Bogota. The eldest son of President Gustavo Petro will address his defense under the figure of “provisional release” after a guarantee function judge decided yesterday afternoon not to send him to pretrial detention to face charges of illicit enrichment and money laundering that weigh against you.
In the midst of great public expectations, which follow the case as if it were a soap opera, the man in charge of the case took several hours to expose an indecipherable legal gibberish before announcing that he will not send Nicolás Petro to jail, thus adding another ingredient to this melodramatic plot whose first chapter began at dawn last Saturday, when Petro Jr. and his ex-wife, Day Vázquez, were arrested in the city of Barranquilla.
Nicolás Petro obtained the benefit of probation after declaring yesterday that a good part of the money of illicit origin received by him and his ex-wife during 2022 went to his father’s electoral campaign. According to sources close to the investigation, this serious accusation is only the beginning of a strategy by the president’s firstborn before indulging in a figure called the “principle of opportunity” through which he could even get rid of all the accusations against him.
Judicial experts explained that this would be possible if Nicolás Petro provides the Attorney General’s Office -as he has offered- credible and sufficient evidence to demonstrate that resources of illicit origin came to his father’s campaign.
Petro Jr.’s ex-wife was also released, but both will have mobility restrictions and will be prohibited from approaching other procedural subjects involved. The judge went beyond the prosecution’s request for the president’s son to receive “home detention.”
Sorrowful son’s revenge?
The recent statements by the eldest of Petro’s six children not only caused a major political reverberation, but have also generated an avalanche of speculation about the motivations that Nicolás could have to cause irreparable damage to the image and governability of his own father. .
Local media recalled that when Nicolás’s ex-wife went to the magazine Week to denounce that her ex-husband –whom she had just discovered having an affair with her best friend– had received colossal amounts of money taking advantage of his status as the son of Gustavo Petro, he tried to explain Nicolás’s conduct by arguing that he had not raised him or participated in their training process.
The distance that the head of state took in front of his son at that moment would be –according to some analysts– the cause of the coldness with which Nicolás is acting, knowing the damage he causes to his father.
Sources close to the prosecution revealed on Thursday that the defendant refused to receive President Petro in the institution’s bunker, where he has been detained since his capture, while some media broadcast a message from Laura Ojeda, Nicolás’s current partner: ” I really appreciate that you don’t repeat history, you are an excellent father”. Ojeda is in her ninth month of pregnancy.
Meanwhile, Sofía Petro, daughter of the president’s third marriage, wrote on networks that “I usually discuss many things with the president because I believe that it can always be done better. But there are two indisputable things that no one has like him: the honesty of his heart and his love for Colombians.
Andrés, another of Nicolás’s brothers, questioned him without euphemisms: “I want you to get out of the hole in which you find yourself much wiser and without resentment, because you are the only one responsible for what you did.”
After President Petro not only announced zero pressure on the judicial branch, but also rejected the accusation the day before yesterday of the arrival of hot money to his campaign, warning that only the people who elected him could remove him from power, the troubled waters of politics Colombiana seemed to return to calm, just three days before the head of state completed the first year of his term.
After the most radical sectors of the right called for Petro’s head, alleging the alleged illegitimacy of his election, most political parties closed ranks around the president.
This support was spearheaded by former President César Gaviria, powerful head of the Liberal Party, who got up early this morning to say: “We are obliged to fight for President Gustavo Petro to finish his term.”
While the gruesome judicial case of the president’s son progresses, another investigation will begin in the Commission of Accusations of the House of Representatives, constitutional judge of the president of the republic, where -according to opposition parliamentarians announced- a complaint will be filed for the alleged entry irregular money to the electoral campaign.
