The Minister of Agriculture, Cecilia López, is another of the high officials of President Gustavo Petro who is giving explanations after admitting that he met with Nicolás Petro –eldest son of the Head of State–, who today is at the center of the controversy for allegedly having received money irregularly for the President’s campaign and who is also accused of having pressured members of the cabinet in exchange for bureaucracy.
In dialogue with EL COLOMBIANO, López detailed the circumstances of the meeting he had with the deputy from Atlántico and revealed that Petro himself, upon learning of the meeting between the minister, Nicolás Petro Burgos and other politicians, He warned him that “if they asked for something, don’t give it to them.”
As explained by the official, the meeting was held in her apartment in Bogotá and took place before she took office as minister on August 7. The meeting was organized with the intermediation of the lawyer Miguel Ángel del Río, who called to arrive at Congress with the blessing of the Historical Pact.
“Before being a minister, Miguel Ángel del Río asked me for an appointment to talk about the Atlantic and he came to my apartment with some politicians and with Nicolás, whom he did not know. They told me about the Coast and I told the President at the junction, ”said López, who assured that he does not remember the date, but that the politicians spoke of the” need to give opportunities to the Atlantic Coast ”.
According to the account of the head of the Ministry of Agriculture, after the meeting she told Petro about the meeting and he gave her a strong warning, even when her own son was in the middle: “At the junction I told President Petro and he told me that if they asked for something, don’t give it to them”.
López told this newspaper that after that meeting he “never again” saw Nicolás Petro, “nor did he look for me at all.” When inquiring about whether during that meeting Petro Burgos made some kind of bureaucratic request, the minister replied: “No, he only mentioned the lack of representation that the Coast had, but there was no request, because he was not yet a minister.”
Another is the version of the lawyer del Río, who told the Blu Radio station that, prior to Petro’s election, he created a group of lawyers “with the purpose of confronting vote buying and electoral mafias.” It was this group that, he said, met with Minister López, but – contrary to what the official told EL COLOMBIANO – the meeting took place not before Petro’s triumph, but later, exactly in October, when the President added two months of Government.
“In mid-October, Nicolás Petro was in Bogotá and we had a meeting about the possibility that I could assess an electoral space, either from the Atlántico Governor’s Office or from the Barranquilla Mayor’s Office for the 2023 elections. It seemed like a valid exercise (…) At that time, I organized a meeting with Minister Cecilia López to which I invited Senator Pedro Flórez, Deputy Nicolás Petro and other Caribbean leaders. The idea was to establish with the minister a kind of support guideline”, declared the jurist.
A few days ago, Semana Magazine published the chats of Nicolás Petro Burgos with his ex-wife, Day Vásquez, in which she warns him that meetings with his father’s government ministers could bring him problems. “Stop meeting with ministers and others (…). Stop that, they are going to send a letter to your dad (…) you still have a lot to learn, ”says one of the messages.
During the Petro Burgos chats He spoke about 10 places that the Minister of the Interior, Alfonso Prada, would have given him to locate lawyers in the entity. “Prada gave me some slots. She gave me 10 slots. I am going to give 3 for Ciénaga, one to help my mother, one for you and 5 for the political issue of Barranquilla, ”Petro tells his wife at the time.
Part of the couple’s conversations revolve around that issue. The president’s son asks his ex-wife who to recommend for those slots he had been given. That is, who to accommodate in the bureaucracy that would have been promised.
This Monday Prada denied the accusations and said that he met the President’s son during the campaign: “We have never talked about quotas for anything, because in my language that word does not exist. It would be necessary to see in the framework of that conversation what he wanted to say. I do not know what he’s talking about. I’m not going to speculate (…) I have no idea what he’s talking about. But I must tell the Colombians that he has not given me a resume. No one can enter the Government without all the transparency steps being noted. Anything that has been against that, I censure it,” Prada replied.