The first year of Gustavo Petro’s government has been like being on a roller coaster. Sometimes he climbs the slope and feels the adrenaline of a government willing to break the paradigms, but other times it is impossible not to feel the emptiness in the stomach that occurs when he goes into free fall. In fact, the first year of his government ends in the middle of a new drop from the train that has us by the hair.
This time, the free fall was carried out by an executioner that no one saw coming: his own son Nicolás, a tormented young man who grew up without his father’s affection, threw him a few days ago and framed him without any offense. Nicolás told the prosecutor’s office that he had evidence that his parent, that is, President Petro, knew that money entered his presidential campaign that was not registered in his accounts, which constitutes a crime in Colombia.
Until now, Nicolás Petro has not provided evidence that his father is involved in this corrupt plot and has changed his version several times. He first said that his father did not know anything about the illegal financing of his campaign, then that he did. Now he has just partially exonerated him in an interview by stating that his father was unaware of the money he asked for from highly questioned characters, using his father’s name, but he insinuated that the president did know of the contributions made by well-known contractors who they were not reported in the campaign accounts. Despite the fact that the versions of Nicolás Petro are contradictory, his statements against his father have unleashed a crisis that has petrified the country.
I am not exaggerating when I say that this political crisis that Nicolás Petro unleashed began with an act of spite, just as it happens in the Greek tragedy.
Day Vásquez, his ex-wife, hurt because Nicolás was unfaithful to her and abandoned her to go with her best friend, decided to pull the nail out with her ex-husband and in a fit of jealousy, exposed her shame in an interview for the magazine Week. Day recounted how Nicolás, behind his father’s back, set up a corruption network taking advantage of the fact that he was the son of the president, for which they diverted money that they themselves requested from contractors non saints supposedly for his father’s presidential campaign, but in reality they were for his pockets. For Nicolás, the Prosecutor’s Office immediately opened an investigation against him and when the son expected his father to accompany him in such a difficult situation, the president decided to marginalize himself. He warned the country that he was not going to use his power to influence the process against his son and after making it clear that his commitment came first with the constitution, he wished him luck at that very moment. difficult.
In a country more accustomed to seeing how presidents use their power to protect their relatives who have had problems with the law, Petro’s reaction fell like a refreshing balm, but the calm did not last long. His son Nicolás de él considered that his father had left him alone. He tried to call him several times, but he had no answer and, according to what he himself confessed in an interview, he even tried to threaten him, letting him know that if they left him alone he could tell many things about the campaign, but he had no answer either.
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Then came another drop in free fall, after he was captured along with his ex-wife. Shattered, he decided to plunge the knife and point at his father.
This act of revenge hits Petro where it hurts the most because it equates him with traditional and corrupt politics, which attracts clients and buys votes and feeds on a perverse network of contractors, a political world from which Petro has wanted to distance himself.
Your son has given his enemies new incentives and very surely they will use this family tragedy to take advantage of it, magnify the scandal and fill it with superlatives, especially now that the regional elections are coming up.
The presidential campaign finance scandals in Colombia have always been a circus. The control agencies in charge of investigating have been agile to archive these processes, despite the evidence. That happened with the presidential campaign of the Uribista candidate Óscar Iván Zuluaga, in 2014 investigated for having received money from Odebrecht underhanded. It was archived by the National Electoral Council for lack of evidence, despite the fact that there was evidence that this campaign had received 1.6 million dollars from Odebrecht under the table (6 years later, without knowing why, the Prosecutor’s Office dusted off this evidence and has just charged Óscar Iván Zuluaga).
Something similar happened with the re-election campaign of Juan Manuel Santos. Despite the evidence that showed how this campaign had been financed with money from a mega highway that Odebrecht and its partner Episol, from the Sarmiento group, were going to build, the investigation was archived due to expiration of terms by the National Electoral Council and the Prosecutor’s Office. he didn’t even investigate it. Even more grotesque is what the current Attorney General Francisco Barbosa did when the scandal was uncovered about possible illegal financing of the campaign of Iván Duque, his friend at the university. According to the complaint, a criminal gang led by a drug businessman who was later assassinated in Brazil would have collected money to finance the second round of Iván Duque’s campaign. The Prosecutor’s Office closed the investigation without having made any arrests.
With Petro things seem to be at a different price. On this occasion, the control agencies do not want to turn a blind eye as before and walk with their antennas on. That should be good news if it weren’t for the fact that they don’t seem to be very interested in investigating in accordance with the law. In an unprecedented act, prosecutor Barbosa raided Nariño’s house, as if it were Ali Baba’s cave, with the aim of obtaining information that he could have requested through a trade. Without evidence, he went out to insinuate that they were illegally intercepting from the Casa de Nariño, when he has an investigation that was opened based on a complaint filed at the time by the Petro campaign and in which there is evidence that it would have been intercepted. by police officers who operated from the facilities of the Nariño palace when Duque was president.
Nicolás Petro was captured when he had not even been charged, but in other cases in which those investigated are right-wing politicians, the Prosecutor’s Office is generous and condescending. In the hearing of the president’s son, the Prosecutor’s Office arbitrarily designed an organization chart to point out the connections that Nicolás Petro had in which he involved half the Government. This organization chart was later presented by various media as if all those names were part of a criminal network. The investigations of the Prosecutor’s Office will be so arbitrary that it had the luxury of not putting in that organization chart the name of Alex Char, the dolphin of the powerful Char clan, whom the Barbosa Prosecutor’s Office has decided not to touch even with a rose petal. despite the fact that he has more than 30 investigations for corruption and that he also appears in Day Vásquez’s chats.
Many predict that the same thing will happen to Petro as to Ernesto Samper, the progressive-minded president whose campaign was alleged to have been financed by the Cali cartel in the 1994 elections. Time went by defending himself.
If this country were the same as it was 30 years ago, the comparison would be valid, but it is not. Samper managed to stay in power because he always had the support of the great economic powers that supported him despite the fact that the US embassy and many media outlets and journalists were on the other shore. Petro, who is the first left-wing president of Colombia, has (curiously) good relations with the North Americans, but is still viewed with mistrust by economic groups, who are now also the owners of the few remaining media outlets. Several of these media have become the main spokespersons for an increasingly selective Prosecutor’s Office, generous with its friends but implacable with everything that has to do with the Petro government. The president does not have it easy.
Despite this scenario, it would be stupid to say that the culprits behind Petro’s reformist agenda are the media and the usual elites that oppose the reforms. Until now, the great responsibility for his reforms not going to see the light is Petro’s lack of leadership when it comes to putting together a government coalition.
However, this tragedy that exposes a dysfunctional presidential family, navigating between revenge, hatred, feelings of guilt, jealousy, betrayal and power, is the best ammunition that Petro’s enemies have to hit his political project. Everything that moves low instincts is worth gold in this world governed by digital networks.
It remains to be seen if the president, who is an expert in recovering quickly from free falls, manages to get out of this roller coaster of emotions in which he has us.
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