“Nice way to try to hide the confessions of the main economic group in the country by bribing politicians. It is not with our honor, gentlemen of Snail News”, wrote on Sunday night President Gustavo Petro. The tweeter president thus responded to an investigative report from Colombia’s most-watched newscast, which shows that the couple of a drug trafficker promoted his presidential campaign in the department of Casanare, in the eastern plains of the country. Petro has been hit since his eldest son pointed out the existence of unreported income to that same campaign, on the Caribbean coast. But less than 12 hours before the Noticias Caracol report, it had gone on the offensive: after the agreement between the powerful Grupo Aval and the United States authorities in which the conglomerate accepts its responsibility for paying bribes from the Brazilian multinational Odebrecht, The president had also said on Twitter: “I ask the political parties to return the money donated by the economic group that has confessed to granting bribes.”
The Caracol News report is clear. The night before the first round of the presidential election, in May 2022, a two-hour event in favor of Petro was held at a house on the outskirts of Yopal‚ the capital of Casanare. In the event, in which the vote for the current president was requested, the organizers thanked “Sandra Navarro” among other people. Three weeks later, the authorities captured Juan Carlos López Macías, alias Nephew, who had been extradited to the United States for drug trafficking a decade earlier. He had returned to the country in 2015 and was being investigated in Colombia for continuing his illegal business. López negotiated with the courts and accepted the charges, for which he was sentenced in March to 15 years in prison. His partner is Sandra Navarro Trujillo, who was also captured, but was released.
Navarro and his sister Angélica were part of the committees of Human Colombia, the coalition of political parties and movements that endorsed Petro’s candidacy, during the campaign. His great ally was Fabio Vargas, who had acted as spokesperson for Colombia Humana in the department in 2021. Noticias Caracol revealed videos of Vargas at parties in the same house, with López and Navarro, in which it is clear that they were political celebrations in which vallenato singers launched proclamations of support for Petro. In fact, the newscast also reveals an audio in which Vargas is reproached for having brought Sandra Navarro closer to the campaign, and he responds by defending the innocence of her friend.
Petro responded with various arguments. He said that he did not hold a demonstration in Yopal, something that Noticias Caracol does not affirm. He assures that the person in charge of the campaign in Casanare is called Sonia Bernal and not Sonia Navarro. He also said that the movement’s national board suspended the movement’s assembly in that city in February 2023, nine months after the party, due to allegations that it would be infiltrated by right-wing politicians and drug traffickers. Finally, he affirmed that the campaign never received contributions in that department. In any case, this situation puts the magnifying glass on the complexity of the elections in Colombia. As the expert on electoral issues Alejandra Barrios recently explained to this newspaper, in a presidential campaign it is practically impossible to follow up on many contributions made in cash or goods, and the candidates cannot know everything that happens in their favor or against them. .
Beyond that, the case enters a judicial terrain that was already marked by the complaints against Petro for the revelations of his son, for which there is already an investigation underway in the Chamber’s Accusations Commission, as well as by the investigations by the National Electoral Council on the financing of his campaign. The president appointed a criminal lawyer to face any investigation against him. The blows he has dealt and received show that politics, as so often in Colombia, once again depends on the law. Petro himself seems to be so clear that his message about Odebrecht was accompanied by a proposal for a justice reform, which in a government whose main commitment has been regulatory changes (to health, taxes, higher education or the pensions) promises to revive a debate on the functioning of the judicial branch that was central in the two previous governments and went nowhere. Petro has also reiterated that one of his great achievements has been to present an applauded shortlist of women to replace Francisco Barbosa, his great critic, in the Attorney General’s Office.
That the debate goes from the political to the judicial is bad news for a president, especially if his endeavor is to transform a country. Even if the cases are not about the government or the president, they create anxiety. And if they are, they reduce the margin of governability. Even more so when the government is as hit as Petro’s, as revealed not only by his speech on the symbolic August 7, but also by the decision of the members of his Cabinet to read a public letter that day in which they showed him their support. The fact that subordinates remember that they are on the side of the boss who appoints and removes them at will – a fact that should be taken for granted – is, in the end, a sign of fragility.
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