Just seven days before the presidential elections in Colombia, the atmosphere is increasingly heated. Several surveys give a tie between Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández and new data appears every day that can play against one of the two. Only now has it become known that Xavier Vendrell, a former member of Terra Lliure, arrested in his day for terrorism and in 2017 for the Voloh case of diversion of funds for the separatist attempt, is one of the three foreign advisers to the candidate’s election campaign of the extreme left.
The confessed accomplice in the 1989 attacks against an INEM office in Hospitalet de Llobregat and in 1990 against the Hidroeléctricas del Segre company in Olesa de Montserrat, appears in the “petrovideos”. It is a series of recordings of meetings of Petro’s most trusted team, where they reveal a whole plot of foul play to annihilate their rivals. One of the attendees sent them to the magazine ‘Semana’, which has been making them public since last Friday and, in addition to leaving the leader of the Historical Pact and some of his closest collaborators in a bad light, has provoked the intervention of the Attorney General’s Office , which will investigate whether any activities violate the electoral law.
Vendrell’s intervention, who appears sitting next to Petro’s wife, Verónica Alcócer, refers to the head of the communications team. He suggests firing her and adds that, since he believes that her salary is covered by a well-known businessman named Christian Daes, he should finance whoever they put in her place. Given Petro’s doubts that Daes might not accept, Vendrell’s response seems in keeping with his criminal past in Terra Lliure. “What you have to explain to Daes is that he, or he manages it well, or the headline that may be there is: ‘Daes is irregularly financing Petro’s campaign,'” affirms the Catalan.
The friendship between Petro and Vendrell, a deputy in the Parliament of Catalonia between 1999 and 2010, the year in which he left politics to jump into private business, was made clear when the Colombian senator was mayor of Bogotá. It was the year 2017 and Vendrell was arrested for the Voloh case of alleged diversion of funds. “Xavier Vendrell has been imprisoned in Spain, he is a businessman whose crime is to help the independence of Catalonia. We are experiencing moments of maximum tension in the democratic struggles of the peoples. My solidarity with his family, which has given us so much solidarity” Gustavo Petro wrote on Twitter.
“Xavier Vendrell is a member of the Esquerra Republicana, today the largest party in Catalonia and an ally of Human Colombia for a better world,” he stated on the same network. It should be remembered that Colombia Humana is the movement that Petro created and that was later integrated into the Historical Pact, which includes, among others, the Communist Party, the Democratic Pole, and has the support of Comunes, the party formed by former heads of the FARC.
It has also been revealed that the Ecuadorian Vinicio Alvarado, convicted of corruption and a refugee in Caracas, is another designer of the controversial strategies to defeat opponents. He was a publicist in Rafael Correa’s campaign in 2006, then held high positions in his government and in 2018 he had worked in the Petrista campaign.
Among the most controversial issues they deal with, one affects the former Team Colombia candidate, Fico Gutiérrez, at the time the favorite to enter the second round. They advised presenting him as a “depraved” and a friend of the ‘narcos’ and they searched the prisons for two who would verify it, and they go so far as to suggest that they should appeal to the “imagination” of each one to attack him.
Another victim of the plot was the centrist Sergio Fajardo, when they believed he was the rival to beat, and they thought they needed to muddy him. Despite everything that is revealed, it does not seem that he will be decisive in the elections on Sunday. Five polls predict a technical tie between Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández, and only one, that of Yanhass for RCN, indicates that the former mayor of Bogotá will win with a difference of ten points.
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