenty twenty two. That's meant firms have struggled to sell their holdings at the valuations they want to So ' been holding ono companies for longer than usual whichich means there's less cash coming in now The executives getting these loans are betting it's going to come down the line and are borrowing against those future earnings Cooccaine production is booming again in Colombia and with it, more violence There was a peace agreement in twenty sixteen with a large guerrilla group called Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC That calmed things down for a while, but now FARC has been replaced by several smaller groups Colombians won an end to the violence, and on Sunday they elected a new president who promised a military crackdown. The FT's Joe Daniels here to talk more about this. Hi, Joe Him M. So Joe, you visited a rural part of the country where a lot of drug production and trafficking is taking place ten years out. from this peace deal with FARC. Tell us more about this area and what you heard from the people that live there So this is an area that used to be controlled by the far almost totally. And since they demobilized, O smaller players have moved in I met there several indigenous community members. including thirty six year old Nora Takanis. NSAa who is a member of the NASA Indigenous community from the town of Toribio She told me When the peacece deal was signed in twenty sixteen. J There was actually a bit of peace and stability in her community. That was shattered in twenty nineteen when A massacre was carried out against her community by some of these gunmen who were jostling for control of the region. in that massacre I A prominent community leader was killed. Nora was pregnant at the time and survived the shooting but fled the town and went to another municipality in Colombia for a few years and What happened to Na isn't isolated. This was happening to communities across rural Columbia Okay, why did this happen though? Why didn't this peace deal a decade ago lead to lasting security Well, a number of things happened externally The global market for cocaine only continues to grow and the price of gold is way up on where it was ten years ago. Then of course, the fart leaving created a huge vacuum Whereas before the FAC held a sort of monopoly on the drug trade in the areas that they operated in. What we've seen now is the FAC lefteft and the area became more fragmented between dissident groups that didn't go along with the FAC deal and other organizations that were never part of the FC They're all scrambling for control in these regions So All of this together has created a kind of perfect storm brring in The Colombia States inability to access rural areas as well It means that security has just been very hard to get a handle on So Joe, the country has just elected the right wing Evilardo de spriia as president. Tell me more about his strategy for dealing with gangs So while his policyies light on details, he is promising a military crackdown on organized crime He's saying that he'll get support from the U. S and Israel to do so And like El Salvadoran Pident Neib Buke, He's also planning on building massive jails to house all the criminals He says he'll lock up. Wh, on the face of it, Bouquleet's approach appears to have worked and crime rates are way down His critics would say he's eroded political rights very quickly in El Salvador So Joe, this is you know, this region of Colombia, but let's zoom out a little bit more and talk about Wider Central and South America are we seeing similar things happen throughout what we're seeing throughout Latin America really is an expansion organized crime. as the profitability of illegal economies becomes greater and greater we're seeing violence erupt in places that weren't so violent before and In these countries, the politics are destabilized by This violence and by the perception of insecurity As a result of that, we've seen candidates who promise a tough line on crime who seem to have the U.S backing in fighting crime. We've seen those candidates do well We saw it happen in Chile where the right one, we saw it happen in Honduras the right one there this year and we've now seen it in Colomb. Joe Daniels is the FT's Andean correspondent. Thanks, Joe Thanks, Mike. Before we go, former Federal Reserve Chair Allan Greenspan died yesterday. He was one hundred years old Greenspan headed the central bank for nearly twenty years from nineteen eighty seven to two thousand six. Some considered him the world's greatest central banker because the US economy grew quickly in the nineteen nineties and early two thousands But he's also been criticized for missing the signs of the financial crisis that hit just two years after he left office Hey guys, do me a favor and takeake this five minute survey we're doing on a crazy idea that we have. a Saturday version of the FT newews briefing Now we know that there were some technical difficulties with the survey link yesterday, but we've got it all patched up Let us know what you think about a weekend FTNB and you could be entered to win a pair of Bose headphones That link is in the show notes If This this has been your daily FT news briefing, cheheck back tomorrow for the latest businessusiness news