Comparing Petro’s Government Crisis with the Process 8,000: Analysis of Recent Scandals and Similarities with the Past

2023-06-07 06:00:52

12:01 AM

There are not a few voices that have begun to compare the crisis of the Petro government caused by the audios of who was his right hand in the campaign, Armando Benedetti, with the process 8,000 who was regarding to overthrow former president Ernesto Samper almost 30 years ago.

The first to notice that what was coming with the leaking of those conversations between Benedetti and Sarabia, where the former congressman from Barranquilla insinuates that he obtained $15,000 million of dubious origin for the campaign, was not any means of communication or an opposition politician, but the same Benedetti, when he yelled at Sarabia: “Read how the son of a bitch 8,000 started and why it started, there is the key to everything that is going to happen to you.”

This is not the first time that a Petro government scandal has been compared to that of Samper. Already last April some had found coincidences when the ex-wife of the President’s son accused Nicolás Petro of receiving $1,000 million from drug traffickers investigated and convicted for his dad’s presidential campaign. In response, Petro asked to investigate his son and assured that “he did not raise him.” However, in this case of the alleged hot money (which continues to be the subject of investigation in the Prosecutor’s Office) of the president’s firstborn there are not so many coincidences with the 8,000 as in the latest Benedetti audio scandal. These are some:

To learn more: Benedetti’s audios leave a flavor similar to the Nicolás Petro scandal, where did the money come from?

1. Audio filtering as source

As well as the Benedetti audio leak, threatening to confess the origin of the $15,000 million which according to him he obtained in the campaign on the Atlantic Coast, are the starting point of the investigations that are being carried out today the Prosecutor’s Office, the Attorney General’s Office, the National Electoral Council and the House of Representativesin 1994 there were some audios in which the head of the Cali cartel, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, confessed to the journalist Alberto Giraldo that they made contributions to Samper’s presidential campaign.

Those audios were revealed by Andrés Pastrana, who had lost the elections and who asked Samper to resign. This week Federico Gutiérrez, who lost the elections with Petro and Rodolfo Hernández, He also asked Petro to resign and denounced it before the Commission of Accusations of the House of Representatives.

Also read: Who is responsible for the phantom $15 billion that, according to Benedetti, entered Petro’s campaign on the Coast?

2. Campaign managers are protagonists

Benedetti, who shadowed the president on his campaign tours across the country, seems to have a counterpart in the case of the 8,000. Back then, one of the first officials to be convicted in the scandal was Santiago Medina, Samper’s campaign treasurer.

Medina was the first to turn on the fan in the Prosecutor’s Office and thanks to his collaborations justice managed to put several state officials behind barsincluding Fernando Botero Zea, who had been the coordinator of the campaign.

But the reason why Medina decided to go once morest the government that he supported in the campaign was because, like Benedetti, I was disappointed not to receive the space politician to which he believed he had a right, since he had been promised the French embassy and in the end they offered him a consulate in Greece.

It is precisely a rudeness and the little relevance that Benedetti was having in the government which infuriated him. “Get ready because at any moment I claim my political space and do not do it so that they can see and if they believe that It’s a threat, it’s a threat”, the former ambassador told Laura Sarabia.

Find out: “In an act of weakness and sadness I let myself be carried away by rage and drinking”: Benedetti on filtered audios

3. The story of victimization and polarization

Despite the fact that the evidence once morest him seemed unbeatable, Samper always excused himself by saying that everything was done “behind his back” and accused the right, the conservatives, the media and the United States of conspiring to seek his downfall. a similar speech President Petro has adopted during these weeks, he has spoken of an attempted “soft” coup to “stop the fight once morest impunity”. For her part, Vice President Francia Márquez has accused the right of “manipulate and deceive” to town”. An important difference between the two scandals so far is that the gringo government, through the State Department, has supported Petro, while Samper at the time turned its back on him.

4. An antagonistic and powerful prosecutor

One of the political figures who has benefited the most from the government’s missteps has been Attorney General Francisco Barbosa, who has starred in harsh disagreements with Petro, to the point of calling him a “dictator.”

Barbosa is the one who carries the investigation of the case of the President’s son, of the interceptions to the telephones of the nannies of Sarabia and probably in the next few days he will call to declare the protagonists of what has begun to be called the “scandal 15,000”. 29 years ago, Attorney General Alfonso Valdivieso was convinced that Samper was responsible for the money that came to his campaign, so much so that it was he himself who denounced it before the Commission on Accusations of the House of Representatives, where Petro is now denounced. by Federico Gutiérrez, and previously the campaigns of Juan Manuel SantosIván Duque and Óscar Iván Zuluaga.

On behalf of Process 8,000, Samper spent most of his four-year term defending his innocence, and a majority of the Liberal Party in Congress managed to archive the investigation. However, the stain of drug trafficking on his government remains in the memory of the majority of Colombians. The Benedetti audio scandal is just beginning and the question of the origin of the $15 billion remains unanswered. For now, what is known, according to the coordinator of the Petro campaign, is that those who put the money on the Costa “they were not entrepreneurs”.

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