Gustavo Petro’s government is experiencing a deep internal crisis. On February 4, during a Council of Secretaries of the Executive meeting, it became evident that the group that makes up Petro’s administration had split. The division was caused by the Colombian President’s decision to appoint Armando Benedetti as Chief of the Office of the Presidency.
Following the controversial appointment, several Secretaries resigned from their positions in protest: Culture, Environment, Defense, the Administrative Department of the Presidency, etc., were left without office chiefs. In response, the Colombian President requested the formal resignation of all Secretaries, in order to avoid more protest resignations. On his X account, Petro wrote: “I have requested the formal resignation of ministers, ministers and directors of administrative departments. There will be some changes in the cabinet to achieve greater compliance in the program ordered by the people.”
In the tense council of secretaries, which Petro attended and which was televised, Vice President Francia Márquez said, “I do not share, Mr. President, your decision [to appoint Benedetti as Chief of Staff]. I respect it because you are President, but I do not share your decision to bring in these people who are responsible for what is happening here.”
For her part, Susana Muhamad, then the Secretary of Environment, commented on the allegations of gender violence against Benedetti, “As a feminist and as a woman, I can not sit at this table of our cabinet, of our progressive project with Armando Benedetti.”
Who is Armando Benedetti and why did his appointment cause division?
Benedetti is a Colombian journalist who went into politics and quickly rose to prominence in the Colombian Congress. He was first elected to the Chamber of Representatives in 2002 with the Liberal Party, and in 2006 was elected a Senator with the right-wing Union for the People Party. In 2010, he was appointed president of the Congress, thanks to the support of the Union for the People Party. At the time, this party also supported the election of Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos. Benedetti had previously served as a Bogotá councilman between 1998 and 2000. He was close to Uribe’s government when it was in power.
In 2016, Benedetti was investigated for allegedly receiving bribes in a case of embezzlement of money from the magisterium of Córdoba. In 2017, he was accused by the prosecutor’s office of being linked to the irregularities being investigated in the Odebrecht company case.
Armando Benedetti had already been part of Petro’s team even before he became president as his campaign manager in 2020, and many accuse him of exceeding the electoral spending limit provided by Colombian law. Benedetti, who was linked to the right-wing Colombian establishment, served as Colombia’s ambassador to Venezuela in 2022, achieving the normalization of relations between the two countries, which had been broken for several years.
At the end of his diplomatic mission in Caracas, he was appointed ambassador to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. In 2024, several Spanish media outlets reported that his wife, Adelina Guerrero, denounced Benedetti for threatening her with a gun. In addition, while he was ambassador to the FAO, he declared that he was suffering from a cocaine addiction and that he was in a detoxification process.
In response to the accusations that have been circulating again in the media, Armando Benedetti affirmed “What they have said about me and what they are saying is false. They insist on creating stories without any veracity and against me!”
Petro defends Benedetti and downplays his Secretaries’ resignation
Introducing Benedetti as the new Chief of Staff at the aforementioned meeting of Secretaries, Petro said that he believed in second chances and that his decision should be respected. Petro compared Benedetti to Jaime Bateman, the ideologue of the disbanded guerrilla group M-19, of which the President was a member during his youth.
After the political shake-up, Petro, during his visit to Dubai, has sought to downplay the importance of the resignations of several of his secretaries, arguing that they do not represent a change in his government’s program:
“There is no need to worry. It won’t be a big change in the secretaries. Many [of the Secretaries] will remain [in office]…What we are doing is to remove people who have electoral aspirations. It is not healthy to combine electoral aspirations with their functions in the public administration.”
