Exporter Jose Antonio Martinez Rojas, writing in Hoy’s Saturday issue, urges farm producers and exporters to close ranks against the proposed 5% export tax sent by the Executive Branch back to Congress. Martinez points out that the tax would hurt the agricultural producers most of all, since the 5% would be reduced from their sale price, and this would affect the large and smallest producers. Martinez wonders why the farm sector of the country has to pay for the mismanagement and excesses of the banking sector when “it was a crab that someone else ate.” He speculates that the government finds it easier to penalize the defenseless and nationally widespread farming sector, instead of going against the compact and powerful banking sector, whose members caused the problems in the first place.
Martinez says that the revenues the tax would collect would only serve to continue paying for the “bottles and big bottles” (bottellas y botellones), or the bloated public payroll. He recommends that the President imitate the legislators that have announced the cancellation of a hundred advisors that only showed to collect their checks at the end of the month. “That way, great savings would be had every 15 days and the country would not have to resort to drastic and impopular measures such as those that are being suggested.”