President Gustavo Petro during a ceremony at the Casa de Nariño on June 26. JUAN BARRETO (AFP)
Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro has responded to the persistent rumors of alleged health problems that have prompted him to cancel previously announced commitments. “No, it’s nothing serious and it’s not always the same. “First it was my team’s inexperience,” said the president this weekend in an extensive interview with Cambio magazine, without going into too much detail. “I need my balance, permanent tiredness is a bad advisor. If you go too far you won’t think well, you will make mistakes and in this case I can’t afford to make a lot of mistakes,” explained Petro, who ended a year in power this month.
Saturday’s conversation with journalists Daniel Coronell and Federico Lara comes at a time when the opposition wants to open a debate on the health of what is now Colombia’s first left-wing president, given the repeated cancellations of events, his agenda and his chronic tardiness. The controversy escalated precisely on Thursday, the day the interview was originally scheduled, when the presidency canceled a meeting with the union council and the president also did not attend a meeting with the governors of the Pacific departments, which he was holding in his stead headed . Interior Minister Luis Fernando Velasco.
Some opposition congressmen have already formally requested that the legislature force the president to undergo a medical exam, a mechanism not provided for in the Colombian legal system. “Now they want to confuse the fact that I don’t go to an event because I supposedly have illnesses. No gentlemen, the President will not be forced into rude traps,” Petro wrote in a message on social network X, Twitter’s new name, this week.
Now they want to confuse me by not going to an event because I supposedly have illnesses.
No, gentlemen, the President will not be drawn into rude traps.
When we talk about national consistency, we’re talking about openness. Don’t waste time with me with Marrullas https://t.co/7OhgQeEypr
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) August 22, 2023
When Cambio asked the president about the never-confirmed versions that he was suffering from depression, he recalled former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt saying so during a debate, alluding to an alleged episode when he was in exile in Belgium found some columnists before he was resumed. “Yeah, that’s what we call gossip,” Petro denies the rumours. “I don’t understand Ingrid’s gossip either because I’m trying to remember that moment. I was in Europe, apparently at a time that was not comfortable for me, having left with death threats. So what Ingrid says are lies,” he says. ““I don’t know why he did that,” the president concludes.
“Why do I have to be watched?” asks Petro, who often complains about the way journalists report on his government, which has brought him accusations from organizations defending press freedom. “[El expresidente Álvaro] Uribe was on his way to his farm, we all knew that. Not everything that happened, said or did there was public knowledge. I know that there were parties by Vallenato orchestras in the Palacio de Nariño, they liked it, I have no reason to criticize that, but there was no pressing press. What I feel is a press decided to monitor like the police. If he thinks Petro because he’s from the left, then you have to look at him differently,” he complains.
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In the speech, the President also referred to the visit a week ago to his son Nicolás Petro, who is accused of illicit enrichment and money laundering. Although the relationship has broken down, the eldest son said the president was unaware of the dirty money he received during the campaign. “Sometimes I put myself in their shoes (…) having such an experience must be very difficult,” says Petro, who has promised not to interfere in the process and to respect the independence of the judiciary. “The episode is cruel and after the cruelty of personal life comes the political cruelty.” What they do to him,” he claims in another passage regarding the action of the prosecutor’s office headed by Francisco Barbosa, who has become an opponent of the government is. He also reiterates that in his discussions with Prosecutor Barbosa he has always refused to raise his son’s issue. “They wanted to capture me,” says Petro, echoing recent statements by former paramilitary chief Carlos Mario Jiménez, “Macaco,” who said the current president was part of a conspiracy to thwart his rise to the paramilitary target declared power. .
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