Until a few months ago, Olmedo de Jesús López Martínez, former director of the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD), was a politician unknown to most Colombians. Today he has the future of Gustavo Petro’s Government in his hands. This Tuesday he will meet at the Attorney General’s Office to give a sworn statement about the corruption scandal for the purchase at inflated prices of 40 tank trucks for La Guajira, which occurred when he was director of the powerful entity. The call from the Prosecutor’s Office comes after López and his lawyer asked on Sunday for a beginning of opportunity to collaborate with justice and reveal the details of the criminal network, in which high-ranking government officials and the presidents of the Chamber of Deputies have already been identified. Representatives and the Senate.
What is known so far comes from number two of López at the UNGRD, Sneyder Pinilla. The former official has accused López of ordering him to pay 1,000 million pesos (about $260,000) to Andrés Calle, president of the Chamber, and 3,000 million pesos (around $770,000) to Iván Name, head of the Senate, in the second case. through Sandra Ortiz, who resigned from her position as presidential advisor due to the complaints. The money was allegedly delivered in October 2023, just before the regional elections, in exchange for accelerating the processing of Petro’s social reforms in Congress. According to Pinilla, the money came from the cost overruns in the purchase of tank trucks, intended to bring drinking water to the most remote communities of La Guajira.
López has asked the Prosecutor’s Office for security for him and his family, and total immunity to avoid going to jail, in exchange for helping him determine who gave the order for the alleged bribery. “They take advantage of my silence. Well, no more,” he says in an audio that circulated in the media. “During my more than 32 years of constant fighting for rights and freedoms, I have had to face tough battles. Those who have fought like me will know well how difficult it is to follow orders, even when you do not agree,” he says. His lawyer José Moreno confirmed this Monday on Caracol Radio that López will collaborate with justice: “He has decided to tell the truth, everything that happened, and show the public how the real people responsible gave him orders.”
It is not yet known whether the procedure this Tuesday at nine in the morning, before a prosecutor from the Specialized Directorate against Corruption, will be in person or virtual, due to the risks and threats that López has denounced. It has been rumored that the former high official will point to Carlos Ramón González, today in charge of the National Intelligence Directorate (DNI) and then director of the Administrative Department of the Presidency of the Republic (DAPRE), or to the ministers of the Interior and Finance , Luis Fernando Velasco and Ricardo Bonilla.
But who is Olmedo López? How did he come to lead an entity with multimillion-dollar resources without having experience in risk and disaster prevention? With which political parties has he had alliances? Do his possible revelations against senior Petro officials protect anyone?
López is a veteran politician from Antioquia who has spent most of his career in public life with the leftist Polo Democrático party, to which President Petro belonged. He studied Economics at the Universidad Autónoma Latinoamericana, in Medellín. He was a councilor of Caramanta, a municipality in southwestern Antioquia, the region where former right-wing president Álvaro Uribe is from. From local politics, López went to departmental politics. He was a candidate for the departmental Assembly in 2011 (he did not do well: he obtained only 30 of the 2,246 votes in his municipality and came in a distant second place on a list that did not reach seats), president of the Polo in Antioquia and manager in the department of the campaign of the current senator Clara López for the Presidency in 2014. The following year he was a candidate, always for the Polo, for the Governor: he obtained 1.85% of the vote and fourth place. Like his entire party, he supported Gustavo Petro in the 2018 and 2022 presidential campaigns.
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Despite his long militancy on the left, in recent years he has been very close to the conservative senator Carlos Andrés Trujillo, also from Antioquia and all-powerful in Itagüí, a city of 280,000 inhabitants adjacent to Medellín. The all-powerful congressman, who has dominated local politics in the last decade and a half, became mayor of that municipality in 2011. There he appointed López as his Secretary of the Environment. Since then, the two politicians have been close, despite being active in parties located at ideological opposites.
The current director of the UNGRD, Carlos Carrillo, who replaced López after the corruption scandal, deepens this idea. “Everyone knows that the UNGRD belongs to Carlos Andrés Trujillo,” he said on Caracol Radio. “All roads lead to Itagüí,” he added in an interview with María Jimena Duzán. In fact, in Antioquia politics it is said that López was one of the bridges that led Senator Trujillo to get closer to President Gustavo Petro, to the point that at the beginning of Trujillo’s mandate he managed to be the president of the National Conservative Directorate and came to the point that the party will declare itself the government party. Olmedo was the Government’s liaison with Trujillo, and Trujillo was Petro’s liaison with the Conservative Party. Trujillo is one of the two conservative senators who have ensured that he advances the Government’s pension reform, by not leaving the premises with his colleagues and preventing the quorum necessary for voting from being broken.
Senator Trujillo continues to manage Itagüí. “He has been in power for four consecutive mayoralties, he is the most powerful man in the municipality,” an expert source in Antioquia politics tells EL PAÍS. The current mayor, Diego Torres, is a token of his. An alternative means of Itaguí, The Itaguiseño, denounced this week that the relationship between López and Trujillo is not limited to the tank truck scandal in La Guajira, but is also seen in the municipality. “Olmedo López has several bureaucratic positions in the Mayor’s Office of Itagüí, among which is his nephew Mateo Alejandro López Ochoa, who was appointed as an advisor on January 11.”
Olmedo López’s sworn statement this Tuesday at the Prosecutor’s Office will be decisive for the Government and will have an immediate impact on the legislative process of social reforms.
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