Fugitive politician held in Venezuela has some serious dirt on Colombia: report
Fugitive politician held in Venezuela has some serious dirt on Colombia: report
by Adriaan Alsema
February 4, 2020
President Ivan Duque‘s could pay a heavy price for his refusal to resume consular ties with Venezuela as a fugitive coalition politician held in Caracas would know about a plot to rig the 2018 election.
Duque’s Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro offered to reestablish diplomatic ties last week, but not without warning that fugitive Senator-elect Aida Merlano “was telling everything about Colombia’s ruling class.”
The Colombian president rejected the “blackmail” last week while Venezuelan intelligence agency Cebin was extracting information from the politician.
Merlano is a member of the Gerlein clan and an associate of the Char clan, who wield tremendous power inside respectively the Conservative Party and the Radical Change Party and are both notoriously corrupt.
According to newspaper El Tiempo, which is owned by Duque’s financial patron, the politician does not only have inside information about these two clans, but knows about an alleged conspiracy to rig the 2018 presidential election that was won by Duque.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/fugitive-politician-held-in-venezuela-has-some-serious-dirt-on-colombia-report/
Fugitive Colombian senator Aída Merlano captured in Venezuela
28 January 2020
. . .
Merlano, who was serving a 15-year sentence for vote buying, gave prison guards the slip in October.
She slid down a rope a second-storey dental surgery where she was undergoing orthodontic treatment and an accomplice whisked her away on a motorcycle as passers-by looked on.
Her escape was a great embarrassment for the Colombian prison system.
CCTV footage of her sliding down a red rope and landing on the pavement went viral. Many Colombians questioned why she had been allowed to leave the prison and why the guards had not entered the surgery with her.
More:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51279806
