MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Colombian May 25 presidential candidates suffer severe credibility blows

Polls show Santos still ahead, but before the Rendón and Zuluaga's incidents

Just three weeks before Colombia’s presidential election begins, President Juan Manuel Santos’ re-election campaign has been hit by yet another blow. His chief campaign strategist J.J. Rendón resigned on Monday night amid controversial allegations that he took 12 million dollars from some of Colombia’s top drug lords in exchange for helping to negotiate their surrender with positive terms.

 To add to the bad news, his main rival for the presidency, Oscar Ivan Zuluaga, gained support in the latest polls.

Rendon, a Venezuelan national opposed to the Chavista regime is one of Latin America’s most prominent campaign consultants and is credited with leading a series of underground attacks on rivals that helped Santos come from behind in a 2010 run-off to defeat Antanas Mockus.

The Colombian President called Rendón’s resignation a “gallant” gesture. Santos said he didn’t know whether Rendon received payments for his supposed mediation efforts but said he believed in his former aide’s good word.

The allegations against Rendón, which were not new, were published over the weekend by the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and the news magazine Semana. The reports cited testimony from Javier Antonio Calle given in a US jail, who was formerly one of the country’s most-wanted drug-traffickers until he surrended to the authorities in 2012.

Rendón acknowledged on Monday that he was approached by intermediaries of Calle and other drug bosses after Santos’ 2010 election, but he denied taking any money. The cartels allegedly wanted him to relay an offer to the president whereby narcotics gangs would disarm, in exchange for concessions such as protection from extradition to the US. Police and prosecutors also acknowledged discussing the initiative with Rendón but said they rejected it out of hand. Calle ended up turning himself in to the US drug agents on the Caribbean island of Aruba a year later.

The office of Colombia’s chief federal prosecutor said it was looking into the matter and would send prosecutors to New York to interview Calle before deciding whether to open a probe into Rendón and another Santos aide implicated in the reports, former political adviser German Chica.

Before his surrender, Calle and his brother, who also is in US custody, ran a criminal gang known as “Los Rastrojos,” or “The Leftovers,” a violent paramilitary force that dominated the cocaine trade along Colombia’s border with Venezuela and other parts of the country.

Posting on his Twitter account, Rendón denied the allegations. He said that he received a “request from Francisco Galán (National Liberation Army leader) to communicate to the government a proposal from illegal groups for submission to justice.”

“I then transmitted this message to the president in presence of public prosecutor Viviane Morales,” he added.

The political strategist, who was also in charge of Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto successful election campaign, said that documents at the public prosecutor’s office could clear his name.

Rendon’s resignation comes as Santos struggles to maintain his lead over rivals in the May 25 election. Two weeks ago, the president was forced, via a court order, to reinstate leftist Bogotá mayor Gustavo Petro just weeks after he had been removed from office. Santos himself acknowledged in an interview with Caracol Radio last month that Petro’s ouster had negatively affected his approval ratings.

But despite the recent negativity, the president still looks on track to win another term in office.

A poll published late Monday, taken prior to Rendón’s resignation, showed Santos would win 27% of the vote. up four points from March. Zuluaga however continued to gain, jumping to 19%, from a previous score of 8%.

Pollster Cifras y Conceptos also found that the incumbent would beat his right-wing candidate 34% to 31% in a run-off.

The fight for the presidency took another sharp turn yesterday however, when it emerged that Colombian authorities had uncovered spying allegedly aimed at disrupting the controversial peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Officials said that a rogue intelligence unit had hacked the emails of both negotiators from the guerilla group and the president himself. The allegations, published by Semana, were linked to an office used by Zuluaga’s social media team in an up-market area of northern Bogota.