Bogotá.- The outgoing president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, assured this Tuesday that the government of his successor, Abelardo de la Espriella, who will assume the Presidency next Friday, will be “brief,” while insisting on alleged electoral fraud in the past elections.
“How long will the effects of that fraud last? People in the offices of Marco Rubio (U.S. Secretary of State) are already talking about Abelardo ‘the brief.’ They already sense that he wouldn’t even last the four years of his term, but rather that the Colombian population would make him resign,” said Petro during the Festival for the Defense of Public Higher Education, in the municipality of Soacha, adjacent to Bogotá.
A multitude of young people gathered in the main square of Soacha, where Liberal presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was assassinated on August 19, 1989, to welcome Petro, who in three days will leave the Government to be succeeded by De la Espriella, whom he does not recognize as president-elect.
The president, who arrived accompanied by members of his cabinet and his youngest daughter Antonella, indicated that he gave the order to create “liberating guards to take care of the people” and that, in the event that the Army and the Police do not do so, they have the freedom to disobey the authorities.
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“The liberating guards are to defend the life of the people, they are not paramilitaries, but rather they obey exclusively the people’s assemblies of the territory and therefore their strength. Suddenly, weapons would have to be at the service and under the ethical orders of the territorial citizenry itself,” maintained Petro.
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The outgoing president insisted this Tuesday that his successor was elected with an electoral system that supposedly did not guarantee the security of the votes, which is why he does not recognize De la Espriella’s victory and said that in the current situation “it is clear what could be a civil war in Colombia“.
Petro insisted that, according to an independent audit he voiced at a press conference this Monday, there was an “algorithmic, systematic electoral fraud and, above all, a huge volume of votes in favor of Abelardo,” who defeated Senator Iván Cepeda in the second round of the elections, who was the candidate of the president and his party, the Historic Pact.
He also referred to the risks he may face starting August 7th when he leaves the Presidency and what his followers should do in the event that it reaches an extreme.
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“And perhaps if they dare to touch the one who speaks, the current president of Colombia, and try to tarnish him with undeserved imprisonment, whether within Colombia or abroad, I invite you from here, before it is too late, to call for an indefinite general strike if that were to happen,” he stated.
