The representative to the chamber for the peace seat of the department of Arauca, Karen Astrith Manrique Olarte, has been accused this week of being part of a huge corruption scandal. According to statements before the Supreme Court of Justice by Olmedo López, former director of the National Risk and Disaster Management Unit (UNGRD), Manrique met several times with him in 2023, and with officials of his entity, to review the progress of three contracts that totaled 92,000 million pesos. These contracts were to be awarded by direct debit to ensure, at the same time, two things: the stability of the peace process with the ELN guerrilla and the positive votes of six congressmen on key bills for the Government. The 35-year-old representative did not answer any of this newspaper’s questions about the case, but she did make a statement on her social networks in which she denies the allegations. “Olmedo López is lying, his desperation to be accepted by a good agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office is leading him to act wrongly and with bad intentions, I am sure that justice will act in favor of the truth,” she wrote in X.
The testimony of Olmedo López, revealed this week by the investigative unit of Caracol Newsclaims that the House representative wrote in her personal notebook which contracts were needed to guarantee the votes in the Credit Commission – in charge of approving international loans for the Government -, which municipalities they should be directed to and which congressmen would be the beneficiaries. All this after reaching an alleged agreement with the Minister of Finance, Ricardo Bonilla. “The congresswoman comes to my office to promote the contracts (…) I give her my notebook and she writes,” López told the Court. Caracol Newsupon reviewing the entries to UNGRD in December 2023, and early 2024, confirmed that Manrique entered there several times to meet with Pinilla and López.
According to the statements, the congressmen involved are: Wadith Manzur (from the Conservative Party), Liliana Bitar (Conservative Party), Juan Pablo Gallo (Liberal Party), Julián Peinado (Liberal Party), Juan Diego Muñoz (Green Alliance, who resigned in February from his seat due to health problems), and Manrique herself. The multimillion-dollar contracts would be destined for the municipality of Cotorra (Córdoba), the town of El Salado, in Carmen de Bolívar (Bolívar) and Saravena (Arauca).
This last contract, worth more than 32 billion, was officially intended to build flood protection and prevention works on the Bojaba River. But, according to Olmedo, it would actually serve to finance the ELN guerrilla, which has had a strong presence in Saravena and the rest of the department of Arauca for decades. In the end, none of the three contracts were signed or executed, because the media reported another corruption scandal in the state, and President Petro asked Olmedo López to resign. However, the Attorney General’s Office and the Supreme Court of Justice are already investigating all those involved to determine what crimes they committed.
López insisted before the Court that the government ordered him to direct UNGRD contracts to finance the ELN, presumably so that this group would not leave the negotiating table because this guerrilla group would need public money to stop its practice of extortionate kidnapping. The government as a whole, the dialogue table and the president have denied these accusations. In a message on Wednesday, Petro dismissed the accusations. “The government requested that the ELN not return to kidnapping and as is public knowledge, the ELN has reaffirmed its return to this terrible practice. The ELN has been in armed struggle for more than 65 years, it does not sell out. I wish it were that easy to make peace, but anyone who knows the history of Colombia knows that ending the war or some of its practices is not done with money,” wrote Petro. He added: “Colombia’s illegal organizations have sources of illicit financing that are much more powerful than the contracts that some politicians like and that I know they have been practicing for decades.”
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Representative Karen Manrique, a politician unknown to most Colombians until this week, came to Congress in 2022 to occupy one of the 16 peace seats for victims of violence—new seats that were agreed upon in the process with the FARC in Havana in 2016. Manrique has said that her family had to move from Tame due to the presence there, years ago, of several armed groups. However, since the moment of her appointment, several voices in her department questioned the choice due to her closeness to the Liberal Party. Manrique worked for several years in the office of former congressman Nevardo Eneiro Rincón Vergara, a powerful Liberal politician from Arauca, who lost his seat in the House of Representatives in 2021 for improper celebration of contracts.
“Manrique is Rincón’s quota in Congress,” a politician from Arauca who knows her well and preferred not to give his name for security reasons told EL PAÍS. Other political sectors in the region say that the closeness of Manrique’s husband —the cattle rancher and businessman Gustavo González— with Enerio Rincón was key to her being elected. Another person from Arauca who knows Manrique’s work assured this newspaper that the politician had several disabilities to position herself as a representative of peace: “She was unknown to the victims, she had never participated in any space or process with the communities. She arrived as part of the Liberal Party.”
According to her resume, the representative “has held important positions in national and territorial institutions; she was an advisor to the Congress of the Republic, secretary of social welfare in the Tame mayor’s office, advisor to ESAP for the Action Plans for Rural Transformation of the PDET Municipalities and Coordinator of the municipal government of Tame.”
According to sources, Manrique did not comply with the guidelines for peace seats, which explicitly state that no candidate could receive support from political parties and must be a victim of the armed conflict. “There were several lawsuits against his election that have not advanced,” said one person. “It was learned that he won with votes from the city and not from peasants and victims, as the law said,” said another person from the region, who says he cannot give his name because “there is a lot of money involved and it is very dangerous.”
Eduardo Cedeño, a political scientist and analyst from Arauca, explains that in that region of the country the ELN has become a “para-state” that often makes up for the failures of the state. “Here the state is very weak, the only permanent thing is its absence,” says Cedeño. “The guerrillas have been co-opting and supplanting the state for years, not only in the control of weapons, but also in resolving problems with farms, boundaries, administering justice between neighbors, intervening in family disputes,” he adds. For this reason, he insists, it is not strange that the guerrillas are related to and intervene in all areas of the department’s public sector, including state contracting: “Does the ELN have access to state contracts? It has done so all the time. It does so with a contracting firm, wins a public tender and collects commissions,” he concludes bluntly.
An investigation by the Electoral Observation Mission, or MOE, reinforces Cedeño’s idea and explains that since 1990 the ELN guerrilla, specifically the Domingo Laín front, captured the State. “It became involved in the electoral processes to guarantee that its allies occupied elected positions and, thus, dominate the state territory and capture the resources from oil royalties,” says a report by the MOE. In fact, today, the last two former governors of Arauca, Ricardo Alvarado and Facundo Castillo Cisneros, are in prison for having alleged ties to the ELN. Cedeño insists that the guerrilla has had relations with political leaders of all ideologies: “They cohabit, they are in all the dynamics of public life, anyone who is dedicated to politics or the economy has to deal with them.”
That others have done so is not proof that Manrique, the peace representative, has directed resources to the ELN. But it does explain why, in the region she represents, the guerrilla has received public funds even before the representative appeared in the biggest corruption scandal of the Petro government.
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