Bogotá (EFE).- The Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, with only ten months in government, faces a delicate crisis that involves a scandal of illegal interceptions and possible abuses of power to two of his bishops, the chief of staff, Laura Sarabia, and the ambassador in Venezuela, Armando Benedetti.
The alleged theft of a briefcase with money from the house of the senior official allegedly by Marelbys Meza, a woman who worked for her as a babysitter, was the trigger for a series of irregular actions that today has Sarabia on a tightrope, who is He has become Petro’s right-hand man in his Government, and Benedetti, who was during the electoral campaign.
Sarabia is a young lawyer, who worked with Benedetti when he was a senator and came to Petro jointly. The ruler decided to keep her, as proof of her worth, in the closest position she had: that of head of office.
Thus, she has become one of the most powerful women in the country, but her meteoric rise has been slowed by the babysitter scandal and the illegal interceptions that were ordered against her, as well as a polygraph test carried out in the Palace itself. presidential.
“I reject the illegal interceptions, we have fought all our lives for the guarantee of human rights, that fight cost the lives of many of ours. Let these facts be investigated and what happened be clarified,” Vice President Francia Márquez said on Twitter, implicitly acknowledging that there was something illegal, although Petro said last night on the same network that “no member of the Government has given any order for interceptions telephone”.
theft of money
It all began at the end of January when, according to what was learned last Saturday through a publication in Semana magazine, Marelbys Meza was accused of stealing a briefcase with an unspecified amount of money from Sarabia’s house.
According to Meza’s version, when Sarabia found out about the theft, members of presidential security took her to a building located opposite the Casa de Nariño where they interrogated her and subjected her to polygraph tests without a court order.
Until then, the scandal was due to the possible abuse of power by the State to try to clarify a particular matter, but suddenly the reflectors pointed towards Benedetti, who, according to the journalist Daniel Coronell, could be behind Meza’s complaint. in an episode of “friendly fire” in the Government.
Benedetti was one of the first allies that Petro found outside the left in 2021, when he launched his presidential candidacy, and much of his electoral success is attributed to him, for which he became a powerful figure in the Government, which, before the court cases that pursue him and a reputation for being unreliable did not save him a ministerial position, but appointed him ambassador to Venezuela.
The connection with the ambassador
After Meza’s complaint, Benedetti’s connection to the case emerged, revealed on W Radio by Coronell, according to which the ambassador could be behind the revelations of the former babysitter, who also took care of the ambassador’s children, as a result of a crash between the two for positions in the Government.
According to this version, Benedetti wants to leave the embassy in Caracas and asked Petro for the Ministry of Defense, which the president did not accept, and Sarabia, his former subordinate, “offered him the Ministry of the Interior or the Foreign Ministry, despite the fact that both positions were already filled.
Benedetti returned to Bogotá this week to meet with Petro and, while the country awaited the results of that meeting, Cambio magazine revealed that Meza was not only interrogated without a warrant, but that her phone was intercepted by the Police, who used a operation against the criminal gang Clan del Golfo in the department of Chocó.
This version was corroborated by the attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, who said at a press conference that “judicial decisions” will be made in the coming days in this case, which he considered “not only aberrational from a judicial point of view, but also puts us on the wrong foot.” again in the worst historical scenario in Colombia, which is the violation of human rights”.
Paradoxically, when Petro was in the opposition, he was a fierce critic of the illegal wiretapping carried out during the government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) and known in the country as “chuzadas”.
Petro’s crossroads
This scandal, which is full of loose ends, occurs at a time when the Petro government is experiencing low hours, with problems on different fronts.
On the one hand, his social reforms are stopped in Congress and the government coalition has just dynamited, to the point that congressmen from the Alianza Verde party presented a proposal yesterday to archive the controversial health reform.
The president also maintains a harsh confrontation with the prosecutor, with the Council of State, with the Attorney General’s Office and even with the press.
In an attempt to tip the scales in his favor, Petro announced that on June 7 he will walk “side by side with the working people” in a mobilization called by labor unions in defense of the reforms. That same day, Sarabia is summoned by Congress to answer for the case of the nanny, a domestic problem that reached the dimension of a government crisis.
