2023-07-30 05:01:00
Nicolás Petro Burgos, the eldest son of the president of Colombia and deputy of the Assembly of the Department of the Atlantic, was arrested for alleged money laundering and illicit enrichment. His ex-wife Daysuris Vásquez was also captured for money laundering and violation of personal data for events that occurred from 2022 to date.
“Those captured will be placed at the disposal of a municipal criminal judge with the Function of Guarantee Control, who will be asked to impart legality to the procedures for search, capture and seizure of probative material elements,” reported the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office through a statement, while indicating that “a charge will be made for the alleged crimes and” a measure restricting freedom will be requested.
After the arrest, the president, Gustavo Petro, expressed himself in his X account. “As a person and a father, so much self-destruction hurts me a lot and the fact that one of my children goes to jail; as president of the Republic I assure that the Prosecutor’s Office has all the guarantees on my part to proceed according to the law,” he wrote. And he added: “I wish my son luck and strength. May these events forge his character and be able to reflect on his own mistakes. As I stated before the attorney general, I will not intervene or pressure his decisions; may the law freely guide the process.”
After his message, ministers and political personalities close to him showed their support. One of them was the Colombian vice president, Francia Márquez, who expressed her solidarity with the president, indicating that “as a mother and father” she was for her children, she knows “what hurts when a child is in difficult situations.”
For his part, the former president of Congress, Roy Barreras, praised that Petro “overcame his presidential majesty over his pain as a father.” “Criminal responsibility is individual, but family solidarity with the president belongs to all of us who love him. No president was subjected to that pressure in the exercise of office,” he said. And he remarked: “Nicolás Petro is the first son of a president to go to jail, not because the sons of other presidents have not committed crimes, but because no other president allowed justice to act independently and without pressure as Gustavo Petro does. “.
The complaint of his ex-wife
On March 21, the Prosecutor’s Office announced that it was criminally investigating Nicolás Petro for his alleged meetings with drug traffickers in prison and for possible money laundering,” after his ex-wife assured in an interview with Semana magazine that the drug trafficker Samuel Santander Lopesierra , alias “the Marlboro man”, gave him “more than 600 million pesos for his father’s campaign. “That never legally reached the campaign because he kept that money, and so did others,” added the woman, who He mentioned that Petro’s son also received 200 million pesos from businessman Alfonso “Turco” Hilsaca, which did not go to the campaign either.
In another scandal related to illegal wiretapping, former Colombian ambassador to Venezuela Armando Benedetti threatened to reveal alleged irregularities in Petro’s presidential campaign in the Caribbean departments, AFP reported. In conversations leaked by the press with the former right hand of the president and former head of the cabinet, Laura Sarabia, Benedetti insinuates an alleged involvement of Nicolás Petro in these irregularities.
“I always had very serious indications of what was happening with Nicolás. When the complaint against him comes out, I start to put the puzzle together: I travel to Cartagena the following week and ask what happened and they tell me some stories” , the former diplomat told Semana in early June without going into details. On July 18, Sarabia appeared before the National Electoral Council (CNE) and denied having knowledge of the campaign money, while Benedetti was summoned by that authority, but did not appear.
the firstborn
Nicolás Petro Burgos was born in 1986 in Ciénaga de Oro, a town belonging to the Caribbean department of Córdoba. It was the result of the president’s union with Katia Burgos, a young woman with whom he shared militancy in the guerrilla group Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19). In his book One Life, Many Lives, Gustavo Petro recounted that he met Nicolás when he was still a baby and he was a prisoner in La Picota prison in Bogotá. “It was very strange to meet my first son in jail, knowing that I would not see him again for a long time,” said Petro, adding that he spent a year with him and Katia Burgos in hiding, but for security reasons separated from them.
Due to this circumstance, Nicolás was away from his father in his childhood and was raised by the maternal family, a fact that the president used last March to distance himself from his firstborn when the complaint against him arose. “He grew up in Córdoba, he studied there and did his university there, right. We never really had the opportunity to live together, I didn’t raise him, that’s the reality,” the president explained in an interview with Cambio magazine.
According to Petro, in the 1990s, when the M-19 demobilized and he already had a political career, Nicolás began to get closer to him and noticed “political concerns, from an electoral point of view,” which none of his five other children he had. After the 2018 presidential elections, in which Iván Duque defeated Gustavo Petro, Nicolás decided to contest the Atlántico Governorship. He intended to take advantage of his father’s political capital in Barranquilla, the capital of that department, where he obtained the highest number of votes.
Thus, in the 2019 regional elections, he ran as a candidate for a coalition headed by Colombia Humana, the movement founded by the current Colombian president, but lost by more than 500,000 votes to Elsa Noguera, close to the Char family who since He has been in charge of politics in Barranquilla and the Atlantic for years. However, for having come in second place, the Opposition Statute guaranteed him a seat in the Atlantic Assembly, for the period 2020-2023.
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