The shady business of the President's son
President Petro’s son Nicolás Petro was arrested on July 29 and has since confessed that Petro’s 2022 campaign received illegal money. The story (so far) of a devastating scandal for Gustavo Petro.
On July 29, Colombians woke up to the news that Nicolás Petro Burgos, the son of President Gustavo Petro, had been arrested on charges of money laundering and illicit enrichment, along with his ex-wife, Daysuris Vásquez. This investigation against Nicolás stems from claims made by his ex earlier this year that he collected dirty money for his father’s 2022 campaign from a drug trafficker and corrupt businessman with criminal ties. A few days later, Nicolás Petro agreed to cooperate with prosecutors and confessed that his father’s 2022 campaign received illegal money.
While Gustavo Petro has tried to distance himself from his son, pledging that he would not interfere with the investigation, he knows that this scandal could devastate his presidency.
An angry ex-wife
The story begins with an ex-wife going to the press to reveal her ex’s dirty dealings with shady people.
In an interview with Semana magazine in March, Daysuris ‘Day’ Vásquez said that Nicolás Petro, Gustavo Petro’s first son, received money from people “who have a somewhat dark past”—most notably 600 million pesos from Samuel Santander Lopesierra “the Marlboro man”, a former congressman and convicted drug trafficker, and 400 million pesos from Alfonso “El Turco” Hilsaca, a corrupt businessman with criminal ties. She said that this money was for Gustavo Petro’s presidential campaign but that Nicolás kept most of the money for himself, and that Gustavo Petro was never aware of his son’s dirty dealings (at the time). She explained that Máximo Noriega, at the time a Pacto pre-candidate for governor of Atlántico, was Nicolás’ intermediary who received all the money (in cash). As proof, Vásquez gave over 1,600 pages of WhatsApp chats to Semana. In these chats, the ex-couple mostly discusses the money, their fear of being robbed or losing the money and wondering what to do with the large amounts of cash without raising suspicion. Nicolás insisted on using the money to buy a house outside of Barranquilla for 1.6 billion pesos.
Day Vásquez said that Nicolás Petro met privately with nearly all cabinet ministers. In certain cases, Nicolás Petro arranged ‘quotas’ (bureaucratic sinecures) for political allies in ministries and government agencies. In WhatsApp messages, Nicolás Petro says that he received ten ‘spots’ (cupos) from then-interior minister Alfonso Prada. He also had an ally of corrupt former senator Musa Besaile installed as director of the SENA (national training service) in Córdoba.
Day Vásquez repeatedly said that Gustavo Petro was not aware of his son’s activities and that he was a ‘victim’. She told him everything on February 1. According to her, Petro was disappointed and said that Nicolás was going to get into trouble and that as a result he’d also end up in trouble because of his son.
Nicolás Petro denied all claims and complained that he had received a “social and media lynching.”
The scandal only blew up because of a bad breakup and marital infidelity. Nicolás cheated on his wife, Day, with her best friend, Laura Ojeda, a reality TV star. Suspecting that he was cheating on her, Day allegedly got access to Laura Ojeda’s cellphone and ‘profiled’ her. Following the breakup, Laura Ojeda and Nicolás are now together and expecting their first child. Meanwhile, Day Vásquez is now engaged to representative Juan Manuel Cortés, elected for Rodolfo Hernández’s Liga in Santander.
“I didn’t raise him”
A few hours before the story dropped, Petro tweeted out a statement in which he asked the Fiscalía (the attorney general’s office) to investigate his son and his brother Juan Fernando Petro (alleged of being part of a network asking drug traffickers for large sums of money in exchange for being included in the government’s peace policies). Petro tried to get away of the story and distance himself from his son (and bothersome brother) before the scandal exploded.
In the coming days, Petro continued to distance himself as much as possible from his son. In an interview with Cambio, talking about his relation with his eldest son, the president said that “I didn’t raise him, that’s the reality.” This line—“I didn’t raise him”—went viral and earned him all kinds of criticism from commentators.
In part, Petro was correct: he didn’t raise Nicolás.
Gustavo Petro has six children (five biological, one adopted) from three relationships with different women, and has a different relation with each of them, reflecting his turbulent life. Nicolás Petro was born in 1986, while Petro (a M-19 guerrillero) was in jail. He is the son of Katia Burgos, daughter of a powerful conservative family in Ciénaga de Oro (Córdoba), Petro’s birthplace. When he was released from prison after 18 months, Nicolás was a little over one year old and Petro lived with him and his mother, clandestinely, in Bucaramanga, but left after a few months. Nicolás was raised by his mother in Ciénaga de Oro, while his father later remarried in 1992 and began his political career following his demobilization from the M-19. Petro continued to live distant from his son, seeing him only twice a year during holidays in the late 1990s.
However, Petro’s claims that he never raised his son ring hollow because Nicolás has been, by far, his most ‘political’ son. Politics brought them together: Nicolás supported his father’s mayoral campaign and later administration in Bogotá, appearing behind him on the balcony when Petro was removed from office as mayor in 2013. However, in 2014, Petro asked the Fiscalía to investigate his son amidst claims of influence peddling in public contracts.
Nicolás Petro, using his father’s name and political base, began building his own political career in the Atlántico department, with the help of Máximo Noriega, a longstanding petrista in the region. He ran for governor in 2019, finishing second, which ensured him a seat in the departmental assembly. At the time the scandal erupted, Nicolás Petro was trying to consolidate himself as the leader of petrismo in Atlántico.
Petro assured that, as soon as he learned of the accusations against Nicolás by his ex-wife, he acted immediately. He warned his ministers not to have any relations with his son. However, his ex-wife Mary Luz Herrán, claimed that Petro actually learned of the accusations earlier, in December, when his eldest daughter, Andrea (who lives in France), told him everything she had heard from Day. Andrea denied this, claiming that she found out much later, in January. In any case, before the scandal erupted in March, Andrea had publicly criticized her half-brother on social media, calling him out for meeting with Musa Besaile’s son.
The Marlboro Man and El Turco
The most explosive claims in Day’s interview were that Nicolás Petro received money from a convicted drug trafficker and a corrupt businessman.
Samuel Santander Lopesierra, known as the “Marlboro man”, is an old name of the Colombian-Caribbean underworld who existed in the liminal space between politics and criminality in La Guajira in the 1980s and 1990s. Santa Lopesierra made his fortune in cigarette and liquor smuggling in the border town of Maicao, connected with Aruba’s powerful Mansur family, supplying informal retail markets in Colombia (sanandresitos). In parallel to his ‘business’, Lopesierra was active in local politics in the 1980s and was elected to the Senate (as a Liberal) in 1994 with over 41,000 votes, despite already being known as the “czar of contraband” or the “Marlboro man.”
Unsurprisingly, the line between smuggling booze and cigarettes and smuggling cocaine is fairly thin. Since the mid-1990s, US authorities suspected that Lopesierra was part of a drug trafficking and money laundering scheme, laundering drug money through Puerto Rico, Aruba and Venezuela with the Mansurs. Lopesierra and the Mansurs were connected to the illegal financing of Ernesto Samper’s 1994 campaign, with the Mansurs said to have funnelled $500,000 to Samper’s campaign. In Colombia, Lopesierra was also connected to the 1995 assassination of Álvaro Gómez Hurtado and the expansion of paramilitarism in La Guajira in the 1990s.
Lopesierra was arrested in 2002 and extradited to the United States in 2003. In 2006, he was convicted of smuggling over 2,000 kg of cocaine into the US was and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2007. He was released in 2021 and, back in Colombia, he’s been trying to relaunch his old political career. In 2022, he publicly endorsed Petro but did not participate actively in the campaign. Now, he’s running for mayor of Maicao.
Alfonso “El Turco” Hilsaca is a businessman and public contractor from Mompox (Bolívar) who has been involved in several judicial scandals. Hilsaca became a superpower in the public lighting world, winning big public concessions across the country, most likely because he financed local political campaigns. In 2021, for example, amidst significant criticism, his companies won a multi-million dollar 15-year concession for public lighting in Neiva (Huila), and later also got the contract to manage the municipal cadastre for 15 years. His companies also won the waste management concession for 20 years in Cartagena in 2005 and he’s long been accused of controlling Cartagena’s regional environmental authority, Cardique. Hilsaca’s business empire also includes hotels and bars in Cartagena.
Hilsaca has been implicated in several judicial cases. He has been detained twice, in 2009-2010 and in 2014, both times following allegations that he financed illegal groups and that he was behind homicides, including the murder of four prostitutes in Cartagenna. Following years of delays, Hilsaca is awaiting trial on charges of homicide (accused of paying for the murder of a witness in 2009) and financing the Rastrojos criminal group. In 2015, Hilsaca was said to be behind a plot to bug the offices of then-deputy attorney general Jorge Perdomo. Hilsaca was also involved in a corruption scandal in El Salvador after his company won public lighting contracts in San Salvador.
Hilsaca initially denied the allegations and sued Day Vásquez for insult and slander.
The arrest
Fast forward a few months, and through another scandal also involving claims of illegal financing of Petro’s campaign, to July 29. At 6 am, the Fiscalía arrested Nicolás Petro and Day Vásquez. The president’s son is accused of money laundering and illicit enrichment, while his ex-wife is accused of money laundering and breach of personal information. The Fiscalía announced that they would seek pre-trial detention for both. They were arrested in Barranquilla and transferred to Bogotá.
Nicolás Petro’s arrest was unprecedented: for the first time, a sitting president’s son was arrested.
Gustavo Petro reacted on Twitter. In a lengthy tweet, Petro wrote that “as an individual and a father, it pains me to see so much self-destruction and one of my sons going to jail, as president of the republic, I’ve assured the Fiscalía that it has all the guarantees on my part to proceed in accordance with the law.” He wished his son luck and strength, “may these events forge your character and may you reflect on your own mistakes”, while reiterating that he would not intervene or interfere with the Fiscalía’s decision and let the law guide the case freely. Petro’s reaction was measured and calm. It contrasts with Álvaro Uribe’s behaviour following the arrest of his second cousin, former senator Mario Uribe, for parapolítica in 2008: Uribe angrily confronted the Supreme Court and the presidency participated in a plot to discredit the magistrate investigating parapolítica.
Petro’s reaction was clearly another attempt to further distance himself from his son. After “I didn’t raise him”, he now hoped that he’d “reflect on his own mistakes.” His reaction contrasts with his reaction to the Sarabia-Benedetti scandal in May, in which Petro defended Laura Sarabia and began claiming that the scandal was part of a golpe blando (soft coup) by his enemies in the deep state. In the case against his son, Petro hasn’t attacked attorney general Francisco Barbosa or the Fiscalía.
Political reactions to the news split along partisan lines. The opposition called on Petro to take responsibility for his son’s arrest and ‘come clean’ on the accusations of illegal financing and narco-financing of his campaign. Álvaro Uribe did stand out, saying that “my parents always taught me never to rejoice in the pain or hurt of others.”
Pacto politicians largely closed ranks behind Petro, expressing solidarity for the president or calling for the investigation to proceed in accordance with the law. Petrista Green senator Inti Asprilla praised Petro’s “absolute respect for the actions of the Fiscalía and judge.” The Pacto’s mayoral candidate in Bogotá, former senator Gustavo Bolívar, said that while Nicolás was the first son of a president to go to jail, it wasn’t because other presidents’ sons hadn’t committed crimes, but rather because no other president had allowed the judiciary to act independently and without pressure. Bolívar criticized Nicolás Petro’s arrest, saying that because he didn’t have a criminal record and didn’t constitute a flight risk, his arrest was “pure electoral circus” by Barbosa, an opponent of Gustavo Petro.
Bolívar was referring to the corruption scandals surrounding Álvaro Uribe’s sons, Tomás and Jerónimo, who have been accused of enriching themselves thanks to dubious business dealings and ties to the Odebrecht scandal. However, unlike Nicolás, they’ve never been formally accused of any crimes.
The Fiscalía detailed how Nicolás Petro lived large. The prosecutor said he lived the life of someone earning 200 million pesos a month (US$48,700) but his only source of income in 2021-2023 was his monthly salary of around 26 million pesos ($6,300) as deputy in the departmental assembly. In 2022, Nicolás Petro had an income of 251 million pesos but total expenses of 1.6 billion pesos (over $388,000). With his inexplicable wealth, Nicolás Petro had several luxury houses and condos around Barranquilla, a Mercedes-Benz, jewelry and expensive clothes and shoes.
On August 1, Nicolás Petro pled not guilty but unexpectedly announced that he would cooperate with prosecutors. He said that he would relate “new facts and situations” that would help prosecutors, and that he was doing so for his family and his future baby.
Bombshell confession
On August 3, the prosecutor in the case announced that Nicolás Petro had confessed to the illegal financing of Gustavo Petro’s 2022 campaign. Nicolás Petro admitted that he had enriched himself illegally and that he had received “large sums of money” from Santa Lopesierra, Alfonso Hilsaca’s son Gabriel and a businessman in Cúcuta. Nicolás and Day kept some of that money for personal gain, while the rest of the money was invested in Petro’s 2022 campaign. Day helped Nicolás launder the money.
The prosecutor announced that the money which went to the campaign exceeded campaign spending limits and some of the money was not reported to the authorities. Nicolás Petro agreed to provide evidence to prosecutors to support his claims.
Gabriel Hilsaca’s lawyer said that his client did give money to the campaign but only learned that Nicolás had kept the money when the scandal erupted.
On August 4, a judge ordered Nicolás be released on probation, banned from having any contact with anyone else involved in the case, leaving the country or attending political events. Day Vásquez was also released on condition she attend court summons, not leave the country and not attend political events. The judge denied the prosecutor’s request that Nicolás be placed under house arrest.
The media had previously reported that the Petro campaign hadn’t properly reported expenses for its large operation of election witnesses or payments to three top campaign strategists. The National Electoral Council (CNE) is already looking into irregularities in Petro’s campaign financing. Since 2017, violating campaign spending limits and campaign financing from illegal sources are punishable offences. The campaign manager and the candidate who receive money from prohibited sources may face four to eight years in jail. Campaign treasurers may face four to eight years in jail for breaking spending limits.
Illegal campaign financing is nothing new in Colombia: the Cali cartel in the Samper 1994 campaign (Proceso 8.000), Enilce ‘La Gata’ López and paramilitaries for Uribe 2002, Odebrecht for Santos 2010 and 2014 and Zuluaga 2014 and Ñeñe Hernández for Duque 2018. With the recent exception of Óscar Iván Zuluaga, candidates (presidents) have never been charged. In part because there existed a tacit pact between president(s) and attorneys general, and pro-government congressmen, not to seriously investigate any accusations that threatened institutional stability—Congress and the Fiscalía let investigations and allegations drag on. This tacit pact was broken with Petro’s election and his confrontational relationship with attorney general Francisco Barbosa, an old friend of former president Iván Duque.
Who knew what?
However, these cases also never went anywhere because it was never possible to prove that the candidate knew of the illegal financing. This was Samper’s defence (todo fue a mis espaldas—everything was behind my back) and Santos’ defence against Odebrecht money (me acabo de enterar—I just found out). This is once again the key question here: did Petro or his campaign manager, Ricardo Roa (now president of Ecopetrol), know about the illegal financing of the 2022 campaign? For Petro, Roa and the campaign to get into real legal trouble, there would need to be evidence that Roa was aware of illegal sources of financing.
Day Vásquez in March said that Petro didn’t know anything until she told him.
Vicky Dávila in Semana announced in her usual sensationalist style an exclusive interview with Nicolás Petro, published on August 5. Although Semana led with the headline “I’m not going to immolate myself for my father” and the interview had interesting elements, Nicolás Petro said that neither his father nor Roa knew about the money he received from Lopesierra and Hilsaca, that he didn’t tell him and that his father had no way of finding out. Despite Vicky Dávila’s insistent questioning to get a scoop, Nicolás Petro remained largely evasive, vague or coy when asked about issues like illegal financing of the campaign, Armando Benedetti and other potential irregularities.
In the interview, Nicolás does make clear that he won’t sacrifice himself for his father and that he was badly hurt by the “I didn’t raise him” comment, saying that at that moment he realized he was only a pawn. About his upbringing, Nicolás blames his father for abandoning his mother when he was a newborn. He says he always loved his father and saw him as a superhero, but that their relationship was always very distant and cold.
On a ‘lighter’ note, Nicolás said that he lied to Day when he told her he had cupos with then-interior minister Prada. He invented that so that he could give her the resumé of a friend of hers, Laura Ojeda (now his girlfriend)…
Nicolás Petro remained more non-committal when asked about another businessman who financed the Petro campaign in the Caribbean: Euclides Torres, a Barranquilla businessman (also in the public lighting business) and leader of a political clan in Atlántico. The Torres clan entered the Petro campaign in 2022 through an old ally, former senator Armando Benedetti, and contributed financially and logistically to the campaign—most notably, they’re said to have paid for a large rally in Barranquilla in the fall of 2021. The clan includes Liberal representative Dolcey Torres and Pacto senator Pedro Flórez, who is married to Euclides Torres’ niece. Euclides Torres had exclusive access to Petro’s private victory party.
The Nicolás Petro case and the Sarabia-Benedetti scandal have raised new questions about the Torres’ role in the campaign. Nicolás Petro was close to Pedro Flórez and the Torres clan, who are alleged to have lent him a luxury apartment in Bogotá. It’s still unclear whether or not the Torres’ contributions to the campaign went unreported, and what Gustavo Petro knew about their contributions.
Gustavo Petro tweeted on August 5 that what was happening to his son was “terrible and very unfortunate for me”, hoping that one day they can talk and forgive each other. He added that the campaign did not receive any illegal money.
The aftermath
The Nicolás Petro scandal is devastating for the administration. Even if the judicial consequences may take a long time and drag out, politically the scandal is another blow to the president.
This scandal, plus the Sarabia-Benedetti scandal and the Benedetti audios with their mentions of ‘15,000 million pesos’ for the campaign in the Caribbean, adds to serious suspicions of illegal financing of the 2022 campaign. For some, they put into question the legitimacy of Petro’s election. As his critics are now keen on pointing out, opposition leader Petro often criticized politicians for vote buying and fraud. In 2020, during Duque’s Ñeñepolítica scandal, Petro had tweeted that the Council of State had ruled that “a single vote obtained through fraud invalidates the election.”
A lot of Petro’s supporters were attracted to his anti-establishment, anti-corruption message and his promise of decency and honesty in politics. Today, some of them are increasingly disappointed or disillusioned with these revelations. Several petrista influencers or politicians expressed their deep disappointment—though nearly all expressed their trust in Petro, and instead blamed his son for “destroying the hope of many.” Other diehard petristas started claiming the scandal was ‘entrapment’ against the government or that Nicolás Petro was an uribista infiltrator in the campaign.
While Petro won’t expend energy on defending his son, he will defend his government. On August 3, speaking in Sincelejo, he defiantly said that the government will go until 2026 because no one other than the people themselves can end it. He attacked those who attempted to pit father against son to bring down the government, and emphatically stated that he had never asked any of his children to commit crimes.
Petro knows how to defend himself. In Sincelejo, he reminded the audience of when then-inspector general Ordóñez had ordered his removal from office as mayor of Bogotá, claiming that the people had come out in his support at the time and allowed him to stay (in reality, he was reinstated as mayor by court order). Petro will continue to put distance between him and his son. In Sincelejo, he said that previous presidents had been their sons before justice, but that he wants to protect justice above all.
Can this scandal bring down Petro? The possibility of him being removed from office (impeached) is being taken (semi-)seriously by some, but it’s still a long way ahead and remains, for now, very unlikely—though not impossible.
Legally, the scandal is going down three parallel paths: the judicial case in the Fiscalía, the investigation in the CNE and the impeachment cases against the president before the House of Representative’s Commission of Accusations. La Silla Vacía explains them in detail here.
In the Fiscalía, there may be a criminal case against the Petro campaign (Ricardo Roa) for campaign finance irregularities. The Fiscalía hasn’t yet formally implicated Roa in the case, but if they do so, that case would follow the usual criminal procedure. Attorney general Francisco Barbosa is an old friend of former president Iván Duque (who nominated him for the job) and critic of Petro. He only has less than six months left on the job (Feb. 2024). Petro has already presented his list of three nominees to succeed him—three women, all former prosecutors seen as independent and without obvious political ties (unlike Barbosa and other previous attorneys-general). Petro has also asked that an ad hoc prosecutor, rather than the attorney general, lead the cases against his family members.
As mentioned above, there’s already an preliminary investigation for campaign finance irregularities before the CNE, the electoral authority. The CNE is not an electoral court and cannot in any case go after the president. If the magistrates-rapporteurs in the case find merit to formally investigate the campaign, it will be up to the full body of nine magistrates to decide to formally accuse anyone or adopt sanctions against the campaign—decisions require a two-thirds majority, or six votes. According to the law, sanctions for breaking the spending limit or other finance irregularities may include the suspension or loss of party status or suspension of the right to register candidates for public office. The CNE’s investigation may also have criminal implications for the campaign manager. However, as I’ve discussed in the past, the CNE is a political body with a partisan composition, and the current magistrates—elected by Congress in 2022—are mostly pro-government (on paper, coalition parties control a majority of the CNE). In the past, the CNE has been weak and ineffective, both because of its limited investigative capacity and its partisan makeup, and has closed the cases against Santos, Zuluaga and Duque for campaign finance irregularities.
The Fiscalía cannot investigate the president, who has a special fuero. The House of Representative’s Commission of Accusations is the commission responsible for investigating all complaints against the president and bringing impeachment charges against the president. If the House adopts impeachment charges, an impeachment trial would take place in the Senate. The impeachment charges may refer to crimes committed in the exercise of his duties, indignity for misconduct or for common crimes. In the first two cases, the Senate may remove the president from office and suspend his political rights, and the accused president may face trial before the Supreme Court based on the evidence. In the last case, the Senate can only declare whether or not there are grounds for further measures, and, if so, the accused would face trial before the Supreme Court. A guilty verdict in the Senate requires a two-thirds majority.
Unlike in other Latin American countries, no sitting Colombian president has ever been impeached and the only president to have been impeached and convicted was former dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in 1958-9, after he left power. In 1996, during the Proceso 8.000 against President Samper, the House voted to dismiss the accusations. Complaints against Uribe, Santos and Duque didn’t even make it out of the commission. Because the commission has only rarely accused anyone, it’s earned the moniker “commission of absolutions”.
The commission has three of its members currently investigating the complaints filed against Petro by opposition lawmakers. Two of them are from governing parties: Alirio Uribe from the Pacto and Olga Lucía Velásquez from the Greens. The opposition is already trying to recuse them because they support the government.
On current evidence, there’s no real case against Petro. The possibility of Petro being removed from office remains extremely low, although not impossible, if further evidence directly implicates Petro.
It’s clear that this scandal is far from over. Damaging, juicy revelations will continue to come—from the media, prosecutors or the other parties in this case.
The scandal will further polarize public opinion. The opposition and anti-petristas will claim with greater confidence that Petro’s election was illegitimate, won through dirty money and corruption. If he feels besieged or threatened, Petro’s resolve to defend his government and presidency will only be stronger.