The electoral authority of Colombia (CNE) decided this Tuesday to initiate an administrative investigation against President Gustavo Petro for allegedly violating spending limits in his 2022 campaign, investigations that the president calls an attempted “coup d’état.”
Petro and some leaders of his campaign team “are accused of allegedly violating the spending limit” for the equivalent of about $925,000, the president of the National Electoral Council, César Lorduy, said in a press conference.
The leftist president is exposed to financial fines, but not to loss of office. However, experts point out that the CNE can send a copy of the investigation to the House of Representatives (Lower House) so that the president can be impeached.
Among those investigated is Ricardo Roa, manager of Petro’s campaign to come to power in 2022 and current head of the state oil company Ecopetrol, and its treasurer.
Also leaders of Colombia Humana and Unión Patriótica, the main left-wing political movements in the country.
Since the investigations into these alleged irregularities began, the president insists that the electoral authority is being used to overthrow him.
“The coup d’état has begun,” he immediately wrote on the social network X.
– Money from a drug trafficker –
Suspicions over the alleged violations of the limits established by law grew in July of last year, when the president’s eldest son, Nicolás Petro, admitted to the prosecutor’s office that he received money from a drug lord and used it in some campaign events in the Caribbean coast.
The president’s lawyer, Héctor Carvajal, had anticipated in a radio interview that he was not going to recognize any decision of the CNE and that he would take legal measures.
Petro assures that the CNE has a bias, since some of its magistrates are close to right-wing parties.
On social networks, some of his allies began to call to “defend the Constitution.”
According to the investigations carried out so far by the CNE, Petro’s team did not report expenses incurred to organize mass meetings with followers on the Caribbean coast, a traditionally right-wing region but which in the last election catapulted the leftist to the presidency.
That hypothesis gained strength after Nicolás Petro stated before the prosecutor’s office that money from a drug lord known as “the Marlboro Man” entered the campaign.
The confession was made within the framework of an investigation for alleged money laundering, for which the president’s son was arrested in July 2023.
Nicolás Petro assures that his father did not know about these money movements.
Another scandal hit the president after a series of audio recordings of telephone conversations between his ambassador to the FAO and former ambassador to Venezuela, Armando Benedetti, and his right-hand man, Laura Sarabia, were leaked in June 2023, in which he threatened to ” tell the truth” of alleged anomalies carried out to obtain votes in the Caribbean region.
Contributions from an Ecopetrol union and payments made, but allegedly not reported, to electoral witnesses during the voting are also being investigated.
© Agence France-Presse