Fear of the Prosecutor: Gustavo Petro will not resign from the Senate

The senator and candidate for the presidency of Colombia for the Historic Pact coalition, Gustavo Petro, silenced rumors suggesting that he would resign from the Senate in the coming days to dedicate himself fully to his campaign.

He precisely responded to this question from commune 10 in Neiva (Huila), from where he held his first event 'Petro listens to', in which he seeks to hear the concerns of citizens firsthand and incorporate them into his campaign program.

According to what the president of the Colombian Congress, Juan Diego Gómez, told Semana last Friday, April 1st, some rumors said that Petro's decision to resign from the seat — which he won by placing second in the 2018 presidential election — would come to him in the form of an official office “in the coming days or weeks he is going to present, but it hasn't come yet.”

In addition, Gomez said that Petro should continue to fulfill his responsibilities if he did not give up his senator's credential, such as attending debates, even if he was on the presidential campaign. Otherwise, he would have to submit to disciplinary action by the Office of the Attorney General.

However, according to his statements on Tuesday, Petro is not as afraid of the controlling body as he is of the prosecutor: according to the opposition leader, when he resigns, he would lose the jurisdiction with which he would be tried by the Supreme Court of Justice and would be left at the mercy of the Attorney General's Office.

For his part, Attorney General Francisco Barbosa responded to the candidate in a video from Panama City and condemned his words, noting that “it is regrettable that Mr. Gustavo Petro intends to be president of the Republic riding on the country's judicial institutions.”

It should be emphasized that these resignations have already been submitted by other senators who took up the presidency of the Republic. In 2018, Iván Duque applied to withdraw from office on April 10 and run for the campaign that took him to the Nariño Palace.

However, unlike Duque, Petro would not be replaced, as his seat in the Senate was handed over personally by the Opposition Statute, not in the name of a party.

It should be recalled that Petro has been close to losing his opposition seat several times and that his 2018 vice-presidential formula, Angela María Robledo, did lose it after a double membership was concluded.

In 2021, a political death attempt was dropped before the Council of State because Petro had suggested civil disobedience after the discovery of the case of the political ñeñeñe. He concluded that the penalty sought for Petro, which is loss of investiture, or as it is colloquially known, 'political death', does not apply because these “assumptions” respond to the senator's point of view and thought, related to the aforementioned corruption scandal.

Within the evidentiary material, the Council of State also evaluated the concept that Prosecutor Idayris Carrillo delivered on behalf of the Public Prosecutor's Office, where she somehow defended Petro and assured that the pronouncements he made were not grounds for the loss of investiture, but for other disciplinary sanctions, but that they were not correspond to their departure from Congress.

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