Never before had a mayor had to travel as far to have a talk with the president-elect of the Republic as Daniel Quintero did, who undertook a 9,300-kilometer trip from Medellín to Italy. He left on Thursday, to make a stopover in Paris, because from Colombia there are no direct flights to that peninsula.
The citizens of Medellin would not have found out if it was not because some curious person found him at the Charles de Gaulle airport and took a photo of him in which he appears standing, with a small backpack on his back and with the airplane runway in the background. , which in a matter of seconds went viral on Twitter.
And the curiosities are just beginning. The mayor’s office —when asked by journalists— responded that the mayor had gone on “personal leave”. Indeed, he did not request permission from the Council as required by law. Why does a mayor go to talk to the president-elect and call it a personal matter? Is he going to speak of personal interests or is he going to speak on behalf of the city?
His opponents from social networks also complained to Quintero about the fact that he was suspended for 41 days, he returned just three weeks ago and in that short period he has already been absent from office twice.
But beyond the suspension, the mayor’s permits and vacations —which also show his degree of interest in the city— the question is Why did Mayor Quintero have to travel to Europe to speak with Gustavo Petro?
A review of what has happened since the candidate of the Historical Pact won the Presidency until today can give some clues.
Mayor Quintero has been very attentive, almost eager, to respond to any request from Petro. He got up early on the first business day (June 21) after the victory to organize meetings and start moving the five metrocables that Petro mentioned in the campaign, of which Quintero had not spoken before nor are they in the Metro Master Plan.
On June 22, Petro asked with a trill “the mayors and governors of the country to prepare lots with legal titles to build university campuses.” And just an hour later, Quintero was one of the first leaders to respond: “The Universidad del Norte de Medellín has the green light. Of course, Mr President.”
That same Wednesday the 22nd, Quintero had already left for Bogotá to try to speak with the president-elect. The balance of the visit was not the best: he could not talk in depth with Petro; The one with whom he was able to talk in detail was with Alfonso Prada, head of the campaign’s debate. Quintero “put on the table the name of his wife Diana Osorio”, according to sources from the Petro team, for the ICT Ministry. However, until now it is not clear, because the one who most sounds for that position is Saúl Kattan, whom Petro appointed as president of the ETB when he was mayor.
During that visit to Bogotá, Quintero also applied to be the “bridge” between the Antioquia business community and the Petro government. But this week that ends, the city unions told him that they did not want to take the photo with him. Perhaps the mayor is not clear that relations with businessmen take place in direct dialogues between the unions and the president.
What he did achieve on his trip was the nomination of Esteban Restrepo, his former Secretary of Government, as coordinator of the junction with Antioquia. However, in this task they have had several adversities. First, last Tuesday, Governor Aníbal Gaviria came out to say that he had already talked with Petro and that he was unaware of and did not authorize “the group of supposed junction.” Then, on Thursday, it was Petro himself who appointed a person for the Hidroituango junction, who was different from the one Esteban Restrepo had named, with which he seemed to distance himself from the Quintero team.
Something seems to be wrong with that relationship. On the one hand, Petro is grateful to Quintero because he played it hard with his campaign: he took out a large part of his cabinet to proselytize, he had himself sanctioned by the Attorney General’s Office for participating in politics and it is still a question mark how much money he invested in it. But on the other hand, Petro caught up with a Twitter thread where with statistics they showed that the votes of the Caribbean Coast made the difference for the triumph of the Historical Pact.
In the Petro team there are divided positions with respect to Quintero. Above all, some say, they do not want to buy the fight that the mayor of Medellín has declared to practically the entire local establishment. And in the new spirit of reconciliation of Petro does not accept the language of the mayor calling the sectors that have built Antioquia “mafiosi” and “corrupt”.
For this reason, perhaps, Quintero tried to change tactics and sent for Nicolás Posada, president of the Antioquia Interunion Committee, so that “a photo like the one of Petro and Uribe” could be taken. However, Posada replied that they are willing to start a dialogue —for which Quintero has shown no interest in two and a half years—, but without a photo and without a media show. The Secretary of Economic Development, Alejandro Arias, who served as the Mayor’s messenger, said that this could not be guaranteed.
And it is that the businessmen of the city were already cured of what had happened to them at the start of the Quintero administration. The newly elected mayor then summoned the most visible heads of business and academia to work together and everyone; despite the differences, they accepted with the aim of continuing to build. But after a short time, according to several of them, they realized that Quintero had used them to put up a kind of facade to hide what was moving behind.
As Luis Bernardo Vélez, a councilman who opened the doors of various sectors of the city to the then unknown Quintero and who resigned from Quintero’s movement saying that the mayor had deceived him, said: “I realized that there was a hidden agenda in the campaign that I never met.”
Daniel Quintero does not seem to have, for now, a solid space in the National Government. Perhaps that is why he organized, from one day to the next, the long trip to Florence, Italy.
On Wednesday night that trip did not seem to be squared. At least that is how it is deduced from a notice that reached the media that day inviting Quintero and the EPM manager to a press conference. But surprisingly that same Thursday they canceled the press conference, without explaining why, and the next day when the photos of the mayor were leaked at the Paris airport, the reason was known.
It should be noted that among the topics that were going to be discussed at the press conference was that of UNE, which is of great urgency for the city, taking into account that EPM dropped the appeal with which it seeks that the Council allows it to sell its participation in said company.
Why did you suspend that press conference on an important and urgent issue? On Tuesday the governor disavowed the junction and on Thursday the Petro team announced another name for the Hidroituango junction, which may partly explain the anxiety, and the desire to travel, that has been generated on the 12th floor of La Alpujarra. That was precisely the day that Quintero decided to travel.
It should be remembered that it had already been announced that former President César Gaviria was going to meet with Petro in Italy. As is known, the former president is very close to Quintero; nevertheless, they would not necessarily have the meeting with Petro together.
A new chapter of this story will be produced this week. The mayor’s office, with the aim of continuing to score points, decided to hold two major events in Medellín. One is on Monday and Tuesday, the “Meeting of the bench of the Historical Pact”, in Plaza Mayor; according to the program, the “host” is Daniel Quintero and Francia Márquez, the vice president, will install the event. And the other will be on Wednesday, They aspire to have a summit with all the mayors of Antioquia, and for that they launched an invitation to all of them on Twitter.
While Quintero tries with all kinds of strategies to get into the Petro government, in Medellín the complaints about mismanagement are not enough: 27 schools are falling apart (according to the Personería, 79% of the infrastructure is bad), many of the old people that the Mayor’s Office used to attend to, they no longer attend to them and the risk system, which has weakened with politicization, has led to the city being surrounded by this rainy season. Those are just the complaints of the last few days.