BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Nicolás Petro, the oldest son of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, has admitted to receiving illicit money that went into his father’s 2022 presidential campaign, prosecutors said in a court hearing on Thursday.
Prosecutor Mario Burgos told a judge that Nicolás Petro, who was arrested over the weekend on charges of money laundering and illicit enrichment, disclosed that he had received large sums of money from a Colombian contractor charged with murder, a former senator convicted of drug trafficking and a “powerful” businessman.
In the bombshell hearing, Burgos said Nicolás Petro, 37, revealed that some of the money was used for his personal benefit and to increase his wealth unlawfully. The rest, prosecutors said, went to his father’s presidential campaign.
According to Burgos, Nicolás Petro agreed to provide more evidence, resign his seat as a local lawmaker in Colombia’s Atlántico department and avoid accepting other political roles.
Advertisement
The revelations amount to the most significant scandal yet in an already turbulent first year for Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president. If proved true, the allegations could set the stage for an impeachment investigation — or even criminal investigation — into what the president himself knew about the campaign money.
President Petro, speaking Thursday at an event in northern Colombia, denied any connection to the allegations.
“The president of the republic has never asked any of his sons or daughters to commit a crime, neither to win, nor to finance campaigns, nor for anything that has to do with power,” Petro told a crowd in the Sucre department. “My sons and daughters have been free. They may make mistakes like every human being. They’ll walk different paths from mine, maybe, but from their father you will never expect that. It has not happened and it will not happen.”
Advertisement
An attorney representing Nicolás Petro did not immediately provide comment Thursday evening. He said he was still in court.
The latest details in the case now leave the struggling president further weakened in front of a divided congress that could be tasked with investigating him, said Yann Basset, a political science professor at Colombia’s Rosario University.
“Even without this scandal it was very complicated, because he did not have the majority in the congress and he has not wanted to negotiate with political parties,” Basset said. “Now the government’s only agenda is basically to survive.”
Prosecutors will open a new probe into the illicit money that allegedly ended up in Gustavo Petro’s presidential campaign, Burgos said, because some of it was not reported to electoral authorities.
Nicolás Petro’s former wife, Daysuris Vásquez, was also charged with money laundering and taken into custody on Saturday, Colombia’s attorney general said in a news release.
Advertisement
Their arrests come months after Vásquez, who separated from Nicolás Petro following his alleged affair with one of her former friends, accused him in a Semana magazine interview in March of using money donated to his father’s presidential campaign to support a lavish lifestyle. Gustavo Petro was unaware of his son’s actions, according to Vásquez.
“The money never got to his [father’s] campaign,” Vásquez told Semana.
After Semana published the interview, Nicolás Petro denied that he had misused any money from the campaign and said he would cooperate with authorities.
The arrest of the Colombian president’s son also comes weeks after leaked audio messages implicated the president’s chief of staff and his ambassador to Venezuela in possible campaign finance violations. The attorney general launched a probe into the allegations; Gustavo Petro fired both his chief of staff and the ambassador.
Advertisement
The president said Saturday he would let the investigation into the allegations against his son and Vásquez run its course.
“That one of my children has to go through jail hurts,” Gustavo Petro said in a statement. “As the president, I can assure the attorney general’s office that they have all the avenues on my end to proceed according to the law.”
Colombia’s political system lays out several steps before a president may be impeached. An impeachment trial must go through both chambers of congress and then to the Supreme Court.
Colombia’s congressional investigative committee, created decades ago, has never impeached a president, said Ramiro Bejarano, a law professor at Colombia’s University of the Andes in Bogotá.
Still, Bejarano said, Petro’s political power is diminishing by the day.
“The only solution that I see for Petro to get out of this crisis is to call on all political parties and negotiate with them,” he said. “The dream of governing as one party on the left has been cut short.”
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMSwvsudZmtoYmh8cYSOaWpon6WowaLCzmannqyipHq0u81mmqikn6Kvqq2Mn6ynnKNisq2xwq2gqKajZA%3D%3D