According to the presidential candidate, he made that decision because he wanted to vindicate her after Córdoba was removed by then attorney Alejandro Ordóñez from his seat as congressman in 2010 < /h2>
“I saw a woman who had been beaten by Ordóñez. They removed her from her popularly elected position, as arbitrarily as me”, Gustavo Petro.
In an interview with Blu Radio, presidential candidate Gustavo Petro said he regretted having included Senator elected Piedad Córdoba in her political coalition, the Historical Pact.
“That could be my mistake, and I have to take responsibility, because there is what is called political responsibility. I saw a woman who had been beaten by Ordóñez. They removed her from her popularly elected position, as arbitrarily as me , because a prosecutor cannot do that (…) She was very low profile, very isolated, for many years and I said: why not vindicate her? So, I was the one who made the decision to invite her to the composition of that list as an Afro woman, beaten and politically excluded”, declared the candidate on Blu Radio.
In addition, he said that made the decision to separate the senator from her campaign due to the events that have occurred in recent weeks and as long as her legal situation is not resolved.
It should be remembered that Córdoba was provisionally detained for 48 hours by the Honduran immigration authorities at the Palmerola airport in Comayagua, for carrying $68,000 in a briefcase without having declared them, a fact for which the senator could face a process for money laundering.
At the time, Córdoba delivered three statements to the agents of the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Organized Crime (Fescco), which according to the newspaper El Herald, they were contradictory and confusing.
“In her first version, she said that the money came from a Colombian businessman residing in Tegucigalpa, the second version was that she did not know he was carrying the money, and the third is that the resources are part of the payment for a consultancy”
You may be interested in: Piedad Córdoba in Honduras: how her 48-hour detention went for carrying $68,000 in cash without declaring it
About her latest version, Córdoba assured that it had been a consultancy carried out for the Colombian businessman Mauricio Sánchez, who currently lives in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. This version especially caught the attention of the authorities of that country because their government had announced in a statement that the politician would be visiting to “participate in activities of various women’s and human rights organizations”, but not in labor activities.< /p>
Furthermore, the case report states that The congresswoman was aware that she could not withdraw more than 10,000 dollars from the Central American country unless she declared a larger sum, something she omitted.
At the time, Piedad Córdoba He defended himself through his Twitter account, assuring that everything was a “misunderstanding”. “Thank you Colombia and our America for so much solidarity. The persecution does not stop but the truth prevails. Overcome the misunderstanding in Honduras ”, she said in her social network.
He also thanked the Colombian Foreign Ministry in another tweet: “I especially thank Vice President Marta Lucía Ramírez and Consul Michel Carrillo for their support and attention in this impasse (…) To the authorities of the brotherly Honduran people, I thank the due process so that the legal procedures of the case and its timely resolution were given.”
In addition, the congresswoman is accused by her former political adviser Andrés Velázquez of making money by handing over hostages to the point of delaying the surrender of Íngrid Betancourt and three US congresswomen, and of their supposed link with the alleged figurehead of the government of Nicolás Maduro, Alex Saab.
Candidate Gustavo Petro assured that, “there is an ethics commission of the Historical Pact that is studying the issues and that it should, hopefully in the short term, make a decision from an ethical point of view”.
The senator made the adhesion official n of her party, Citizen Power, to the Historic Pact in September 2021 and she was elected in the legislative elections on a closed list.