The president's younger brother, Juan Fernando Petro, is questioned from time to time for being in meetings with politicians or gangsters that leave a bad taste. The last of these meetings occurred last Monday, in the city of Medellín, where he met in a restaurant with 11 mayors of small municipalities on the north coast of the country—all from the area called Urabá Antioqueño. Petro Hermano did not want it to be a meeting that would appear in the press, and when the media journalist IFM News He found it there, Juan Fernando asked for his cell phone to be taken away. “No photo can come out of here,” said the president's brother, according to what the media director later narrated. The photo came out. The information that was talked about, too. Juan Fernando Petro, who is not a public official, listened to the mayors talk about education, health or peace, and promised to send his concerns to the president. The mayors narrated in the middle The Empty Chair that they had already tried to communicate through another institutional means with the president but, when that didn't work, they looked for the younger brother.
“Who do you look for to send a reason? To the mother, the father or the brother,” one of them told them. The family sometimes works better than the State.
Once the meeting came to light, the brother then began to answer questions. Because I was there? Is he the president's messenger? “If traveling through the municipalities is a crime, then they should put me in jail,” he responded to Caracol Radio, and confirmed that he does not have any official role in the government to act as a messenger. His goal, he says, is to reach out to communities to understand their concerns and convey them to 'someone' with power. “I am not the Institution, I am not the governance, but it has to do with a berraco minister, a governor, a deputy, someone who cares about what happens there,” he said.
The president's brother is known in public opinion not so much for his work as an activist—he worked at the NGO Latin American Commission on Human Rights—but for his questioned meetings. In April 2022When Gustavo Petro was still a candidate, Caracol Noticias revealed that Juan Fernando had entered La Picota prison to meet with politicians convicted (for corruption or homicides) who wanted to join the future president's peace program. Gustavo Petro then came out to defend his brother, saying that they were just talking about a possible “social forgiveness.” Months later, Petro won the presidency.
The following year, in 2023, new meeting, or meetings. It was reported in several media that Juan Fernando Petro was offering prison benefits to drug traffickers in exchange for money—Univisión revealed that it offered amnesty to a drug trafficker to avoid his extradition to the United States in exchange for thousands of dollars. At that moment the president sent a more damning message to his brother: he asked the Prosecutor's Office to investigate him.
“My commitment to Colombia and the Colombians is to achieve peace and whoever wants to interfere with that purpose, or take personal advantage of it, has no place in the Government, even if they are members of my family,” the president wrote in a public letter. . His brother didn't like the message at all. “He decides to make his people suffer this public ridicule, which undoubtedly crosses the border of what is strictly fraternal, to place us as the target of slanderous attacks,” Juan Fernando responded. Shortly afterward he went on to say on television that President Petro has Asperger's. The president once again put distance. “Something is wrong with my brother. “I have never received a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome,” the president clarified.
Newsletter
The analysis of current events and the best stories from Colombia, every week in your mailbox
RECEIVE THE
But every so often another meeting appears. Cambio magazine revealed in early February that Juan Fernando Petro was, in 2022, in a meeting with senior officials of the Family Welfare Institute to define contracts that would benefit a questioned councilor. Diana López Zuleta, journalist and contributor to this newspaper, said last year that Juan Fernando got married in 2020 and, among those present at the celebration meeting, was the wife of a famous politician convicted of homicide named Kiko Gómez. “The friendship between the president's brother and the wife of a criminal is not a crime, but it is questionable if it results in benefits for the convicted person,” she wrote Zuleta. Gómez received very suspicious benefits for the transfer of a prison from Bogotá to Barranquilla.
“In this country everything is a suspicion,” the brother told Caracol Radio, defending himself from suspicions about the last meeting with the 11 mayors of Urabá Antioqueño. But it's not just a suspicion. There are several.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS newsletter about Colombia and here to the channel on WhatsAppand receive all the information keys on current events in the country.
#Petro39s #brother #interferes #government #affairs #holding #position