President of the Argos Group assured that Daniel Quintero uses populisms and fallacies to deteriorate the Antioquian business community

At the end of the Proantioquia Members' Assembly, which was held on the morning of Thursday, March 17, at the Botanical Garden of Medellín, the president of the Board of Directors of that organization and also president of the Argos Group, Jorge Mario Velázquez, did not waste to respond to, according to him, the attacks on the business sector made by Mayor Daniel Quintero.

In his speech, Velázquez assured that Quintero has hurt Medellín with his “hate speech” against Antioquia companies and in that sense, he said that there is no opposition between “the State, academia and the private sector”, stating that, historically, this triad has been responsible for promoting “the major social transformations” of the country.

It should be recalled that Velázquez's statements come after the strong questions that the mayor of Medellín made to Antioquia businessmen last January, during a dialogue with Semana magazine.

In the interview with the Bogota media, Quintero said that the Antioquian Business Group (GEA) resembled the mafia cartels. “What were there were some cartels, some mafias, where the GEA, Uribism, Fajardism were added, and they all had an agreement to take a step and someone independent arrived, he put his finger on the wound and that has hurt them a lot,” the local president of Medellín told Semana.

The controversial statements did not go unnoticed by the Antioquia businessmen, who, although they were spoken at the time, two months after Quintero's statements took advantage of the ProAntioquia Members' Assembly to launch strong criticism of the local president and, moreover, to defend the role that private enterprise has played in Antioch.

In this regard, the president of the Argos Group also pointed out that private companies cannot “allow stigmatization, polarization, populisms and diatribes accompanied by disqualifiers to be inserted into the discourse of our society, let alone accept the declarations and fallacious statements of the mayor's deteriorating Antioquia entrepreneurship”.

Next, Velázquez highlighted the work done by the citizen oversight, a body that he indicated has denounced “the multiple irregularities in the management of the city's public apparatus”. Likewise, the president of the Proantioquia Board of Directors expressed his confidence that the authorities and respective supervisory bodies will be responsible for following up and clarifying such complaints.

For his part, President Iván Duque, who was also at the meeting, joined the questions against the mayor of Medellín, expressing his concern about the change of builders of the Hidroituango hydroelectric mega-works.

The criticism of the Antioquian businessmen did not go unnoticed by the mayor of Medellín, who, through his social networks, responded: “Apart from the 4 billion recovered, we have prevented the loss of at least two billion pesos to EPM thanks to the departure of the GEA from the board of directors. Bad management, and bad business were meant to break EPM.”

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