Bogota. The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, was unaware that money from a former drug lord financed his campaign, said his son Nicolás in statements released this Saturday by Semana magazine, in which he admitted that he is estranged from his father.
“Neither my father nor the campaign manager, Ricardo Roa, knew about the money Daysuris (Vásquez, his ex-wife) and I received from Santander Lopesierra and Gabriel Hilsaca,” said the 37-year-old politician, whom a judge granted parole on Friday after being arrested for money laundering and illicit enrichment.
The president in turn denied this same Saturday that his electoral campaign has been financed by drug trafficking.
“The campaign did not receive any money of an illegal nature and I found out about what happened from a meeting I had with Nicolás’s ex-wife in my office just a few months ago when I asked that they investigate my son,” he said through the network. social X
In the middle of a judicial process, Nicolás, who was arrested a week ago, revealed that he paid Petro’s campaign part of some 102,000 dollars that Samuel Santander Lopesierra, extradited to the United States for drug trafficking in 2003 and free since 2021, gave him last year.
A son of Alfonso “el turco” Hilsaca, a businessman accused in the past by the prosecution of financing paramilitary groups and planning homicides, also gave money to Nicolás, according to Mario Burgos, prosecutor in the case that makes the Colombian government tremble.
The president and Roa “did not know that part of those contributions I used for the campaign. It is important to make that clarification, but there are other circumstances,” added Nicolás, whose trial for money laundering and illicit enrichment will continue.
respect for justice
“As I said before, as president I will not put pressure on justice in his case, the judicial officials who intervene in his process will be respected by me,” Gustavo Petro said on Saturday.
In a recent event with peasants in Sincelejo (Sucre, north), Petro denied alleged versions that indicate that he knew of these movements.
“If that were true, this president would have to leave today,” added the first left-wing president of Colombia and who will celebrate his first year in government this Monday.
Petro pointed out that “what will never happen (…) is that it is affirmed that the current president of the Republic has even suggested or become an accomplice that one of his sons or daughters commits crimes, because that has not happened.”
