The Colombian president assured that Ricardo Bonilla is not guilty, but he fell into a trap.
Through his X account, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, asked this Wednesday the head of the Treasury portfolio, Ricardo Bonilla, to step aside after new facts were known that allegedly link him to the looting of the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD). These are the audios of his former advisor, María Alejandra Benavides, in which she links him to the apparent purchase of congressmen for the approval of the 2024 Budget and other Government projects.
“I hope he resigns, not because I think he is guilty, but because they want to tear him apart for being loyal to the government program and they want to unconstitutionally overthrow that government,” the president said in his tweet. According to Petro, Bonilla fell into a “trap” of the “far right wing” and that in this scenario he prefers that his minister resign.
“Bonilla's mistake is academic naivety, thinking that everyone has the same intellectual stature. That is why he disobeyed my instructions not to trust the Uribe-supporting officials of the Ministry of Finance, who cheated us from the beginning, like when they paid for Duque's gasoline deficit with the budget, or evaporated the money for the public university, or did not put the codes that classify government projects to prevent their budgeting and prevent the resources from arriving,” said the head of state.
Petro then insisted that Bonilla was naive and had forgotten a principle of the left: “Technology is not neutral, it is always political and depends on which social group is in power. Neutral technology, turned into technocracy, is only a mental deception, it is nothing more than the power of the richest in society and in the world.”
Despite everything, Petro stressed that Bonilla did not give indicative quotas to the congressmen, because that was an order he gave from the first day in the Casa de Nariño. On the other hand, he stated that the mentioned moves from the UNGRD were not made, because he stopped them by asking for the resignation of Olmedo López, whom he referred to as “the bandit and traitor of the murdered dead of the left.”
Bonilla's departure, who has not yet commented on the matter, occurs at one of the most complex moments for the Petro government in terms of finances. Congress refuses to process a financing law to cover a $12 billion gap in the 2025 budget, partly because the opposition called it a new tax reform, but also because of the noise of the UNGRD issue in the Treasury portfolio. After the minister's resignation, for many the proposal is virtually sunk.
