Bogota.- Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, He affirmed this Thursday that he will continue his term until 2026 and that “they have tried” to confront him with his son Nicholas Petro Burgos to overthrow his government, after the latter, accused of money laundering and illicit enrichment, told the Prosecutor’s Office that part of the money he received entered his father’s presidential campaign in 2022.
“Of course they have tried to use the family scars, the wounds, some will heal, others perhaps never to try to open the way for the collapse of the first popular government in Colombia,” said the president in an act with peasants in Sincelejo, capital of the Caribbean department of Sucre.
Petro, who next Monday will celebrate the first of his four years in power, stressed that he owes his election “to the people and to no one else” and for this reason “it is to the people that I must answer.”
“You have the absolute certainty that this Government ends according to the popular mandate, of no one else, and that is good that it is clear in Colombia, there is no one who can end this Government that is not the people themselves and the people He himself gave an order by majority in the electoral polls, we will leave until the year 2026”, he emphasized.
According to the prosecutor in the case, Mario Burgos, the president’s eldest son, arrested last Saturday, agreed to collaborate with the Justice and “provided relevant information that the Prosecutor’s Office was unaware of” about the use given to money received from the drug trafficker Samuel Santander Lopesierra, alias “the Marlboro man”, and a son of the controversial businessman Alfonso “Turco” Hilsaca.
“In reality, some of said money entered his coffers (of Nicolás Petro) and others to the 2022 presidential campaign in which our current president, Dr. Gustavo Petro Urrego, was elected,” the prosecutor said at a hearing.
In his speech in Sincelejo, Petro assured that his eldest son could not have talked about corruption business because that was not what he taught them.
“He did not say that for a basic reason, to none of my sons and daughters, here is one present, I have never told them that they commit crimes, that has not existed,” said the president, who accused his opponents of rubbing their hands pitting “the son against the father.”
However, last March, when Nicolás Petro’s ex-wife, Daysuris Vásquez, revealed to the press that he had received allegedly illicit money, Petro distanced himself from raising his firstborn.
«He grew up in Córdoba, studied there and did his university there, law; We never really had the opportunity to live together, I didn’t raise him, that’s the reality, “he said then in an interview with Cambio magazine.
On Saturday, after Nicolás’s arrest, he assured: “As a person and a father, so much self-destruction hurts me a lot and that one of my sons goes to jail” and added that he wished him “good luck and strength” and that “he can reflect on his own mistakes.”
