The Medellín Council will have new faces starting this Friday, July 8, when the first of the three councilors who will replace those who left their seats on the Democratic Center (CD) bench in recent weeks are expected to take office.
This is Claudia Marcela Ramírez Echeverry, who enters the seat left by María Paulina Aguinaga, the last to resign from the corporation. According to the voting order given by the CD list in the 2019 regional elections, Ramírez was in 11th place with 4,327 votes.
The new councilor has moved between social and community leadership in the city. In recent days, she told EL COLOMBIANO that she respects the process and the institutional framework and that her focus will be to manage the strengthening of work in the territories from that political scenario.
Subsequently, next Monday, July 11, the remaining two councilors are expected to take office. One of them is the entrepreneur Carlos Andres Rios Puertawho assumes the seat left by Simón Molina, the second to resign in order to consolidate a candidacy for Mayor of Medellin in the 2023 elections, a process that will be done through signatures.
Ríos obtained the party’s tenth vote in 2019, with 5,266 supports. He was deputy minister of the Social and Business Defense Group in the current government and told this newspaper that he will achieve strong political control, strengthen the opposition to Mayor Daniel Quintero and put on the table a better relationship with the city’s business sector, which, he considers, has been highly attacked by the current municipal administration.
That day, the lawyer Leticia Orrego Pérez would also assume the seat, who replaces Albert Corredor, who was the first to resign, apparently, to run for mayor, although he has not yet made the matter official.
Orrego left her position as special registrar of Medellín to assume the seat. She had the ninth highest personal vote in 2019, with 6,739. Orrego has always worked closely with representative Óscar Darío Pérez, who was re-elected to the House of Representatives last March, with 45,148 votes.
How will the bench of the CD be?
This bench, which has been surrounded by fights and internal divisions because the eight councilors that comprise it did not agree on opposition to Quintero.
Now, the three new ones are joined by the old Alfredo Ramos (occupies the opposition seat), Sebastián López, Lina García, Nataly Vélez and Julio González. The latter also entered following the resignation of Gabriel Dib.