Armando Benedetti, the outgoing Venezuelan ambassador who began his electoral career 30 years ago as a Bogotá city councilor, is a man known for being in the limelight during Uribismo, Santos and now Petrism. A clever politician who knows exactly where the reflectors are looking and how to get closer to where the light is. Even the faithful Petristas who didn’t trust him from the start recognize that he is a man who knows how to return to the center of power. The question is not whether he will return. The question is how.
It is said that he can be a charismatic conversationalist but also an explosive man, a politician who knows his way around the circles of power so well that his cunning sometimes inspires more suspicion than admiration. “He’s a political fox, a complex person,” former chief of staff Laura Sarabia recently told EL PAÍS, just before the two left Gustavo Petro’s government this week. Armando Benedetti, the shrewd former senator who was Colombia’s ambassador to Venezuela until this week, is leaving the government he helped elect after he blew himself up in a clash with the chief of staff.
Earlier this week, people close to Sarabia reassured various media outlets that he was behind the allegation that led to a fire at the Casa de Nariño, the revelation that her ex-nanny’s chief of staff had accused her of stealing money from her stole and stole money She’s put on a polygraph If it was a master move, it didn’t go quite right. Journalist Daniel Coronell revealed that Benedetti had initially hired the former babysitter, that he had also accused her of theft and that, most importantly, he had flown with her to Caracas just before her testimony against Sarabia was published in Semana magazine. It was untenable to keep the two officials interviewed, and President Petro dispatched them on Friday morning with open words for them and little affection for him.
“While the investigation is ongoing, my dear and respected official and the Venezuelan Ambassador are retiring from the government,” the President said. Benedetti said goodbye to the president in a much more sentimental way, although he also left him a memento. “For many years I have admired your talent for defending the underprivileged,” he says a published letter in their social networks. “I have been with you through the epic and grueling days of campaigning, trying to realize the dream of a government of change,” he reiterates.
Benedetti was one of the first traditional politicians to jump into Petro’s burgeoning presidential campaign without hesitation when, in 2020, he felt it was time for this opposition politician to win the presidency: he was subsequently expelled from his party, La U Kurz after organizing the first major campaign rally in the Caribbean city of Barranquilla in September 2021. “When so many people gathered, they started saying that Petro could win,” he later told El PAÍS, recalling the crowds behind the candidate’s public square.
He organized the meetings, counted the votes in the individual departments, managed the agenda of the current president and flew across the country with him. His then private secretary in the Senate, Sarabia, was on the same plane. After Petro won, Benedetti wanted the defense ministry, but his campaign loyalty was not rewarded there but at the embassy in Venezuela with the task of re-establishing diplomatic relations with Caracas. He moved away from the epicenter of power in Bogotá, where Sarabia remained, the young assistant who became president thanks to him. But the relationship has cooled with distance during these ten months of the Petro administration.
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The man who broke into the Liberal Party in the 1990s touched on uribismo when former President Álvaro Uribe won the 2002 election and Benedetti moved into the House of Representatives from Bogotá after one term on the council. Just as he lent his political skills to Petrism in 2020, two decades earlier he did not hesitate to offer the same kind of unconditional support to Uribism: His campaign slogan for 2006, the year of the former president’s first re-election, was “100%”. with Uribe”. In his second term, from 2006 to 2010, he was already a senator for La U and also supported the second re-election (which the Constitutional Court eventually stopped).
The Armando Benedetti, today @petrogustavo tells him, “Welcome to human Colombia,” it’s the same one he had as his 2006 Senate campaign slogan:
“100% with Uribe”
The politics of love are now championed by chameleons and lizards emerging from the URIBISTAS awnings!! pic.twitter.com/Ghy9h1F1Lu
— Julián Rodríguez Sastoque 🌻 (@ElJuliSastoque) November 19, 2020
“He comes into the office, makes the President laugh and, as he says, makes him controversial at times. “With his informal language, it’s easy to believe that he doesn’t mind telling him stories or news that others dare not tell,” Semana magazine wrote in 2007 of Benedetti’s relationship with Uribe. Five years later, the La U senator sided with Juan Manuel Santos when he divorced Uribismo and began the peace process with the former FARC guerrillas.
Anyone who has followed his political career with a magnifying glass would define him neither as Uribista nor as Petrista, nor by any middle name. In some cases he has shown his liberal spirit, for example when he spoke out against the criminalization of the minimum dose of drugs against then-President Uribe’s conservative majority. In fact, a few years ago, after his first divorce (he’s been married four times), he’s been open about the struggles he’s had with substance addiction. However, those who scrutinize this politician closely also have doubts about him because of the investigations launched by the prosecutor’s office and the Supreme Court into alleged embezzlement of public funds or illicit enrichment. Hours before it was announced that Petro would remove him from government, a Supreme Court Justice, the conservative Cristina Lombana, called for an investigation into the prosecutor, who was investigating Benedetti on illicit enrichment of an official and aggravated money laundering (and that is to say) initiated by the same who requested that a trial against former President Uribe be archived, which the courts refused to do). The former senator has maintained his innocence. None of the investigations were successful.
So far, Benedetti has not given any interviews to the media and has not published anything other than his friendly letter to the President. That can change. He has maintained good relations with journalists since day one of his political career. Adding to his charisma, he worked at Telecaribe and the news program QAP in the early 1990s, and his father was communications minister to Ernesto Samper (94-98). If you need a call, you have all the media directors’ numbers on your phone. But with more than three decades of political career, he knows when it’s time to speak his mind and when it’s time to shut up. Whatever it takes to return to the center of power.
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