This is Benedetti, the man blessed by President Petro who has caused the worst crisis in his mandate

The appointment of Benedetti, who is the fourth Interior Minister of President Petro, would have nothing particular if it were not for his questioned profile and act, which has caused not only the rejection among several of the members of the government team, starting with vice president France Márquez, but also renunciations and an internal crisis with the historical Petrism They were loyal during their years as a senator and collaborators in times of presidential campaigns. His repairs, as well as those of many followers of Petro and those of his growing detractors, are summarized in four facets of Benedetti: electoral campaign, corruption and illicit monies; domestic violence and misogyny; if it is functional to a public office given its problems with drugs and alcohol; and be an upstart in the hosts of the Colombian left.

All these matters, except for the staff of addictions, were precisely those that in their presidential campaigns of 2018 and 2022 the then candidate Petro swore to banish in the way of governing and doing politics in the country, and against which he would fight to transform a society crossed by violence, machismo, electoral corruption and agreements with the anilored traditional parties. However, Benedetti seems to be the incarnation of all those ills together.

Wetting or sagaz?

Armando Benedetti (57 years old), Barranquilla by birth and lawyer and journalist by profession. His political career began in 1997 as Councilor for Bogotá by the Liberal Party. In 2002 he was elected representative to the Chamber for the same party and four years later he achieved a seat in the Senate on behalf of the U Party and supported by then President Álvaro Uribe Vélez. In the 2010 elections he maintained his seat and in that same period he held the presidency of the Congress, but what he did not maintain was his alignment with Uribe: pragmatic and an ace for matters of political and bureaucratic compounds, gave the volantin to support the newly elected president Juan Manuel Santos.

In Congress, Benedetti played a key role for the peace agreement to be approved in an expedited manner. In the U party he remained until 2020 when, once again, he made a timely jump, but this time away from the center and the right, to accommodate himself on the left of Petro’s human Colombia.

A year later I was already in charge of the Petrista campaign in the Colombian Caribbean, region of the country that has a key role in the electoral dynamics and where Benedetti came to play at home to mobilize support and votes, all of this by the hand of his then judicious assistant assistant Laura Sarabiatoday Chancellor, one of the main detractors of the presence of Benedetti in the Government, and with whom he shares the unfortunate prominence of the scandal for the entrance of 15 billion pesos (about 3.5 million dollars) to the presidential campaign of 2022, monies of doubtful origin and not officially registered, which is why this week Sarabia was summoned by the Prosecutor’s Office to give a statement.

It is evident, then, that Benedetti comes from the most classic and questioned Colombian political caste that Petro says so much, that he knew how to land in the campaign of the historical pact, gain the trust and friendship of the president today and, with it, two embassies, some immunity to the seven cases against him that advances the Supreme Court of Justice, a short Headquarters of the Office and, now, the Ministry of Interior. Thus he returns to the walnut of the National Polyitic and the President’s affections.

The political operator

They say precisely, that politics has no heart. Only interests. As much as Petrism and the most progressive left refuses to believe that its leader can act like the rest of the country’s politicians, betraying promises and principles that has said to defend, it is evident that Benedetti arrived the house of Nariño to align the congressmen, whom he called meetings in the house of Nariñ political parties through fees in the administration, among other negotiations behind closed doors.

Armando Benedetti is what today is called a political operator, one of the best in the country, is clear, because he has developed the skills and obtained first hand the knowledge of how Congress operates thanks to his years of work in him. However, something differentiates it from its predecessors in the ministry, also tanned congressmen and politicians with electoral interests: Benedetti seems to have few scruples, or at least as many as those of the president himself, who prioritizes his reforms bogged down in Congress and hopefully maintain his coalition in power, before his promises of change. More of the same, with equal or greater disenchantment of a public opinion that still does not exceed that Benedetti is the one who does that work.

The whole is valid

While President Petro argues that there is a legal campaign with Armando Benedetti and excuses his personal actions and as an official as an aspect of his lovely madness, Colombians do not stop wondering how it is possible that the president brings him back to the government after the scandals for corruption that Benedetti himself has declared in a viva voice.

In May 2023, it should be remembered, in that low neighborhood fight that he held with the then Chief of Cabinet, Laura Sarabia, said in recordings published by the magazine ‘Week’, that 15,000 million pesos entered (about 3.4 million dollars) to the campaign, what he had done the work on the Caribbean coast and that if they continued to ignore it in the presidency and Sarabia continued to block access to Petro End everything. “No one leaves me thrown three hours there, a man who made 100 meetings in a political campaign, a man who won 15,000 million and now … that I looked for all the money and you know it more than anyone,” he tells Laura Sarabia. And he adds: «Nobody, or Petro, worked more than me in that huge campaign. If it hadn’t been for me, they don’t win, children, never win. To give me that treatment ».

President Petro dismissed him as an ambassador to Caracas and Sarabia resigned from his position as head of the office. But both returned to the government -no one understands well why and suspicions and assumptions are still cooked -Benedetti to occupy the representation before the FAO, in Italy, and she owns the administrative department of the Presidency (Danpre), a position of great weight in the Executive. Meanwhile, the left -wing coalition that led him to power had to swallow several toads on behalf of two ‘outsiders’, monitoring the political project of Petrism and generators of several crises.

Gender and violence

Gustavo Petro, in his long disquisitions as president, in his speeches before the communities, in the campaigns that appeal to progressivism and the value of life, has been shown as a defender of women’s rights, which won the support of feminist groups, among others.

However, the scrato with the Interior Minister seems to be different, despite the rumors of old data but, especially, after the scandal of violence by Benedetti according to his wife’s public complaint, Adelina Guerreromade last May while in Madrid. The count before the local authorities was that of a domestic fight where he threatened her with a knife, a matter that jumped to the headlines in Colombia and Spain, adding to the rumors that circulated a year earlier about the situation of the couple, derived from the publications on domestic violence in social networks made by her and her mother.

That was the trigger, in the last Council of Ministers, so that Vice President Márquez and the then Minister of Environment, Susana Muhamadwill declare first the whole country that they did not agree with the Benedetti’s re -asch, who arrived as chief of cabinet in early February, because in addition to not being part of the political project of Petrism and having serious questioning about the resources of the campaign, he has shown macho and misogynistic behaviors incompatible with a government that preaches – but does not apply – the change.

President Petro responded with a dissertation about love, relationships, the woman in the guerrillas, the macho left that subsists and already very direct with Minister Susana Muhamad, closing the questioning like this: “I have seen feminisms that destroy men”, to end that all people have to give them a second chance. Benedetti has all had it, including that of liquidating from the very heart of the government the political project and affecting the legacy that the president intends. But, of course, Petro is also an expert in second electoral opportunities.