Samuel Moreno died late Friday afternoon at the Bogotá Military Hospital. The former mayor of Bogotá would turn 63 this Saturday. Around noon on Thursday he fainted at the Cavalry School, a military garrison north-east of the city where he was serving an 11-year and 10-month sentence on corruption charges. Since arriving at the hospital, he has been in intensive care with a poor prognosis after undergoing emergency heart surgery.
He was mayor of Bogotá from 2008 to 2011 and was born in Miami in 1960 when his parents were in exile. His grandfather, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, was president after a coup between 1953 and 1957. He made a political career in the Alianza Nacional Popular (Anapo), the political party founded by his grandfather. He was a congressman from 1991 to 2006, first for Anapo and then for the Polo Democrático Alternativo, a coalition of left-wing forces that achieved major electoral successes, including winning the mayoralty of Bogotá in 2003 with Lucho Garzón.
One of the most important figures in polo, he ran for mayor of Bogotá in 2007, replacing Garzón. As mayor, he pushed the subway project forward, achieved a broad coalition with the traditional parties in the council, but was eventually suspended by the attorney general’s office over the corruption scandal known as the “recruitment carousel,” a network of irregularities designed to manipulate public works in the district bogota Also involved in the plot was his brother, then Senator Iván Moreno, who was later identified by the court as the man who negotiated the bribes. The Polo Democrático then expelled him and the political power of the Moranos was wiped out.
He was prosecuted and convicted in the first instance in 2016 for receiving nearly 2,790 million pesos in bribes for a contract for the district’s emergency services. The penalty was 18 years in prison. He added three other convictions for other acts of corruption, which he never admitted. In 2017, international exposure of the Odebrecht corruption scandal reached Moreno: prosecutors found he had received $345,000 from the Brazilian multinational.
Less than three months before his death, he had managed to get the Supreme Court to reduce his principal sentence, that of the contract for the construction of the 26th main street of Transmilenio, Bogotá’s articulated bus system. The Supreme Court sentenced him to 11 years and 10 months in prison.
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