The first lady of Colombia, Verónica Alcocer, believes that in Gustavo Petro’s Government there are officials who maneuver to discredit her. In a criminal complaint that she filed on June 4 and became known this Friday, the president’s wife assures that there is a phenomenon of “friendly fire” about which she has data to provide when a prosecutor is assigned. “In these cases, it is people within the Government itself who launch stories and rumors to confuse public opinion and minimize scrutiny of their own actions,” she describes in a letter addressed to the attorney general, Luz Adriana Camargo.
The document indicates that there is “a systematic strategy of misinformation, an attack on human dignity, honor and good name.” According to Alcocer, those responsible circulate chains of messages with the aim of unsuspecting journalists replicating them in the media. “They write stories that, naturally, they do not subscribe to, mixing a couple of real facts with mountains of lies. They assign themselves the quality of well-informed sources, and in the end they find communicators and opinion makers who collect their stories and publish them without any prior verification or contrast,” the text reads.
The first lady does not provide further details about the reported cases. They have limited themselves to saying that they seek to link it to the corruption scandals of the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD), in which former director Olmedo López and former deputy director Sneyder Pinilla have threatened to slander several officials in their statements. to the Prosecutor’s Office. Until now, the former directors of the entity have acknowledged that they were corrupt and have assured that a part of the money they stole was used to carry out alleged orders to bribe the presidents of the Senate (3,000 million pesos, or $770,000) and the House. of Representatives (1,000 million pesos, or 260,000 dollars), in order to help the legislative reforms of the Executive.
Alcocer’s name has not appeared, at least in the media statements of López and Pinilla. However, the opposition has circulated rumors about his alleged involvement in the scheme. Senator Jota Pe Hernández, for example, suggested at the end of May that statements by López about “a code name,” not yet revealed, could refer to the first lady. “[Es] someone very close to Petro and with a lot of power in the Government, who is not [Laura] Sarabia nor Carlos Ramón [González]. “I wonder: Is the one with the 200,000 million Alcocer?” said the congressman, a YouTuber turned politician, on his X account. Later, media outlets such as Infobae and La FM echoed these statements. They attributed them to Hernández, without verification.
The Minister of the Interior, Luis Fernando Velasco, expressed his concern this Friday about the complaint by his boss’s wife. “It is a very delicate accusation. If she makes it, it is because she has evidence… a person like the first lady is not going to make a statement if she does not have evidence,” he stressed in statements to the media. With a cryptic message, he has maintained the mystery about who may be involved: “I don’t respond, but sometimes I would feel that there may be more collaboration.”
The vice minister’s precedent
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This is not the first time that Alcocer has faced “friendly fire” over alleged acts of corruption. Ricardo Díaz, vice minister of Strategy and Planning in the Defense portfolio in the first months of Government, denounced in September of last year to the magazine Week that a colonel had mentioned to the first lady when referring to a bribery attempt to buy three Qatari helicopters. “He told me that the first lady had a special interest in those helicopters being acquired by the Ministry of Defense,” the former official said then. The first lady denounced him for slander, but the process ended before any decision was made. Díaz died in April of this year.
Alcocer’s role in the Government has been the subject of intense debates, something that usually happens with the partners of leaders. In March 2023, it caused a stir when the first lady appeared at night and by surprise at a meeting between several ministers and congressmen to unblock the legislative process of the controversial health reform. The opposition cried foul and accused her of undue interference. Almost a year later, in January 2024, she once again found herself at the center of public scrutiny after the revelation of million-dollar expenses from her closest circle. This opened cracks in Petrism, where some questioned whether the first lady had so much visibility. Alcocer belongs to a powerful family from the Caribbean region that includes her cousin Mario Fernández Alcocer, former senator and husband of Senator Ana María Castañeda, of the opposition Cambio Radical.
The last few months have been low profile for the first lady, in contrast to the first year of Government. But the “friendly fire” over alleged acts of corruption has been too much and Alcocer has broken its silence. “The content of the information that seeks to link me to acts of corruption (…) has been systematically disseminated with a view to harming my human dignity and moral integrity,” the president’s wife stressed in her complaint.
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