The country’s attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, announced Tuesday that he is investigating Nicolás Petro, the eldest son of the Colombian president, for a possible crime of money laundering. Speaking to The State of Justice in Colombia forum organized by Prisa Media, Barbosa explained that the investigative unit is searching his assets to determine if they are linked to criminal activities. In the WhatsApp conversations revealed by Nicolás’ ex-wife, the couple speak of buying a luxury home in the city of Barranquilla with money a businessman contributed to Petro’s presidential campaign.
The siege of Nicolás Petro intensifies. His own father asked prosecutors to investigate him on March 2 after hearing testimony from his former partner, Day Vásquez. She accuses Nicolás of receiving money for the election campaign that allegedly never entered the accounts of the Pacto Histórico, the left-wing coalition for which Petro was a candidate. One of the donors was a man who had served in the United States for drug trafficking, Samuel Santander Lopesierra, known as The Marlboro Man for his time as a tobacco smuggler.
Barbosa clarified that there was a presumption of innocence and that Nicolás Petro would receive all procedural safeguards. “What is happening is that all prosecution investigations are always focused on people in the criminal field and on property, so there are no assets associated with criminal activity,” the prosecutor explained. In the same statement that Petro asked for his son to be investigated, the result of a first relationship the president had when he was an M-19 guerrilla, he asked the same for his brother Juan Fernando Petro, against whom Barbosa is also alleged to have asked for money from the detainees in order to add them to the list of total peace organizations, where they could benefit from reduced sentences in exchange for confessions and the promise that they would no longer be part of criminal structures.
Nicolás Petro’s affair has become an internal problem for the President, who has been forced to explain himself. He has said that he did not raise this son because he had to live in hiding, which many people interpreted as a way to evade responsibility. In reality, Petro was rather explaining that he hadn’t been a current father to Nicolás and he took some blame for it. The President later had two other marriages, which have produced two more children, as well as another he adopted from the last of his partners, Verónica Alcocer.
But she also had to defend herself against attacks from abroad. In a tense exchange of blows with the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele tried to provoke him with a reference to Nicolás. “Isn’t your son the one making pacts under the table?” Petro was not silent: “Dear President Nayib, everything is fine in my house. The presumption of innocence applies here, a universal principle.”
Nicholas is left alone. His ex-partner has accused him, his father has been the first to tell him to face the consequences, and some of his brothers have slipped that the power has gone to his head. The boy, who is an MP in the Atlantic, has already said he will stay out of the campaign for this year’s regional elections. Meanwhile, prosecutors’ investigators continue their work to determine if he committed a crime.
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