Luis Gilberto Murillo will be the chancellor in charge during the suspension of Álvaro Leyva

Luis Gilberto Murillo, the current Colombian ambassador to the United States, will also be in charge of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the next three months, during which Álvaro Leyva will serve the suspension imposed on him by the Attorney General's Office for the failed contract for the production of passports. . The decree to make this order official, dated this Thursday, February 8, was signed by President Gustavo Petro one day after Leyva decided to abide by the decision and separate from his position.

Both the suspended chancellor and President Petro himself resisted for two weeks to carry out the decision of the Disciplinary Chamber of the Attorney General's Office to temporarily remove him from his position. The entity issued a statement of charges against him for exceeding his duties by declaring void last September the public tender for passports in which the only qualified bidder was the firm Thomas Greg & Sons. The company has already filed a lawsuit for 117,000 million pesos (about 30 million dollars) on behalf of the rights it had acquired upon reaching that point in the process in which it had several competitors.

“I inform that I abide by the decision separating myself from the exercise of my duties,” Leyva explained in a statement on Wednesday night. Until then, he had remained at the head of the Foreign Ministry with the thesis that he would only take action when the president made the decision to comply with the suspension. “The attorney created the figure of self-suspension. “It is the president who appoints and it is the president who suspends,” Petro himself reacted in a message on X, forever Twitter, his favorite communication channel. Until now, it has been his only public statement regarding Leyva's decision.

This Thursday, during a meeting at the Casa de Nariño with the UN Security Council visiting Colombia, the Foreign Ministry was represented by Vice Minister Elizabeth Taylor, and Ambassador Murillo was present at the subsequent press conference.

At 81 years old, Leyva is the oldest figure in the cabinet. Despite being surrounded by controversy, he had so far overcome without major shocks both the attempts at political control in Congress and the ministerial shakeups throughout the year and a half that Petro has been in power. Murillo, for his part, is the first Afro-Colombian to head the diplomatic representation in Washington. At 57 years old, he has been involved in politics in his native Chocó, where he was governor twice. From positions located more in the center of the political spectrum, he was Minister of the Environment under Juan Manuel Santos. In the 2022 presidential campaign, he supported Sergio Fajardo's candidacy as vice-presidential ticket, and later chose to support Petro in the second.

The passport tender has kept the suspended Foreign Minister on the ropes for months. It even provoked a heated discussion with the then director of the State's National Legal Defense Agency, Martha Lucía Zamora, who defended the convenience of conciliating with Thomas Greg & Sons. The two officials ended up harshly confronted in the hallways of the Casa de Nariño itself at the end of last year, and the president chose to remove Zamora, who left launching new accusations against Leyva. After she resigned, the lawyer denounced a meeting in a Paris hotel between officials and those interested in that tender, which was attended by the chancellor's son, Jorge Leyva. The accused admitted having met with Foreign Ministry officials in France, but denied any irregularity.

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.