LEER EN ESPAÑOL
The flight of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president of Sri Lanka, to the Maldives, is the last chapter of an economic and political crisis that has been brewing for months and climaxed with a massive popular protest, which could not be stopped with a state of siege and ended with the occupation by the demonstrators of the government palace in Colombo, the capital of this Asian country of 22 million inhabitants, and of the residences of the president and the prime minister.
An explosive social situation exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic thus ended the political hegemony of the Rajapaksa family, cemented in the military campaign to quell a long and bloody civil war fought between 1983 and 2009, that confronted government forces with the Liberation Tigers guerrilla group, of the Tamil ethnic group, in the north and east of the country, and which caused more than 100,000 deaths.
But the popular reaction is not targeted solely by the Rajapaksa, but by an entire political elite in which the leaders of the Sri Lankan People’s Front, the United National Party and the Freedom Party of Sri Lanka were alternated in successive governments, and even weaving circumstantial alliances that ended up diluting the differences between officialdom and opposition, with common features: erratic policies, exorbitant public spending on infrastructure works of little social utility, and structural corruption, which in recent months also added inflation of more than 54%, power cuts, lack of fuel and shortages of food and medicines.
Barely assumed, in 2019, the Rajapaksa government implemented a tax cut that eroded state revenues, and the subsequent pandemic hit the tourism industry, one of the main engines of the economy, and reduced remittances from Ceylonese abroad, which has reduced access to foreign exchange. To sustain the economy, the government consumed in two years more than 70% of its international reserves.
Sri Lanka’s public debt is divided between the two regional powers that traditionally hold sway over the island, China, which lent the country about $3.5 billion, and India, which granted it a similar amount of economic aid in the last year alone. Rajapaksa asked Beijing for a debt restructuring, and got a swap from the Chinese for about 1.5 billion yuan. And he also tried, without luck, to get an agreement with the IMF for an aid package, which ended up triggering the social conflict.
On 20 July, the parliament will elect a new president, in an attempt to defuse the crisis. Citizen mobilization continues as a factor of pressure in the streets, and is based on the deep-rooted democratic tradition of Sri Lanka, which with ups and downs, was maintained since the independence of the British Empire in 1948. But this time everything indicates that in addition to solutions for the economy, popular demands will also be focused on demanding a profound change of the Ceylonese political system.