Víctor De Currea-Lugo, left in the hands of President Petro the final designation of being Colombia's ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.rrss
There is a whirlwind in the direction of the Colombian Foreign Ministry, with a first and last name, which could grow with the days: Víctor de Currea-Lugo, who announces that the Government of Gustavo Petro has appointed him ambassador of Colombia in the United Arab Emirates and to whom several people point of having committed sexual harassment when he was a university professor.
The doctor and professor in social sciences announced his appointment last Friday on social networks and accusations about his past immediately rolled against him from different corners.
“Isn't that “Change is with women”?
Stop re-victimizing them AT LEAST," wrote left-wing congresswoman Jennifer Pedraza, a former student at the National University where Currea-Lugo was a professor.
Faced with criticism like these, this Monday De Currea-Lugo publishes a column.
In it he defends himself and leaves it in doubt that his appointment is made.
"I leave it in the hands of President Gustavo Petro if he continues with the designation or decides to withdraw it, he has every right to support me or not," says the letter published on his website.
"Leaving the final decision in the hands of the president does not imply, in any way, an implicit admission of guilt on my part, but simply a prioritization of my mental health."
Víctor de Currea-Lugo has not been convicted of the crime of sexual harassment, but the accusations on social networks and the rumors in the corridor have been the subject of debate for almost ten years.
They began when he was a professor at the Faculty of Political Science and International Relations at the Javeriana University, at the beginning of the last decade, a position in which he spent three and a half years.
The professor recounted, in a 2018 column in Semana magazine, that in 2014 he was accused of sexual harassment, an accusation that he says he understood as a strategy of "bullying by the dean's office."
He admitted that he has had at least one girlfriend who was not only younger than him, but who was both his partner and his student — and justified their relationship, which in many universities would be sanctioned due to the obvious imbalance of power.
"That does not make me a pedophile, a rapist, or an abuser," he wrote in his column.
”One of them, with whom I lived, was my student.
And in the course that I taught, it was evaluated by another professor with the explicit authorization of the dean and with the knowledge of all the students in the course, in a relationship that even the rector was informed of.
Where is the abuse?” he says.
EL PAÍS spoke with two academics who were colleagues of Currea-Lugo at Javeriana and who confirmed the accusations made to him at that time by several students.
They clarify that these were complaints that the students secretly made to some teachers and that, as far as they know, they never became criminal complaints or were formalized within the university's administrative system.
“It was not the time of MeToo yet, so the students were not thinking of denouncing each other but rather of seeing how each one could protect themselves,” said one of the teachers.
Among the attitudes of sexual harassment that they heard against Currea-Lugo was that he asked the students for extracurricular dates, sometimes in exchange for passing the subject, or made comments such as "what nice shoes, how good they would look under my bed".
"I have no doubt that he has a record as a harasser," said one of the teachers.
"With Víctor there were always complaints, constant, it was a general theme in his courses," says the other.
They add that he was not the only Javeriana professor who had relationships with students, but they consider that many students complained about him for what they felt was an attitude of harassment.
De Currea-Lugo denies that he was a stalker, and in his defense he says that perhaps people confuse flirting with harassment.
"It is possible that my flirting, which in principle I do not have to regret and for which I do not have to apologize, has offended a woman, that would be cause for an apology," he wrote in 2018. "It hurts that it is affirmed without evidence , under a false gender solidarity, on social networks, my fault and therefore my sentence”.
In 2014 de Currea-Lugo resigned from the Javeriana University for reasons that remain unknown, which his colleagues recall was having a dispute with the dean of Social Sciences, Edwin Murillo.
He became a professor at the National University, where complaints persecuted him among groups that women debated sexual harassment there.
"Like Víctor de Correa-Lugo who doesn't even know that Linkedin is not a social network for flirting?" said a message on Facebook, a comment that worried the professor.
He defended himself by saying that the woman who wrote the message was not his student, and who accused him of slander and inventing post-truths.
In his column this Monday, de Currea-Lugo takes up a good part of his arguments, repeating that the accusations against him by women and teachers are slander or ways of wanting to cancel the public debate.
"Apart from the presidential decision, I already announce the opening of the necessary criminal proceedings," announces the professor, although it is not clear if he intends to denounce congresswoman Pedraza or the columnist for El Tiempo, Sara Tufano, who has echoed the accusations on his Twitter account.
Or to the dozens of people who continue to point him out on social networks when his name is made public again.
"Lugo is an old stalker fox capable of oscillating between the passive and aggressive of his violence, he appeared to me concerned about my learning and my grades and willing for us to do 'something' to improve them," wrote a tweeter.
The Foreign Ministry has not ruled on the issue, but the winds against Professor Currea-Lugo continue to grow.
“In another country, having a mere indication of illegal or unethical behavior already eliminates the possibility of a political career for anyone.
Here the premise in cases of harassment is that until justice (which rarely works well in these instances) does not condemn, everything is possible”, wrote the political analyst Sandra Borda.
For a president who said in his inauguration speech that he will govern "with and for women," de Currea-Lugo's appointment as ambassador can be costly.
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