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RFI interviewed Ronal Fabián Rodríguez, a political scientist from the Universidad del Rosario, about the case of Nicolás Petro, son of the Colombian president, who has been accused of corruption and links to drug traffickers, as well as using his last name to get appointments in official entities. President Petro asked the courts to investigate his son.
R.F.I. Nicolás Petro, son of the Colombian president, denied the accusations of corruption and links with drug traffickers denounced by local media based on the statements of his ex-wife Day Vásquez in an interview with Semana magazine. President Petro had asked hours before the broadcast of the interview, last Thursday, that the justice system investigate it. Nicolás Petro, deputy in the Assembly of the department of Atlántico, has also been linked to influence peddling to obtain positions in public entities. In one of the messages revealed by the press, Nicolás Petro says that Interior Minister Alfonso Prada promised him “10 quotas”, that is, 10 positions for relatives and political allies. What impact has this case had in Colombia?
“Unfortunately, the Colombian State has a strong tradition of nepotism in which the presidential family and even members of that family, when they come to power, take advantage of information and the entire structure of the State for their benefit. This has been recurring throughout history. Colombian policy”.
R.F.I. President Petro had presented himself, however, as a champion of the fight against corruption. How did this affect his image?
“What is surprising in this case, indeed, is that President Petro used a speech against this type of practice, against this way of doing politics and manipulating power. And what we see is that not only his son He had access to the traditional dynamics of Colombian nepotism, but went a little further, as he sought to act, twisting the arm of the institutional framework, demanding posts from different ministers, and that is where the situation is quite uncomfortable because the change promised by the The president in discursive form is not transforming it in practice. He is doing the complete opposite of what he said he was going to do.”
R.F.I. The first lady, Verónica Alcocer, has also been accused of practices of nepotism.
“The first lady has become an actor of power. It is public knowledge that there are positions in the ministerial train, of the main positions of responsibility of the State, that are being assigned by her, or that have to have her patronage. This is very telling of that nepotism because the first lady theoretically has no function within the State. She has become, however, an expression of nepotism within the government of Gustavo Petro. This affects the image of the government because at In the end, the change he promised did not take place, on the contrary, what we are seeing is an extension of that Colombian nepotism.
I think the most serious case is that of the Family Welfare Institute, which is the entity in charge of all issues of childhood and adolescence in Colombia, in particular, designing public policies for children in vulnerable conditions. The address of that institute had been given to a very close friend of the first lady, a neighbor of the Petros. Her credential to be able to access that position was her closeness to the presidential family. But that is a very sensitive position that has a lot of political gain because it manages all the community mothers who are very committed actors in the different popular circles, since they are the ones who receive the children when the parents go to work and that gives them a great dynamism”.