Armando Benedetti justifies his leaked audios as an act of weakness in which he was carried away "by rage and drink"

Of "we all sank. We're all done. We are going prisoner" to express his admiration for President Gustavo Petro and express his apologies for the damage caused by some audios leaked to the press, on Monday night the politician and former senator Armando Benedetti took his emotion to another level. By means of a trill, the same means with which he immolated himself and set fire to the government the previous week, he assured that everything was due to the fact that, dissatisfied with what had touched him politically, "in an act of weakness and sadness" he let himself be carried away "by anger and drinking."

I have been a fundamental part of President Petro's current political project. However, not satisfied with what corresponded to me politically, in an act of weakness and sadness I let myself be carried away by anger and drinking.

— Armando Benedetti (@AABenedetti) June 5, 2023

The audios, released by the magazine Semana, have put the government in a greater predicament. This is the biggest scandal of the ten months of Petro's presidency, which led to criminal complaints against him filed by two opponents on Monday before the Accusation Commission of the House of Representatives, a body that investigates the actions of the presidents. The whistleblowers, former presidential candidate Federico Gutiérrez and Senator Miguel Uribe, believe that Petro should explain the financing of his 2022 campaign. That's because in the audios Benedetti, head of that campaign, tells Laura Sarabia, then chief of staff of the president, that if he talked about what happened everyone could all go to prison. "We all sank. We're all done. We are going prisoner, we finish all the fucking shame," he is heard saying.

These statements generate special suspicion not only because Benedetti, Sarabia and Petro toured the country together promising a government of change, but also because he threatened to reveal the origin of 15,000 million pesos that he says he got in the Caribbean region, from which Benedetti is a native and in which Petro obtained a resounding victory. His discomfort, apparently, was unleashed by the excessive prominence that Sarabia had been acquiring in the Government, in contrast to his low visibility. Benedetti, as he himself admits in his most recent trill, wanted to occupy a position of greater importance in Colombia and considered his role as ambassador to Venezuela as a kind of exile.

Petro did not hesitate to also respond through Twitter, his favorite means to communicate, from where he clarified that "in no interview or in audios has it been shown that I have committed a crime. This is a simple soft coup attempt to stop the fight against impunity." "I don't accept blackmail," he said. This, at a key moment in which Congress is discussing the profound reforms proposed by the Government, which this scandal has already paralyzed; when in the JEP the denunciations of paramilitarism continue, and in which the political movements for the regional elections of October begin to be activated.

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