Colombia celebrated this Sunday the second round of its democratic party in which the majority decided that the economist and former guerrilla, Gustavo Petro, will be the new president of the Republic.
From Uruguay, the government of Luis Lacalle Pou had not yet reacted at 9:05 p.m. (time this note was written) and the legislator for the National Party, Graciela Bianchi, had already decided an hour before that she should make comments.
To do this, he commented on his Twitter account: “The terrible constant in Ibero-America in recent decades: guerrillas, drug trafficking and reaching the government using democratic forms that were not respected. Uruguay bears a great historical responsibility.” With these words, he shared a photograph in which Gustavo Petro allegedly appears sitting next to the powerful Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar.
Gonzalo Marquez, an economist and consultant specializing in Mobility, Transport and Energy (and former director of Transport for the Montevideo Municipal Government between 2018 and 2021) remarked that the photograph is a montage, as confirmed by the fake news verification platform colombiacheck.com.
The falsified photo that Bianchi shared, in fact, came from this photograph, in which it can be seen that Petro’s face was placed on the body of another man who is next to Escobar:
“The photo you are referring to is a montage, senator,” Márquez pointed out, but even then the legislator did not change her position. “Reality is NOT a montage. You have to accept it,” she replied.
“Senator, my only intention is to warn you that you are disseminating false, proven false material about the president-elect of Colombia. I do not make any consideration other than that, ”added Márquez.
But the evidence and the accusations of fake news seem not to move the ultra-conservative legislator from her intention to criticize Petro, and added in another tweet: “He belonged to the FARC for more than 40 years and they were financed by drug traffickers. I reiterate: reality is NOT a montage.”
Half an hour later, Bianchi shared a photograph in which Petro is seen with the late former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, taken some time before the latter became president of his country.
“Do you like it better? The only truth is the reality; The images only illustrate us. Didn’t they learn that truth is the daughter of time? Everything that they insulted me with Iran and the murder of Nisman would have to make them think before answering me, ”she commented.
Petro confronted the narco
In December 1981, different Colombian drug cartels agreed to create and finance the paramilitary group Muerte a Secuestradores (MAS), which intended to confront the M-19, a movement to which Petro belonged between 1977 and 1986.
Between 1982 and 1986, when the Escobar and Petro organizations were already at the height of their confrontation, the former was between 33 and 37 years old, while the latter was between 22 and 26 years old.
But the falsified photograph shows an older Petro, who would be well over 30 years old according to other file photographs. In fact, the face was cut from the image of the meeting with Hugo Chávez, which is as follows:
