Colombian Politics Digest X: The new attorney general
A summary of recent news in Colombian politics: A new attorney general and the agony of the healthcare reform in the Senate
A very eventful few weeks in Colombian politics, with the long-awaited election of a new attorney general and the agony of Petro’s healthcare reform in the Senate.
White smoke: Luz Adriana Camargo, new attorney general
On March 12, in the fifth round, the Supreme Court elected Luz Adriana Camargo as the next Attorney General. Camargo received 18 votes, two more than the required two-thirds majority (16 votes). Her election ends, for now, a major political-institutional crisis which had inflamed political tensions (see previous posts here and here).
Previously, on January 25, February 8, February 22 and March 7, the Supreme Court had failed to elect an attorney general from the shortlist of three candidates (terna) sent by Gustavo Petro last September.
In the third round, on February 22, the Court appeared to come closer to reaching a consensus, with Amelia Pérez Parra reportedly winning 13 votes on the final ballot taken, three votes away from victory, and was therefore presumed to be the favourite.
However, the next day, right-wing Semana dug up some older tweets from Pérez’s husband in which he criticized Nicolás Petro’s arrest in July 2023 (an “aberration based on deliberately misapplied procedure”), the media, insulted prominent journalists and claimed that the Supreme Court elected attorneys general following “calculations of convenience” and had long ceased to be the “moral reserve of the nation.” Semana and opposition politicians and journalists branded him a “fervent petrista” and asked if they would have guarantees if his wife became attorney general. Legal experts said she should not be judged on the basis of her husband’s opinions, but the damage was already done.
When the Court met again, on March 7, the winds had shifted. Amelia Pérez’s support fell to just three or four votes, even though she had tried to soften the blow of her husband’s comments by privately meetings with magistrates. The Court couldn’t stand by and have its morality questioned. With 12-13 votes, the new favourite was Luz Adriana Camargo, whose candidacy enjoyed the active support of several magistrates who campaigned for her internally. Gerson Chaverra, the president of the Supreme Court, said that there were “very important majorities” and that they were close to reaching the necessary majorities. He called for an extraordinary session of the full Court on March 12, rather than waiting for the full court’s regular meetings every two weeks, finally speeding up the process. The Court’s sudden eagerness owed to the fact that five magistrates will be leaving office in April, which would delay the process and make reaching the required majority even more difficult.
Amelia Pérez conceded a rare interview to El Tiempo, denouncing that there was an interest in harming her and they didn’t find anything else to attack her with. She emphatically stated that her husband’s views had nothing to do with her and that he had never influenced her decisions at any point in her legal career. On the morning of March 12, Pérez handed her “irrevocable resignation” from the list of candidates to the Supreme Court. In her resignation letter, she said that her decision owed to the “emergence and interference” of outside factors. Her withdrawal sparked a debate among legal experts over whether or not the Supreme Court could continue the election with an incomplete terna or if it needed to return the list to the president to replace Pérez. Some argued that the Court could continue with the remaining candidates, while others said that the Court could not elect anyone with an incomplete terna. There is no direct precedent for this situation, although in 2018 the Supreme Court had returned a terna for an ‘ad hoc’ prosecutor to Duque after one of the nominees had withdrawn.
The Supreme Court elected Luz Adriana Camargo with 18 votes, against two votes for Ángela María Buitrago and one vote for Amelia Pérez. After an internal discussion, the magistrates decided that they didn’t have the power to accept Pérez’s resignation because she had been nominated by the president and that, at that stage of the process (with voting underway), her resignation did not affect the legal viability or validity of the terna. The election will be challenged in the Council of State, which can take up to 12-18 months to make a decision.
Luz Adriana Camargo is a criminal lawyer who has experience in all stages of criminal procedure—as trial lawyer, examining judge, prosecutor and assistant magistrate—and a track record of investigating political corruption and powerful politicians.
Camargo worked in the Fiscalía from 1992 to 2004, serving as administrative sectional director in Bogotá, and rose to become delegate prosecutor before the Supreme Court in 2003, investigating senior public officials with a constitutional fuero (ministers, governors etc.). She served as assistant magistrate on the Supreme Court (2005-2014), working with Iván Velásquez, the current defence minister, in the special team created to investigate the parapolítica scandal. Camargo continued working with Velásquez in the UN-backed anti-corruption commission in Guatemala, CICIG, from 2014 to 2017. Camargo was head of the investigation and litigation department, working closely with Velásquez, who was CICIG’s commissioner. She supported some of CICIG’s most emblematic investigations, like the La Línea case, which brought down Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina in 2015. Since 2017, Camargo worked as trial lawyer in international cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and as a consultant on various human rights and judicial impunity cases, including the kidnapping and assassination of three Ecuadorian journalists by FARC dissidents in 2018. In 2020, she worked with left-wing NGOs on a report on the murder of social and community leaders, which was very critical of the Fiscalía’s investigations.
Camargo was not initially included in Petro’s shortlist, presented in August, and only joined the list in September, to replace Amparo Cerón (removed from the list by Petro). Given their parallel career paths, she is widely seen as a close ally and associate of defence minister Iván Velásquez. At first, this was seen as a liability: Velásquez had bad relations with his colleagues on the court and later burned bridges by unsuccessfully challenging the election of seven of the current magistrates in 2020.
Gerson Chaverra pointed to her experience as a prosecutor and assistant magistrate, as well as her administrative and managerial experience in the Fiscalía as sectional director in Bogotá in the 1990s. Camargo has a distinguished track record of investigating corruption and powerful, criminal and kleptocratic politicians. This experience stands in stark contrast with most past attorneys general, who came with political connections, most notably her two predecessors—Francisco Barbosa, Iván Duque’s best friend, and Néstor Humberto Martínez, former Santos cabinet minister and Luis Carlos Sarmiento’s lawyer.
Her independence from the government will be put to the test very quickly. The Fiscalía has in its hands several high-profile and politically sensitive cases, including the investigation against Nicolás Petro.
The long saga of the election of the attorney general has not been good for anyone. The February 8 protests, or siege (per the opposition), backfired on Petro and deepened political tensions, and may have poisoned Petro’s relations with the judiciary. The Supreme Court’s painful slowness hurt its reputation, raising questions about the opacity and secrecy of the entire process and allegations of clientelism by magistrates in the election. More experts, politicians and commentators have criticized the court’s electoral powers, which is likely to become a key issue in the discussions of the judicial reform commission. The interim period in the Fiscalía, since Barbosa’s term ended in February, left the entity in the hands of Martha Mancera, a controversial figure who is accused of covering up the drug trafficking ties of a top official in Buenaventura.
The agony of the healthcare reform
Petro’s healthcare reform is agonizing. On March 12, eight of the fourteen senators on the seventh commission signed a proposal to kill the bill. If that majority holds up when it is put to a vote in commission, the healthcare reform would be defeated and buried. The negative ponencia (rapporteurs’ report) was signed by senators from the uribista CD as well as the U, the Liberals, Conservatives, Colombia Justa Libres and the ASI, taking the government by surprise. The government knew that there were six solid votes against the healthcare reform, but it didn’t anticipate that Berenice Bedoya (ASI) and Norma Hurtado (La U) would join the ranks of the opponents.
The members of the commission had agreed that the debate would start after Holy Week, in April, following national hearings and backdoor negotiations. However, the governing coalition shot itself in the foot by presenting their positive ponencia in early March, only signed by the left’s four senators. This egged on opponents, who read it as a sign of weakness and began organizing themselves. Those on the fence joined them: Liberal senator Miguel Ángel Pinto, a strategic potential ally of the government who has received bureaucratic ‘quotas’, joined those who say the bill is unconstitutional and Berenice Bedoya, whose party (ASI) initially was in the governing coalition, complained that her proposals were ignored. The negative ponencia was initially signed and publicly announced by seven senators, who were joined a few hours later by Norma Hurtado, a close ally of Dilian Francisca Toro, whose main argument was that the reform still hadn’t been costed by the finance ministry.
The eight were later joined by MIRA senator Ana Paola Agudelo, who announced that she would vote in favour of the negative ponencia. If this majority holds up when it comes up to a vote, there would be nine votes in favour of killing the reform.
Given how the healthcare reform has become a point of honour for the government, which has spent so much political capital on it, the government is not giving up. Petro said he will not withdraw the reform, arguing that it was essential because of the sums of money lost annually in the system. Health minister Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo has said that the mantra remains “resist, insist and never desist.” Interior minister Luis Fernando Velasco has said that the government will keep negotiating and defending the reform, and assume the political cost of it. In its efforts to save the reform, the government is considering sacrificing its positive ponencia in favour of an alternative ponencia being prepared by Green senator Fabián Díaz. The government thinks it could swing three votes with an alternative proposal. The president of the seventh commission, Pacto senator Martha Peralta, has said that the reform will come up for a vote only after Holy Week, in early April.
This reform has been given up for dead so many times over before surviving in extremis, but this time seems different. It will be extremely difficult for the government to save it against a solid bloc of nine votes against. It can try to delay the inevitable, but winning this round will be nearly impossible and it can’t delay too much: if the reform isn’t approved by the Senate (in commission and plenary) by June, then it will die on its own. The eight senators who signed the ponencia have publicly staked out their positions, and followed up with a public statement saying that they wouldn’t change their votes and wouldn’t support an alternative proposal. Any of them changing their minds after publicly announcing their votes would immediately be seen as a new yidispolítica scandal and likely destroy their political careers.
Even when it should be focused on saving the pension reform (currently in the Senate), the government seems like it wants to go down with the doomed healthcare reform, perhaps for Petro to continue posing as the victim. The defeat of the healthcare reform, which now seems like a when rather than an if, would be a huge political defeat for the government and likely seal the fate of its entire legislative agenda.
Partly in reaction this massive setback, on March 15, while speaking in Cali, Petro raised the possibility of a constituent assembly if the current constitution cannot be applied. This is an explosive but nearly impossible proposal, which will only increase polarization—but I’ll discuss that in a separate post…
More patronage
Continuing the slow drip partial shuffle in the wider administration, Petro has rewarded more political allies with important positions in his administration.
On March 5, former Pacto senator and 2023 Bogotá mayoral candidate Gustavo Bolívar took office as the new director of the Social Prosperity Department (DPS). Bolívar replaces Laura Sarabia, who was promoted to director of the administrative department of the presidency (Dapre) in February.
Bolívar, a prolific author and famous telenovela screenwriter, has been a close and loyal ally of Petro since 2017, when he accepted to be the top candidate of the petrista list for Senate in 2018. In his first term in the Senate (2018-22), Bolívar was Petro’s sidekick, even acting as his cameraman, but he didn’t stand out for his talents as a legislator or debater and made very few friends. Bolívar was reelected in 2022, with the honour of being the top candidate on the Pacto’s closed list, but he never really adapted to the role of being a pro-government congressman. He resigned his seat just a few months later, in December 2022, and became the Pacto’s mayoral candidate in Bogotá. Bolívar never stood any real chance of winning, but even then, his final result was worse than expected and rather humiliating: he finished third, with only 18.7% (compared to the Pacto list’s 30% in 2022).
Bolívar is an activist and popular agitator, and a very polarizing public figure, considered by his opponents to be a boorish and aggressive extremist. For all his faults, Bolívar is straightforward and brutally honest, and his comments have scandalized public opinion many times over.
The DPS administers most of the government’s major social assistance programs and subsidies and is responsible for managing and implementing policies against poverty and for social inclusion, reparations to victims and care for vulnerable groups. In 2024, the DPS has a budget of 10.78 trillion pesos ($2.78 billion). At the swearing in ceremony for Bolívar, Petro said that he initially thought that the DPS should be abolished as it was an “expression of end-stage neoliberalism.” Far from abolishing it, Petro has instead put the DPS in charge of managing an ambitious reshaping of Colombia’s social program. His administration has created a new transfers system (including both monetary and in-kind transfers), transformed the two biggest existing conditional cash transfer programs, Familias en Acción and Jóvenes en Acción, into Renta Ciudadana and Renta Joven respectively, and seeks to better target subsidies and social programs. Renta Ciudadana, the government’s landmark anti-poverty initiative, is supposed to harmonize conditional and unconditional cash transfer programs and better target beneficiaries. In 2024, 3 million households in extreme and moderate poverty will receive between 300,000 and 500,000 pesos every 45 days. Unlike with previous programs, recipients will not need to register but will be automatically enrolled thanks to a new regularly-updated central database. The government has also created a new program, Hambre Cero (zero hunger), which has not yet been regulated. In addition, Petro recently announced a major increase in Colombia Mayor, a meagre means-tested pension subsidy paid out to elderly people in poverty, to guarantee a basic monthly pension of 225,000 pesos to all seniors over 80 without a pension (Colombia Mayor currently pays only 80,000 pesos).
Bolívar will need to manage the implementation of these new programs and resolve outstanding issues like the use of private banks to pay the transfers (Petro’s first DPS director, Cielo Rusinque, opposed it, but Sarabia supported it). However, Bolívar has no administrative experience managing a major government agency and no expertise on anti-poverty policies. Both Petro and him have defended the appointment by saying that he will fight corruption and be a “guarantee of transparency” because “experience is learned, honesty is not.” In a video (filmed while driving, in Miami Beach), Bolívar promised a “transparent and efficient management” and would not allow one cent to be stolen. He’s also said that, like when he was senator, he’d donate his salary.
His focus on corruption and transparency is a clear reference to the corrupt political uses of the DPS under Iván Duque, which is being revealed in an ongoing corruption investigation known as Las Marionetas 2. Duque’s former DPS director, Pierre García, is accused of helping to direct and rig contracts to favour allies of several senators, led by uribista senator Ciro Ramírez, who is now in jail. Because it manages such a big wallet and administers social programs which can yield political benefits, the risks of corruption and inappropriate political uses of the DPS are huge.
Bolívar’s belligerent tone and reputation as an activist and Petro loyalist won’t help allay the opposition’s suspicions that the government wants to use its revamped and expanded social programs, managed by the DPS, for clientelistic electoral purposes (something quite common in Latin America).
Former Bogotá city councillor Carlos Carrillo is expected to be appointed director of the Unidad Nacional para la Gestión del Riesgo de Desastres (National Unit for Disaster Risk Management, UNGRD), the emergency management agency.
He’ll replace Olmedo López, who was fired on February 29, just after the presidential administration itself, through Petro’s transparency secretary, denounced him to prosecutors for a corruption scandal. W Radio had revealed massive cost overruns in a contract for water tank trucks to deliver water in La Guajira—cost overruns to purchase 40 trucks amounted to 20.2 billion pesos ($5.1 million). López also allegedly distributed money, supposedly to attend the humanitarian crisis in La Guajira, to political clans in La Guajira—including 62 billion pesos for ‘heavy machinery’ to the municipality of Uribia, the guajiro stronghold of paisa Conservative senator Carlos Andrés Trujillo, an old political mentor of López (and a key petrista ally). Olmedo López, an inexperienced businessman and politician with connections to traditional politicians in Antioquia and a member of the Polo, had already come under fire for the UNGRD’s poor handling of the wildfires in January 2024 and had previously been suspended from office for a month by the comptroller’s office in December 2023. He’d also been accused of giving contracts to Petro’s friends and allies, including former Pacto presidential candidate Alfredo Saade and the cousin of Nicolás Petro (Petro’s eldest son, on trial for illegal financing of the Petro 2022 campaign).
Carlos Carrillo is a former Bogotá city councillor, elected for the left-wing Polo Democrático in 2019, who became one of the most vocal opponents of then-mayor Claudia López (after having supported her in the 2019 election). Carrillo wanted to run for mayor in 2023, but he was passed over by the Polo in favour of Gustavo Bolívar and he was visibly unhappy with the way he was treated, publicly attacking the Polo’s leadership. In response, the party left him off the Pacto’s list for council. His appointment is a political reward and consolation prize. Like his predecessor, Carrillo has no academic or professional experience in the field (he’s an industrial designer).
Like Bolívar, Carrillo has made corruption and transparency his main priorities in his new job, announcing a ‘purge’ of the agency following the La Guajira water tank trucks scandal and saying that some of the things happening in the UNGRD “look very bad.” Facing similar criticisms for his lack of experience, Carrillo said that Petro trusted his technical abilities and, above all, his “moral abilities.”
Bolívar and Carrillo’s appointments are rewards for two loyalists and political allies of the president. In many of his recent changes to his administration, Petro has pushed out technocrats in favour of political figures who are close allies and ideologically more in sync with him—most notably long-time left-wing senator Alexander López as the new national planning director. However, at the same time, Petro has also kept room for other political groups, as seen with Luz Cristina López, the new sports minister, whose name had been presented by Conservative rep. Ape Cuello.
In other news
The Council of State nullified the elections of the first vice presidents of the Senate and the House, María José Pizarro (Pacto) and Fernando Niño (Conservative) respectively. The administrative court ruled that their elections violated article 40 of Law 5 of 1992 (congressional procedures), which states that the first vice presidencies are to be held by ‘political minorities’, a vague term never properly defined. The Council of State said that the Pacto coalition is a single caucus and the largest block in the Senate, therefore not a political minority. In Niño’s case, it ruled that the Conservative Party with 27 seats, while not the largest party, is also not a political minority. It set a formula to determine who is a political minority (any party with fewer seats than the total number of seats divided by the number of parties represented, which is 7.79 for this legislature). Both Pizarro and Niño have said that they will defend their vice presidencies. Pizarro has called the Council of State’s decision contradictory and problematic, correctly pointing out the contradictions with its own past decisions and the inconsistent and improper application of article 40 in the past (with the Council of State never saying a word). She claimed that there was a clear political bias against the left, a claim repeated by the Pacto. Niño said that the Council of State’s jurisprudence was different at the time of his election.
Nearly 120 senators and representatives, predominantly from the Pacto, sponsored a constitutional reform that’d allow members of Congress, assemblies and councils to switch parties within a four month period without having to give up their seats or face legal penalties. Party switching (floor crossing), or transfuguismo, is banned and members of Congress must resign their seats a year before candidacy registration if they wish to run for a different party. Given current political circumstances and the exploded party system, there is significant appetite for transfuguismo among lawmakers. More on this in later posts…
Petro revived (again) the endless debate about the Bogotá metro. Since taking office, Petro has insisted that a portion of line 1 of the Bogotá metro, under construction, be underground rather than elevated, in spite of the costs and risks involved with modifying the current project and the opposition of the mayor of Bogotá (Claudia López and now Carlos Fernando Galán). On March 12, Petro presented a study by the Colombian Society of Engineers and insisted in burying a portion of line 1 (through downtown), but left the decisions in the hands of Galán. Petro said that Galán must “reconsider” and make a technical, non-political decision. The study in question, commissionned by the government, sang the praises of mayor Petro’s initial underground metro project from 2014 and vaunted the advantages of an underground portion. The study was completed in December but has not yet been released to the public. Galán reiterated that line 1 will not be modified. Work on line 1 is 30% complete.
The largely self-inflicted passports scandal, which currently has Álvaro Leyva suspended from office as foreign minister, continues to cause problems for the government. On Feb. 26, the foreign ministry’s secretary-general José Antonio Salazar awarded the contract to Thomas Greg & Sons, the company which has had printed Colombian passports since 2007. Within hours, Petro fired Salazar, claiming to have been “betrayed” and fumed against a “corrupt contract” (even though the original bid process, in 2023, was launched by his own foreign ministry and tailored to benefit TGS). On March 5, Luis Gilberto Murillo, the caretaker foreign minister (and ambassador to the US), said that the government would not sign a new contract and is currently looking for a solution to the problem, and added that Salazar didn’t have the authority to award the contract. In the meantime, Petro went on a tirade against TGS, which has also won contracts to manage the logistics of elections since 2010. Petro said that the company controlled the database with information on all citizens and the vote counting process and claimed that a “private company completely controls the elections and could carry out a monumental fraud.” He later said that the Colombian electoral system was worse than Venezuela’s electoral system, a rather absurd thing to say. While Petro raises real questions about TGS’ big contracts for election logistics and biometrics, the private company doesn’t control the database with every citizen’s information nor does it control the entire electoral process (it did control one of the software for the vote counting process or escrutinio, which remains a problematic issue).
Thanks for reading!