Colombian president calls on cabinet members to resign

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Colombian President Gustavo Petro called on members of his front bench to quit on Sunday following a stream of resignations triggered by a chaotic televised cabinet meeting earlier in the week.

“There will be some changes in the cabinet to achieve a greater compliance with the programme mandated by the people,” Petro, a leftist former rebel group member, said in a post on X on Sunday evening. He did not provide details of which or how many ministers would be ousted.

Hours earlier, his environment minister and longtime ally Susana Muhamad tendered her resignation, joining two other cabinet-level officials who left their posts in the wake of a rancorous cabinet meeting held on Tuesday.

During that meeting, Muhamad and other top officials including vice-president Francia Márquez, criticised Petro for installing Armando Benedetti, a scandal-ridden political fixer, as his chief of staff. Also criticised was Laura Sarabia, a 30-year-old confidante of Petro, who last week was promoted to foreign minister despite having no foreign policy experience.

Both Benedetti and Sarabia were at the centre of a sprawling government scandal known as “nannygate”, involving wiretapping, illicit campaign financing and a missing briefcase of cash. Benedetti has also faced allegations of misogyny and bullying. 

While both have denied wrongdoing, their presence in the government has driven a wedge between Petro and his traditional leftist allies, including Muhamad.

“As a feminist and as a woman, I cannot sit at this cabinet table of our progressive project with Armando Benedetti,” Muhamad said during the cabinet meeting, which was broadcast on national television as part of Petro’s bid for transparency.

“I have submitted my letter of resignation to President Gustavo Petro, motivated by the same reasons as the cabinet meeting last Tuesday,” Muhamad wrote in a text message to the Financial Times on Sunday. “The president has not yet accepted it.”

Jorge Rojas, the head of the presidency’s administrative department, resigned on Wednesday after only a week in the job, alongside culture minister Juan David Correa.

Petro defended Benedetti during the six-hour spectacle, arguing that his “craziness” was necessary in government. He later said that the infighting was the result of some of his ministers seeking to position themselves ahead of next year’s election. Under Colombia’s constitution, the president may not seek a second term.

Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, took office in August 2022 promising to overhaul the country’s market-friendly economic model by expanding the state’s role in pensions, healthcare and education, while weaning the oil and coal exporter off fossil fuels. 

But he has been frustrated by lawmakers who have pushed back on his radical reform agenda while ousting cabinet ministers from the political centre and replacing them with loyalists. His first finance minister, the centrist and investor-friendly José Antonio Ocampo, was replaced in April 2023 by Ricardo Bonilla, who resigned amid a corruption probe last December.

“The president is a revolutionary, but the government is not,” Petro said during Tuesday’s meeting, in which he also claimed that cocaine is “no worse than whisky” and if legalised it would “sell like wine”, even as production of the drug surges in Colombia.

Analysts say that the upheaval in the presidential palace is hampering the government’s ability to tackle a number of crises, including in the country’s north-east, where warring rebel groups have displaced over 50,000 people in the Catatumbo region this year.

A trade war with the US was narrowly averted last month after Petro initially reneged on an agreement to receive deported migrants. Petro was largely absent from the frantic negotiations that were led on the Colombian side by his since-replaced foreign minister Luis Gilberto Murillo, alongside Sarabia before she took that job.

“This turmoil, unfortunately, is yet more proof that the government’s disarray is affecting the country as a whole,” said Sergio Guzmán, director of Colombia Risk Analysis, a Bogotá-based consultancy. “The government is now realising that it ran out of time.”