A crisis in the style of a Creole House of Cards has had to be resolved by the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, removing from the government his powerful chief of staff, Laura Sarabia, and the ambassador in Caracas, former senator Armando Benedetti.
The president’s right hand was in the eye of the hurricane since his former employee Marelbys Meza, in charge of caring for the baby of the Sarabia couple, denounced that she had been subjected to a polygraph test in order to discover if she had stolen money from the his boss’s house.
The sequence of events is worthy of a soap opera. It includes illegal interceptions of the mobile phones of the nanny and an assistant from Sarabia. And a polygraph exam in the basement of some rooms of the Palacio de Nariño.
Although the events occurred at the end of January, Mayerlbys Meza decided to reveal the facts last Saturday, in an interview with the Colombian magazine Semana, with a political content. At first she only told what was related to the polygraph, denouncing that she felt pressured to accept the test. And that they were looking for the thief of a briefcase with 150 million pesos (21,400 euros).
The following day, and in the same outlet, Laura Sarabia replied that the procedure was justified by the danger that a robbery at his home poses to the security of the Head of State. Petro, for his part, and as usual, blamed what happened on the media on his Twitter account: “The goal is to destroy people because they are by my side,” she wrote.
But as the days went by, new data appeared that exposed a sinister plot. The Attorney General’s Office warned that once Laura Sarabia filed a formal complaint about the robbery, on January 30, she tried to get a prosecutor to intercept the phones of Meza and her co-worker. Failing to get approval, someone hatched a sinister plot. Two police officers immediately traveled to Quibdó, the capital of the Chocó department in western Colombia, with a false report to present to a prosecutor who is prosecuting criminal organizations.
It was then that they invented that Mayelbys Meza, alias the Cook, and his partner were employees of the capo alias Seopas, and that their communications could help capture him. This is how Petro’s chief of staff obtained permission this time to intercept the communications of her workers, although only 10 days later the prosecutor ordered them to be interrupted because they only talked about domestic and personal matters without any interest.
The scandal took on a greater dimension when the ambassador in Caracas, former senator Armando Benedetti, intervened, who had to come out in response to the accusations of having hatched a conspiracy against Laura Sarabia through Marelbys Meza.
Sarabia was his close collaborator for seven years and he recommended her to Gustavo Petro. According to the diplomat, Sarabia asked him for help a few weeks ago, when she found out that Mayelbys was talking to some journalists. She said that he tried to reassure her but that he could not prevent her from giving the interview to the director of Semana. And he also added that the stolen 150 million could come from a powerful transport business group, suggesting irregular payments. He also acknowledged that he was traveling to Caracas by private plane and that on one of the flights he took Mayelbys to speak with her. And his relationship with Petro is so close that he never informed the Foreign Minister of his travels, despite the fact that his position forced him to ask permission.
For some journalists and politicians who referred to the scandal these days, his closeness to the president, knowing uncomfortable details about his private life and campaign financing, as well as secrets about relations with Nicolás Maduro, guaranteed Benedetti a smooth exit. since it keeps too many secrets from the president.
On Thursday night it was learned that Laura Sarabia had presented her resignation letter on the same Monday. Although it was this Friday when the departure of the two was known without big fuss.
The Colombian Attorney General, for his part, announced that the investigations will continue and considers the illegal punctures to be of the utmost seriousness.
While the opposition rubs its hands before a soap opera with a tangle of irregularities, which still has several episodes to go, the Minister of Defense and other members and allies of the Government close ranks and assure that these are unacceptable practices, alien to them.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project