The Colombian government announced this Monday (05) that Milton Rengifo Hernández, who worked with President Gustavo Petro between 2012 and 2015, when he was mayor of Bogota, will be the country’s new ambassador to Venezuela. He replaces Armando Benedetti, who stepped down amid a scandal.
The Colombian foreign ministry detailed in a brief statement that the Venezuelan government had granted its “approval for the appointment of Mr. Milton Rengifo Hernández as Colombia’s extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador in the neighboring country.”
“With President Petro you can have disagreements and criticize him on several facets, but in terms of transparency he is irreproachable, vertical. I was in his UTL (Legislative Work Unit) from 1998 to 2010 and I saw him, disgusted, take from the office a lobbyist who went to offer money,” Rengifo wrote in a tweet retweeted by the president.
The new ambassador was Undersecretary for the Environment and Local Affairs at Petro’s City Hall in Bogotá and also served as his advisor at the time.
Benedetti’s departure
Last Friday, Petro announced the departure of the government of his chief of staff, Laura Sarabia, and Benedetti, for being involved in a scandal of telephone interceptions and possible abuse of power.
Benedetti was one of the first politicians from outside the left to support Petro’s 2022 presidential candidacy, and his electoral influence on the Atlantic coast was essential to the current president’s triumph.
After the electoral victory, the president appointed him ambassador to Venezuela in August last year.
The scandal gained strength on Sunday after the magazine “Semana” published some audios that Benedetti sent to Sarabia in which he threatened to reveal secrets about the financing of Petro’s presidential campaign, who guaranteed last night that he did not receive money from drug trafficking and that the government didn’t do anything illegal.
In the audios, which caused commotion in the country, the former ambassador also reminds Sarabia that he raised “15 billion pesos” for Petro’s campaign and comments that, if he speaks and tells who financed his campaign on the Atlantic coast, everyone will end up in chain.
Petro assured yesterday that Sarabia “has been receiving enormous pressure that she was unaware of”, which is why “she must have suffered and suffers a lot”.
“In the two interviews, Benedetti claims that he helped to get donations for the campaign and that there were no irregularities”, highlighted the president, adding that his campaign direction rejected “many donations and, according to the criteria of the law, others were accepted”. .
“Most of the campaign financing was done with loans from commercial banks”, he stressed.
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