The government crisis in Colombia continues. The president, Gustavo Petro, and two of his closest officials have been embroiled in scandals involving presidential campaign financing, wiretapping, multimillion-dollar robberies and a polygraph test. These events have generated a great national uproar and the opening of a commission in Congress to investigate the first left-wing president of Colombia, who has been in power for less than a year.
The cumbersome scandal that generates divisions within the Colombian government began when the nanny of the now former chief of staff, Laura Sarabia, denounced that she was accused of stealing several million pesos from her former boss’s house and that for that reason she was subjected to an identity test. polygraph in the vicinity of the presidential house.
Later, the magazine ‘Cambio’ revealed that the phone number of the babysitter, Marelbys Meza, had been illegally intercepted. The now former ambassador in Caracas, Armando Benedetti, got involved by being the one who recommended the nanny and with whom in recent days he had more disagreements than points in common.
Benedetti, with a long political career, was discontent, because he did not want to be in Venezuela anymore and aspired to a high position in the Government. Subsequently, the magazine ‘Semana’ published almost half an hour of recordings of Benedetti supposedly speaking with Sarabia, only 29 years old.
In one of them, he affirmed that he, as the “fundamental axis of Petro’s presidential campaign”, obtained about 3.5 million dollars and added that if he revealed who financed them, “everyone would go to jail”.
After the audios became known, President Petro published a tweet in which he denies having received that money and describes his former ambassador’s statements as blackmail, in addition to assuring that it is a soft coup against his government.
The next day, the former ambassador Benedetti acknowledged that he wanted a political space in the Government and tried to lower the juices by assuring that when he sent the audios he was under the influence of alcohol.
A case that the opposition has taken advantage of to carry out a series of accusations and complaints related to the alleged illegal money to finance the campaign of today’s President Petro.
The president is denounced before the Commission of Accusations of the House of Representatives, the only one with the power to judge a president.
One of the complainants is Federico Gutierrez, a former presidential candidate and possible candidate for the local elections next October.
Is there an intention on the right to overthrow President Gustavo Petro in Colombia as the pro-government say? Is it an implosion within the same cabinet? What will happen now with the president? To analyze the subject we have the help of our guests:
-Hernan Cadavid, representative to the Chamber for the opposition party Centro Democratico.
-Alfredo Mondragon, representative of the ruling Pacto Historico party.
Source: France 24
