The candidate for the Presidency of Colombia, Rodolfo Hernández, in an image of last May 15, in Bogotá. Mauricio Duenas Castaneda (EFE)
Rodolfo Hernández is a millionaire and he likes everyone to know it.
He speaks openly about his properties, he says that until recently he had at least five in Miami and that he has just bought an apartment in Bogotá because if he wins the Presidency he would not like to live in the Casa de Nariño.
Being a tycoon in a country like Colombia has helped him gain support in his presidential race.
“What need did he have being such a rich man,” his mother, the already famous Cecilia Suárez, told him, at the idea of her wanting to be president.
Doña Cecilia inherited his explosive character and being a “tireless worker”, he usually says.
His voters speak of his business success as a value.
"A millionaire politician is not going to steal," said one of his voters in Yopal after the first electoral round.
The fortune of Rodolfo Hernández, 77, is 100 million dollars, as he himself has acknowledged.
70% is invested in land and 30% moves in the financing of housing projects that he builds and sells, he said in an interview with
Bocas magazine
.
Hernández founded the company that is now known as HG, after being fired, at the beginning of the 1970s, from the Secretary of Public Works of the Government of Santander, headed by Jaime Trillos.
In 1972, he joined forces with Guillermo Gómez and Abelardo Serrano, two merchant friends of his who lived, like him, in Piedecuesta, and created the HGS construction company.
Shortly after, Serrano withdrew from the company and it remained as HG.
Gómez died three years later, but Hernández kept the name, which ended up becoming his trademark.
No one who has lived in Santander has ever heard of HG.
The name of Rodolfo Hernández is associated above all with the urban development of his native Piedecuesta.
“It was a closed town and he turned it into a city.
At that time we did not have the dual carriageway, only a
small road,
making an investment there was a feat and he dared”, former governor Miguel Arenas reminded this newspaper, who says that the now candidate took advantage of his good reputation in the town to expand its prestige to Bucaramanga and grow its finances.
"There he changed the construction styles, he brought modern, different facades," Arenas recalled.
His path in the real estate industry stumbled upon the financial crisis of the 1990s, which swept away banks, savings and housing corporations.
According to what he has said, at that time he managed to have up to 1,500 homes built, but without a buyer.
It occurred to Hernández to offer the credits himself and act as a bank.
It was then that he began his Plan 100 project. Advised by a couple of Argentines who accompanied him until the start of his presidential campaign, in 1994 they began to lend money to low-income people.
HG asked for the initial installment, 20%, and the rest was financed for 30 years with a fixed interest rate, which was not always met.
“The best business in life is to lend money, even at a low
rate
”, said Rodolfo Hernández without hesitation, who has repeated several times that the best advice he received from his grandmother has been applied throughout his life: “Work with the poor and you will become rich”.
A couple of police officers guard the rest house of candidate Rodolfo Hernández, in Piedecuesta.NATHALIA ANGARITA
The 'lender' of the houses
Hernandez started charging like a bank.
By day and by night.
Any day a week.
According to various sources in Bucaramanga, the key to Hernández's fortune is that he not only built, but also became the lender of the homes of thousands of families who long to have their own home.
“I take the mortgages, that is the milk cow.
Imagine about 15 years a little man paying me interest.
That is a delight”, she has been heard saying in an audio.
HG gives loans at interest rates similar to those of banks and facilitates the procedures for future buyers.
They offer clients “a free investment mortgage loan” and lend them “on their guarantee of payment of the debt”.
A person who believed in his project tells this newspaper how what seemed like a promise of good intentions ended up being a nightmare, worse than if he were dealing with a bank.
In 1995, HG delivered some houses in Girón, in the metropolitan area of Bucaramanga.
They were houses of social interest, which they accessed with an initial fee, which they hand over to Hernández himself in cash, and with the commitment to pay the rest in installments, which would maintain a single value.
It would be many years paying them.
Some found it difficult to meet that monthly payment and ended up losing their houses and being left homeless.
The houses returned to the hands of Hernández better than he had given them.
The candidate and his company have, according to public information from the Judicial Branch, lawsuits against dozens of families in Bucaramanga to execute mortgage processes for non-payment.
Hernández has said in different interviews that the key to his fortune has been the poor.
“My grandmother Lola, who was illiterate and was the one who raised me, told me one thing that I never forget: 'If you want to be rich, she works with the poor.
Because there are many poor.
Make them high-quality products, at a fair price, earn them a little bit
and
the sum of all those little
bits
makes you rich'.
The truth, I ignored him.
And these 52 years I have dedicated myself to that”, he said recently in an interview with Alexander Torrenegra, CEO of Torre.co.
He had also said something similar to the magazine
Semana
.
“The rich do better when the poor have money in their pockets.
The rich are the ones who put together the supply of goods and services.
The poor are consumers.
The candidate talks a lot about land, makes jokes about the premium price with which he sold lots.
In a meeting with his team at the Bucaramanga Mayor's Office, he tells an anecdote that his construction company "bobbed" with the prices with which it negotiated land.
Hernández says that the lots “never get old”, that they are the best investment because they do not lose value.
“The land is worth more every day because of the capital gains that the State itself generates on the lot.
And what the neighbors do, everything that the others work on, is earned by the lot, which also has another advantage: it is never old.
This apartment is getting old, but the land is not.
No one asks him: 'Hello, and how old is that lot?'”, he told
Bocas Magazine
.
The land, on which the history of Colombia has revolved, for Hernández is only a profitable business.
“I finance the
buildings
that I make and I take the mortgages, that is the milk cow”.
Housing prototype of the houses that presidential candidate Rodolfo Hernández promises to build for the peasants.NATHALIA ANGARITA
your taxes
Rodolfo Hernández likes to talk about his money.
He is a millionaire who jokes that he is a rich man in Bucaramanga, a beggar in Bogotá and more beggar in New York.
With a fortune like the one he has admitted to having, questions have been raised about how much his taxes are.
Hernández, who has not made public his income statement, has said that he pays 20 million pesos a day (about 5,150 dollars).
The finances of his company, HG, are in the hands of his wife, Socorro Oliveros.
“She saves everything, she has a sense for rationalization of spending.
I am looser.
She is the one who takes the money and says: 'Here I have this sum, but I give you so much'.
It is terrible for those who sell, but it is very good for the company”, said the candidate about Oliveros' work.
Hernández says that since 1994 he has not set foot in a bank.
He assures that he canceled "everything" and decided to work with his own capital.
In Colombia, where construction companies rely on banks to lay the foundation stone for their projects, Hernández's business is an exception.
He finances the works himself and what he puts out of his pocket he recovers with loans to those who want to buy their homes and who for many years, month after month, pay him a fee.
The candidate and his family own six companies and more than 370 properties including lots, apartments and shops, according to an investigation by
La Silla Vacía
.
In Florida they own the company HG Constructora LLG, which was created in 2019 under the direction of Oliveros and Luis Carlos Hernández, the son who wanted to collect a millionaire commission for obtaining a garbage transformation contract.
One of Rodolfo Hernández's companies in the United States.rrss
“One does not break from living well, but from doing stupid business.
I have dedicated myself to providing, above all else, housing for the poor and now I have the capacity to finance my buyers for up to 20 years, cheaper than any bank in Colombia.
I do not ask for papers, the only thing I ask for is the citizenship card, ”Hernandez said in an interview with Semana, recalling how he became a millionaire.
The construction tycoon will check this Sunday if offering houses and thinking of Colombia as if it were a company will work for him to reach the Presidency.
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