It was August 7, 2022 when the new president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, took office. A radical turn for the Latin American country before the assumption for the first time of a left-wing government. Almost a year later, the former guerrilla fighter reaches his first anniversary with worn-out popularity and with a scandal starring his own son splashing him full.

Nicolás Petro Burgos, who is also a deputy of the Assembly of the Department of the Atlantic, was arrested last weekend as part of an investigation by the Prosecutor's Office that accused him of illicit enrichment and money laundering. His ex-wife Daysiris Vásquez would also be involved. Since then, Colombia remained expectant before the next steps of justice. On Tuesday the accusation of the judge arrived at a public hearing held in Bogotá. The point is that the president's eldest son would have received money from drug trafficker Samuel Santander Lopesierra, the Marlboro Man, and from Alfonso Hilsaca, the Turk, who in the past was linked to paramilitaries.

The strongest blow for President Petro and, therefore, for Colombia came on Thursday, when Petro Burgos revealed that allegedly illicit money entered his father's electoral campaign.. “Actually, some of said money entered [Nicolás Petro's] coffers and others went to the 2022 presidential campaign in which our current president, Dr. Gustavo Petro Urrego, was elected,” the first prosecutor delegated before the hearing said. the Superior Court of Bogotá, Mario Burgos, according to Efe.

Adding fuel to the fire was the confession revealed by the Vásquez Prosecutor's Office, who in an audio taken from a phone call says: “Here he is stealing, I am stealing and we are all stealing, in case he wants to accuse me of being a thief.”. This forceful phrase corresponds to a conversation with Máximo Noriega, published by Semana -the same Colombian magazine that published in March the audios of Vásquez that triggered the investigation-. Noriega is a friend of Petro Jr. and until recently a candidate for Governor of the Atlantic.

Faced with such revelations, the Colombian president published a statement on Twitter this Friday in which he shows his “pain” for the “alleged irregularities”. To which he added that he trusted justice and that “nothing and no one can stop the fight of a lifetime against all forms of corruption, and the Government will continue its task and commitment for a better Colombia without distractions.”

In said communiqué he points out: “I will continue resolutely with the presidential agenda”. However, Semana magazine pointed out that he would have canceled a trip scheduled for yesterday to Palmar de Varela for a meeting with businessmen.

Prior to said announcement on the social network, on Thursday he pointed out that they are trying to overthrow his Executive and that he will remain in charge until 2026. He also said about the illicit financing and about those who affirm that he knew about it: “If that were true, this president had to leave today, because I am not [Álvaro] Uribe, I am not [Juan Manuel] Santos, I am not [ Iván] Duque, I am not one of those who have passed behind, I come from another way of understanding things, I am not going to criticize, but we come from another sensibility”.

The Colombian political class did not take long to speak out in the face of such a scandal. Among them, one of those mentioned by Petro: former president Álvaro Uribe, who alluded to a case for which he was investigated and said on Twitter: “I must remember that the Supreme Court, the magistrates who deprived me of my freedom, filed the unfair process against me for the alleged Ñeñe Politics. They practiced countless tests. They can review the financing of all my campaigns”. Former presidential candidate Sergio Fajardo described Petro Jr.'s testimony as a “bomb”, which “shakes the foundations of democracy.”

While Colombia, whose society was already polarized by the peace process with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), assimilates all the statements and waits for judicial decisions, the calls for a national march on the next 16 have already started. of August. In the different appeals, the resignation or trial of President Petro is requested. It is not the first time that a part of Colombians has demonstrated against the Colombian president, they already took to the streets on June 20 to protest against some reforms proposed in Congress. For his part, the president of the Investigation and Accusation Commission – the only one that can initiate an impeachment process -, Wadith Manzur, said this Friday that Congress is already investigating Petro for irregularities, reported Efe.

Corruption is one of the persistent ills of Latin America, which was almost entirely dotted by the Odebrecht case.

There is a very popular program on Chinese state television featuring Taiwanese who confess to being evil spies recruited by the Taipei separatists to steal the secrets of the communist motherland.

“Focus Interviews”, which as

What surprised me the most when talking to Malala was her sense of humor.. With the aftermath of the shooting on the left side of her face (“I can't smile the way I want to”), she struggled to remember the chases in “Tom and Jerry” as a child, her past

The more years Alexei Navalny has been in prison, the more years of his sentence lie ahead of him. The Russian opposition politician, jailed since 2021, on Friday added an additional 19 years to his sentence for a criminal case that he, his supporters and prominent NGOs consider fabricated.

The charges are tied to his role in his now canceled political movement in Russia.. According to the authorities, Navalny had been trying to foment a revolution seeking to destabilize the sociopolitical situation.. State prosecutors had asked the court to sentence him to another 20 years.

The European Union criticized the ruling of the Russian court. “The verdict of this new mock trial against Alexei Navalny is unacceptable. This arbitrary sentence is the response to his courage to criticize the Kremlin regime,” said European Council President Charles Michel.

Navalny, considered the harshest critic of President Vladimir Putin in Russia, had already predicted his guilty verdict, which he says is intended to scare Russians into imposing more jail time.. The opposition leader is already serving sentences totaling 11 1/2 years for fraud and other charges..

At first, the Putin regime said that the trial against him had no political implications, that it was only for corruption.. But soon after his political movement was outlawed and declared “extremist”. All his collaborators were also vetoed in all the elections.

Their first entry into prison was for violating the open regime while they were in a coma in Germany after being the victim of a poisoning in 2020 for which both their environment and foreign security services blame Russia.. Adding sentences, Navalny is exposed to spending about 30 years in prison.

Since then, Russian justice, which rarely contradicts the government, has been cruel to him.. On this occasion, he was accused not only of creating an extremist organization, but also of rehabilitating Nazism and calling for extremism.. They also point to him for raising funds to “finance extremism” and creating a non-governmental organization (the Navalny Anti-Corruption Fund) whose activities according to the Russian regime incite crime. Also for involving a minor in the commission of illegal acts. For this position, the Russian authorities have relied on the attendance of minors under 18 years of age at their rallies.

Navalny says that all the charges now and before are politically motivated and false, that the regime simply wants him behind bars and out of politics for longer, but he has called on the Russians to think about how best to resist what which he calls the “villains and thieves in the Kremlin”.

The court of the IK-6 penal colony in Melejovo, some 235 kilometers east of Moscow, where he is serving his sentence, has been the one that has judged the case, which surely will not be the last against this activist, who rose to fame with the first demonstrations in 2011 after announcing that Putin was preparing to return to the presidency.

In a message posted on social media Thursday, Navalny, 47, said the verdict actually mattered because he was also threatened with extra terrorism charges, which could mean another extra decade behind bars..

It's unclear what that terrorism case could be linked to, but Russia's Federal Security Service has said that Ukraine and several Russian opposition figures (including Navalny's supporters) were involved in the killing of a prominent Russian war propagandist. , Vladlen Tatarsky. Terrorism carries a sentence in Russia of up to 35 years.

Dressed in his dark prison uniform and flanked by his lawyers, Navalny smiled from time to time as he listened to the judge before the verdict was handed down.. As reported by Reuters, the audio transmission from the court was so bad that it was virtually impossible to understand what the judge was saying.

The Kremlin denies persecuting Navalny, whom Russian authorities have portrayed sometimes as a radical Russian nationalist, other times as a political disruptor backed by Western liberals and Jews.. After years assuring that Navalny has no support within Russia, in 2021 the regime began to point out his dangerousness, but always excusing himself that his case is purely a legal matter for the courts, not a political one..

“We are not following this trial,” Putin's spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, told reporters in June.. Russian President Vladimir Putin always avoids saying Navalny's name in public. But his imprisonment has popularized his figure, and also his investigations into the scandalous corruption in the Russian elite.. Now all critical media is banned, and dissent is in jail or exile.