Gustavo Petro defends his government: "I do not accept blackmail"

The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, has come out in defense of his mood and his government. "I do not accept blackmail, nor do I see politics as a space for personal favors," he reacted to the political storm unleashed by the explosive words of Armando Benedetti, his former confidant. In leaked audios and heated interviews, the now dismissed ambassador to Venezuela has cast, among others, a shadow of doubt about the financing of the campaign that brought the first leftist president to power in the country's recent history.

"Here I am alone to achieve more social justice in my country. That's what moves and obsesses me. If there are people in a different logic in the government, it is better that they separate from it," President Petro wrote near midnight on Sunday in a long message that he published on his very active Twitter account, the communication channel he usually privileges. "I think I understand what happens to Armando Benedetti's mind, I accept his apology, but he must explain his words to the Prosecutor's Office and the country," the text concludes.

Benedetti assures in some audios sent to Laura Sarabia, the also dismissed chief of staff with whom he is fiercely confronted, that if he talked about what happened during Petro's campaign everyone could go to prison. The president dismissed both last week after they were involved in a convoluted case of illegal wiretapping and leaks to the press yet to be clarified. Even after finding himself out of government last Friday, Benedetti has given every sign of wanting to see the world burn, and has continued to give interviews. The most recent was published on Monday by the magazine Semana, which had already published on Sunday the leaked audios in which the then ambassador in Venezuela speaks, among others, of 15,000 million pesos for the campaign on the Caribbean coast.

"An intelligence agency in the government [of Iván] Duque illegally recorded all the conversations made on Zoom during all the months of my campaign and were published in Semana. They could never publish a minute even where I said something illegal or irregular," Petro claimed in his message. He was referring to the video scandal that shook the final stretch of the second round that pitted him against Rodolfo Hernández, but ended in water of borage. "The investigation into those hacks never advanced in the Prosecutor's Office; It was not at that time a scandal that we were 'chuzara', "he defends in his message. One of the main fronts of the political storm has so far been the illegal interceptions of Sarabia's nanny and maid, suspected of stealing a briefcase with $ 7,000 in their home.

The president affirms in what has so far been his most in-depth pronouncement since the crisis broke out: "No one from the government cabinet, nor directors or commanders of the public force, nor directors of intelligence apparatuses, have ordered or interception of telephones, nor illegal searches, nor have blackmail about public positions or contracts been accepted, Nor have money been received in the campaign from people linked to drug trafficking, much less have figures such as 15,000 million been handled outside our accounting."

The progressive forces that have come to power in several Latin American countries fear that a politicized justice system will end up frustrating their push, and Petro's is no exception. The Colombian president had denounced last week a "soft coup" to decimate the government bench in Congress. As he later clarified, he was not referring to the high courts but to the actions of the Attorney General's Office, which sharpens his confrontation with the heads of the control bodies appointed by Duque. Petro has run into a prosecutor, Francisco Barbosa, willing to assume the tone of a political opponent.

The president will dedicate this Monday to the private agenda of Government, without public events, according to the Presidency of the Republic. That has not prevented him from resuming his frenetic activity on Twitter, where he has insinuated that behind everything is the bid for the prosecutor who will relieve Barbosa, who must leave a shortlist presented by the president at the end of this year. "Not only do they seek to prevent the government of change from presenting the shortlist [for] prosecutor, which they know will be a shortlist against impunity, but they are looking for the path that Pedro Castillo suffered," the president of Peru dismissed after attempting a self-coup, Petro has launched.

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