Angie Rodríguez, who for a long time until last February was President Gustavo Petro’s right-hand woman in the Casa de Nariño, is asking for help from the government she works for. The current manager of the Fondo Adaptación has given interviews to several media outlets to denounce an alleged network of corruption, espionage, and threats working against her, in which several high-ranking officials would be involved. “I got tired of the entire premeditated and systematic campaign against me,” she told Semana magazine. “It’s a very well-structured reputational damage by more than twenty people who have tried to remove me from the Government.” They invented, she says, that she was an ally of paramilitaries, the “fentanyl queen,” and a smuggler. And the president believed it, she claims. Her position, she constantly repeats, is a lucrative portfolio that many corrupt individuals want: she manages resources worth one trillion pesos, about 250 million dollars.
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Rodríguez does not reveal all the names, although she says she has reported them to the authorities. But she has publicly named some, such as Carlos Carrillo, director of the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD); Juliana Guerrero, a young woman close to President Petro and his delegate on the Superior Council of the public university of Cesar, who has had decision-making power in the Government; Raúl Moreno, presidential chief of staff; Mariela Barragán, director of Public Function; or Nhora Mondragón, who replaced Rodríguez as director of the Administrative Department of the Presidency of the Republic (DAPRE).
The most serious accusations are against Carrillo and Guerrero. Regarding the director of the UNGRD, Rodríguez assures that he had a spy in the Fondo Adaptación, who reported all the manager’s movements and conversations. She recounts that she received a chat from an anonymous number telling her that Carrillo and Guerrero are conspiring to attack her, and they allowed her to listen to an audio in which, she claims, Carrillo says “I’m going to screw her for being a bigmouth,” and “it will rain fire.” She understands that “fire” as a threat: “Either he wants to kill me, or he wants to put me in jail.”
Rodríguez adds that she has also received chats in which someone has extorted her. “He told me 20 of the big ones, it was 20 million. I thought it was 20 million,” she says. “But then he tells me it was more, and if you don’t give them to me in a certain amount of time, you already know what will happen to you. I was filled with panic, I imagined the worst. I said, they’re going to shoot me, or they’re going to look for my son at school.” So she paid the money, she recounts.
Rodríguez believes that Carrillo made her an enemy ever since she reported last year that the director was not properly executing UNGRD resources to manage a flood crisis in the Mojana area, in the north of the country. The complaint, she believes, hurt Carrillo’s intentions to run for mayor of Bogotá next year. “What he is doing is not just espionage, but it is a way to exterminate me as a public official,” she added, regarding his accusations against her on social media last year, when he accused her of using the Fund as a political stronghold for the Minister of Interior, Armando Benedetti.
Carrillo, in conversation with Caracol Radio, has denied all the accusations. He states that she “wants to generate a media storm, surely to harm the Government before the presidential elections.” “I am not in the power circles of the Palace,” he asserts.
On the other hand, Rodríguez says she believes Juliana Guerrero made her an enemy because she opposed the latter’s appointment as deputy minister of youth last year. At that time, Rodríguez was the director of DAPRE, and had to give her approval to that appointment. But she opposed it because Guerrero had fake university degrees, which is why she is now being investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office. Since then, she believes, Guerrero joined the plot to remove her from the Government.
“I am clear that, among all these people who are part of that plot, she is the worst,” says Rodríguez, who assures that Guerrero has spoken of having ties to an armed group. “She boasted of having ties to the ELN,” she asserts. For this reason, in a report that, she told Semana, she sent to the UNGRD, she holds Guerrero responsible for anything that might happen to her life. “She moves in the shadows of power.” She also points out that Guerrero today controls the resources of the Fondo Colombia Paz, and DAPRE, through director Mondragón.
The third official heavily implicated is Raúl Moreno. “He is a conspiratorial man, who is constantly feeding the president information,” says Rodríguez about the current presidential chief of staff. “For him, there are paramilitaries everywhere, for him, there are people who want to assassinate him everywhere,” she adds. She states that he is close to officials in the National Intelligence Directorate, and has “doubts” if they are behind an event at her parents’ house last year, which seemed like a theft, but was actually a threat. “It wasn’t a theft, it was to intimidate me into staying quiet,” she assures. “I am sure that behind this is this network of people, more than 20 of them,” she adds. At the Prosecutor’s Office, she assures, they told her that the culprits are “a very well-organized structure, it seems they have intelligence and military training.”
Do you believe there is a criminal network in the Casa de Nwariño?, the interviewer asked her in Semana. “Presumably, yes,” replies one of the most powerful women in the Government, who is now opening a new corruption scandal within it. “President, listen to what I am telling you, because I believe you are being deceived, and part of the strategy of all these people is to isolate you from people who are good and loyal to the project,” she warns Gustavo Petro.
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