NewsLatin AmericaGustavo Petro cancels a key military ceremony just 45 minutes before it takes place

Gustavo Petro cancels a key military ceremony just 45 minutes before it takes place

Photo provided by the Ministry of Defense of Colombian President Gustavo Petro (4i) and his Defense Minister, Ivan Velasquez (3i) named the new military leadership this Friday in Bogota.Javier Casella (/Ministry of Defense/Javier Casella/EFE)

Forty-five minutes earlier than planned, when everything was ready to receive him, President Gustavo Petro canceled this Tuesday the troop recognition ceremony and the new military leadership. At the Jose Maria Cordova School, where they were waiting for him, for the event in which the military command is formally assumed, they learned of the cancellation almost in real time.

The official media of the Presidency reported that “unfortunately” it was canceled because the president was “attending urgent private government meetings.” Already on the morning of this same Tuesday, he had postponed the time of the inauguration of the three ministers who have yet to take office: Mery Gutierrez in the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Nestor Osuna in the Ministry of Justice and Arturo Luna in Science.

The Government did not give more details about the reasons for the cancellation, but Palace sources gave EL PAIS two versions in this regard. One of them points out that the military ceremony was canceled because the “decrees of the new leadership are not ready” and that “the president wants the event to comply with everything administrative and normative”; the other, that he was solving the already thorny case of the ICT Ministry, since Gutierrez has not been able to take office.

Local media denounced that Gutierrez, partner of the journalist and politician Hollman Morris, who has been the president’s squire, was the manager of a television programmer who had sued the ICT Ministry, which he intended to direct. The journalist Daniel Coronell published that Gutierrez had sued for more than 45 billion pesos and had also committed part of the shares of her company to a state official in exchange for contracts.

This is the second time his possession has been postponed. On August 11, he was also unable to assume the portfolio. At that time the reasons were not known either, but the director of the Administrative Department of the Presidency (DAPRE), Mauricio Lizcano, said in an interview on W Radio that Petro is evaluating the advisability of appointing him.

“The president has been superzealous in the construction of the cabinet. I have not received any counter-order and the president knows what is happening or if nothing is happening. For now, she is the minister because the president decided so,” said Lizcano. “She is not going to take office today. When she takes office or how she does it is a decision of the president. The spring of the ministers is his decision and he is evaluating and studying all his decisions, ”said Lizcano.

In front of the troop recognition event, the Presidency announced that it will be postponed until next Saturday. Army sources said they did not know the impediment of the decrees and assured that they did not believe that this was the reason, because the subject was not discussed in previous meetings. Other sources pointed out that the publication of the w radio on the complaints that link the new deputy commander of the Army, general (re) Jairo Alejandro Fuentes, in a case of false positives, could also be one of the reasons for the postponement of the troop’s presentation. Petro, campaigning, promised not to have a leadership with investigations of this type.

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Source: EL PAIS

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