The financing of Gustavo Petro’s campaign causes a political earthquake in Colombia

It has not been the right-wing opposition that has unleashed the biggest crisis in the Government of Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing president in contemporary Colombia, who will complete a year in office on Monday. He has been the eldest son of the president, local deputy of his political party and in charge of the movement on the entire Colombian Caribbean coast. Nicolás Petro Burgos, for five months involved in an alleged corruption scandal, decided to collaborate with the Prosecutor’s Office to achieve a lesser sentence. The prosecutor in the case revealed on Thursday that the president’s son admitted that he received money from a former drug trafficker and from two questioned businessmen and that he appropriated part of those sums, which was initially the spigot that opened the investigation. But also, and this is the scandal that fully hits a president who was elected with a promise of change, that his 2022 campaign received a part of those resources, the amount of which has not been clarified, and did not report them to the authorities. electoral.

The president accused the coup. On Friday he reported that he had retained the services of a reputable criminal lawyer to face any investigation. Earlier, on the same Thursday, he had addressed a massive peasant assembly in which he presented his great commitment to agrarian reform, and said that he will remain in office until the end of his term, in 2026: “It was my people who chose me. I owe my choice to no one else. You have the absolute certainty that this government ends according to the popular mandate. From no one else, ”he said between cheers. And he added: “If that (the income of undeclared money to his campaign) were true, this president would have to leave today, because I am not Uribe, I am not Santos, I am not Duke, I am not any of the that has come back”.

“My sons and daughters have been free. They will be wrong, like every human being; they will walk different paths than mine, ”he reiterated, emphasizing his differences with Nicolás, of whom he said in March, when the scandal broke out:“ I did not raise him, that is the truth ”.

That was the truth, because Nicolás grew up with his mother while the current president, then a young M-19 guerrilla, lived in hiding and was in jail. But it is not the whole truth. Petro Burgos is a political dolphin, the only one of the six sons of the president who has competed for votes and power at the hands of his father. In the 2018 presidential campaign, when Petro lost to the conservative Iván Duque, Nicolás participated in demonstrations, toured neighborhoods, obtained support, and served as campaign manager in Barranquilla, the city where he lived. In the 2019 regional elections, he was his father’s candidate for Governor of Atlántico, one of the richest and most populous departments in Colombia. It was not an easy mission, as the right-wing Char family monopolizes power in the region.

Electoral financing has been a subject of recurring problems in Colombia. Barely a month and a half ago, the Prosecutor’s Office charged Óscar Iván Zuluaga, a failed Uribista presidential candidate in 2014, for having received and not having reported financing from the corrupt Brazilian multinational Odebrecht. The campaigns of Juan Manuel Santos and Iván Duque have also faced accusations and investigations.

And a little less than 30 years ago, President Ernesto Samper saw his four-year term become a long institutional wear. He managed to prevent his downfall at the cost of curbing his social democratic program. That case, which investigated the financing of the Cali Cartel for his campaign, the so-called Process 8,000, marked an entire generation, ended with several politicians in jail, and plunged the country into a political crisis. This time it is the president’s own son who has pointed the finger at the president, in an apparent family betrayal that could mark the three years of Petro’s remaining term.

Nicolás lost the 2019 gubernatorial elections, but his father gave him new assignments: leading his political movement, Colombia Humana, throughout the Colombian Caribbean. “Nicolás Petro carried out the campaign that he played. Atlántico preferred to remain under the aegis of the Char and catapult them as the rivals of Human Colombia in the immediate future. Nicolás has the enormous task of leading Human Colombia throughout the Caribbean,” he wrote on his Twitter account the same night as the vote, as a comment on a tweet from Nicolás’s then-partner, Daysuris Vásquez. The political relationship between father and son was consolidated.

Nicolás then became a regional deputy. From that position, in 2022, he was in charge of his father’s presidential campaign in the Caribbean. They won in the first and second round, Petro was sworn in and after seven months came the scandal. The ex-wife Daysuris Vásquez, hurt because Nicolás had been unfaithful to her with her best friend, told the president, first in private and then to Semana magazine, that Nicolás had collected money from a former drug lord, from the son of a questioned contractor and from other sources. for the campaign, and that he had kept it to live a life of exorbitant luxury.

Petro distanced himself from before the revelation, when he asked the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate Nicolás and his brother Juan Fernando, involved in another scandal. But the time bomb exploded when Nicolás spent five days in detention and learned of the Prosecutor’s evidence against him. His confession clouded the launch of the ceasefire with the ELN, the shortlist of women for the Prosecutor’s Office and the end of the interim in the Ministry of Culture, all news that promised to give Petro relief days before celebrating the first anniversary of him in the presidency. The president was once again on the defensive. That he has dedicated his last trip to argue his innocence, and even mention his desire not to resign from office, makes it clear.

The quality and forcefulness of the evidence provided by Nicolás Petro to demonstrate the secret income of money to the presidential campaign remains to be seen. That the institutions —from the presidency to the judiciary, through Congress— manage to face the crisis without getting badly hurt, too. With Process 8,000, President Samper managed to complete his term, but his economic and social policies, the most similar to those of Petro in recent history, lost steam.

Peter himself has said in the past that “an elected policy, be it with money from drug trafficking, be it with the treasury, is illegitimate and extremely weak.” And now it is he on whom that suspicion falls. His room for maneuver is little. The president who had not been politically wounded by his former enemies, like former president Álvaro Uribe, received the hardest blow to his government from where he least expected it: from a confession from his eldest son, the political dauphin of the.

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