The Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, has requested the protocol resignation of all his ministers and other senior government officials, amid the crisis that his cabinet lives after a controversial meeting that last Tuesday showed the discrepancies within the Executive .
“I have requested protocol resignation to ministers, ministers and directors of administrative departments. There will be some changes in the cabinet to achieve greater compliance in the program ordered by the people, ”Petro reported on the social network X.
The president has added that, from now on, when 18 months are missing to finish his mandate, the government “will concentrate completely on the fulfillment of the program.”
Minutes after Petro published this message, the Minister of Labor, Gloria Inés Ramírez, presented her “irrevocable resignation” to the position and thanked the president for having allowed him to work in a “political agenda in favor of millions of workers, in the need to fulfill the popular mandate of the government of change. ”
“We will continue working for a more fair and more democratic Colombia, understanding that politics must travel without sectarianism, but unambiguously,” Ramírez added, who had been in the Government since Petro assumed the presidency.
The controversial meeting
The meeting of the Council of Ministers last Tuesday lasted six hours and in it the president and different members of the Government were accused and recriminated by management failures; The next day, there was the resignation of the director of the Administrative Department of the Presidency of the Republic (Dapre), Jorge Rojas, a trusted man of the President, and the Minister of Cultures, Juan David Correa.
Then he left his position the legal secretary of the Presidency, Paula Robledo, and on Sunday the Minister of Environment, Susana Muhamad, who worked with Petro when he was mayor of Bogotá (2012-2015) announced on Sunday. Muhamad is one of the officials of all the confidence of the president and also one of the best qualification figures in the surveys on the functioning of the government.
The Interior Minister, Juan Fernando Cristo, had already proposed on Wednesday the resignation of the entire cabinet for considering it “unsustainable” after the Council of Ministers of the previous day, but to date it remains in office.
During Tuesday’s Council of Ministers, Muhamad and other officials supported the Colombian vice president, France Márquez, in her criticisms of the appointment as head of the presidential office of former ambassador Armando Benedetti.
Benedetti, who has also been a senator, has several corruption processes and starred in a scandal of sexist violence last July, when being an ambassador to FAO in Rome his wife, Adelina Guerrero, denounced him for physical aggressions during a trip to Madrid. “As a feminist and as a woman I can not sit at this cabinet table of our progressive project with Armando Benedetti,” Muhamad said in the Council of Ministers, which was broadcast live on television and social networks.
However, Petro has defended the permanence in the position of Benedetti, who was a key piece in the financing of his 2022 electoral campaign on the Atlantic coast, so Muhamad today added that “by not agreeing with that decision of the president You have to give up. ”
Meanwhile, the now former Minister of Cultures said, in reference to Benedetti, that “he could not have a women’s mistreat as a boss.”
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