Colombia: Chief of Staff ordered to spy on a domestic worker to see if she had stolen

This Friday, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petroannounced the departure of Laura Sarabia, his chief of staff, and Armando Benedetti, the Colombian ambassador in Venezuela, after possible cases of abuse of power. It all started with the alleged theft of a briefcase with money at the home of the senior official, who accused her nanny Marelbys Meza of it, which revealed a series of irregularities.

Meza told Semana magazine that was interrogated in a basement. The babysitter stated that they called her a “thief” several times, asked her about her lost money, and even threatened to send her to jail. “I didn’t want to go there, but it was my turn. If I didn’t go, they would accuse me of having stolen that money. If I went, then I would tell them: I clarify that I am innocent. I really didn’t want to go, but they went to pick me up at my house. I had to go or go”, says the 51-year-old woman.

Until then, Sarabia was associated with an abuse of power scandal. However, the ambassador’s name appeared for possibly being behind the complaint, according to journalist Daniel Coronell on W Radio.

Following this version, Benedetti had asked Petro to leave his current position to be Defense Minister, but he was rejected. On her side, the official Sarabia “offered her the Ministry of the Interior or the Foreign Ministry, despite the fact that both positions were already occupied.”

The ambassador returned to Bogotá this week to meet with the president, without imagining that Cambio magazine would reveal that the nanny had not only been interrogated without a warrant, but that her phone was illegally intercepted by the Police.

“I felt that they were going to leave me there, that I was not going to go out again (…). They did a polygraph on me and they told me: ‘You can make fun of that device, but not us. She’s not going home tonight, she’s going to jail from here, and we are going to search all your brothers and you,’” Meza said. The attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, confirmed this and assured that “judicial decisions” on the case will be taken in the following days.

For his part, Petro reported that “while the investigation is being carried out, my dear and esteemed official and the Venezuelan ambassador are withdrawing from the Government so that from the power that these charges imply, they cannot even have the distrust that they are going to alter the investigative processes”.

On June 7, Laura Sarabia had been summoned by Congress to answer for the case of the nanny Meza, specifically for abuse of power and illegal wiretapping.

Source-larepublica.pe