The Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, assured on Wednesday that the country initiated “a coup d’état” with the favorable presentation presented by two magistrates of the National Electoral Council (CNE) to bring charges against him for the alleged irregular financing of his campaign.

“If the Constitution says that the President of the Republic cannot be tried by an entity other than the Commission of Accusations (of the Chamber) (…) Why have two entities belonging to an administrative entity said that they raise charges against the president? That is deeply unconstitutional and is the beginning of a coup d’état in Colombia,” the president said.

CNE magistrates Álvaro Prada and Benjamín Ortiz, who are in charge of the investigation, filed the presentation that also calls for charges to be made against Ricardo Roa, president of the state oil company Ecopetrol and who was its campaign manager, according to local media on Wednesday.

In this regard, Petro, who spoke during a day of ‘Government with the popular neighborhoods’ in Cartagena de Indias, and said that “11 and a half million Colombians (who voted for him in the second round of the 2022 elections) will lose their political rights.”

“Not because no criminal judge has ruled that they are criminals, but because it was decided by the Colombian oligarchy and the corruption regime. They want to determine, as they have done in so many Latin American countries, that the president of the Republic despite being elected by the people of Colombia has to stop being president because four or five vagabonds of the political so want it,” Petro added.

Finally, he said that he will remain in office “as far as the people say.”

“If the people say later, later I will go without any fear, without any fear, we will go to where the Colombian people orders. The president of the Republic has only one commander at the front,” he said.

The National Electoral Council (CNE), which will study a paper that recommends charging the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, for the alleged irregular financing of his campaign and violation of the electoral expenses cap, rejected the statements of the president, who considered that decision the beginning of a “coup d’état”, because they “put their magistrates at risk.”

“The serious statements against the members of this corporation break the normal functioning of the democratic system and put at risk those who are in charge of making decisions in fulfillment of their constitutional functions,” the CNE said on Wednesday in a statement.

Magistrates Álvaro Hernán Prada, former congressman of the right-wing Democratic Center party, and Benjamín Ortiz, former secretary general of the CNE, presented a presentation favorable to the positioning of charges against Petro and against Ricardo Roa, president of the state oil company Ecopetrol and who was manager of his 2022 presidential campaign, due to the alleged irregular financing of it.

The presentation presented by the two magistrates will be discussed by the full chamber of the CNE, composed of nine members, who will decide whether to admit it to continue with the process, for which they need the votes of at least five magistrates, or if, on the contrary, they file it.

This case dates back to February 2023 when the CNE opened a preliminary investigation against Petro’s presidential campaign for alleged irregularities in its financing.

As reported by that body at the time, the investigation was opened “based on the anonymous complaint filed for alleged irregularities in the financing and presentation of income and expenditure reports of the first and second presidential electoral campaign” of the Historical Pact, the left-wing coalition that led Petro to the Presidency in 2022.

The ambassadors of the member states to the European Union (EU) reached an agreement on Wednesday in principle to use the benefits of frozen Russian assets to support “the recovery and military defense” of Ukraine in the face of Russia’s aggression.

“The EU ambassadors agreed in principle on measures on the extraordinary benefits of Russia’s fixed assets,” the Belgian presidency of the Council of the EU wrote in its profile of social network X.

He added that the money “will serve to support the recovery of Ukraine and military defense in the context of Russian aggression.”

The European Commission proposed last March to use the extraordinary benefits of Russian assets frozen by the sanctions in relation to the war in Ukraine, which amount to between 2.5 and 3 billion euros per year, to finance weapons and ammunition for that country mainly.

The first transfer of profits to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia is expected to take place in July.
Community sources detailed that 90% of the profits of fixed assets will go to the European Peace Support Fund (FEAP) for military support. The FEAP is an instrument through which EU countries co-finance the shipment of weapons to Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February 2022.

The other 10% will go to the macro-financial aid package to Ukraine from the general budget of the European Union. This year, the community club agreed on an aid of 50 billion euros to Ukraine that is part of the revised community budget, covers the next four years until 2027 and is disbursed in the form of loans (33 billion euros) and grants (17 billion).

Most of the frozen Russian assets are deposited in Euroclear, a Brussels-based body that owns about 192 billion euros.

Belgium keeps a part of the profits of those securities in terms of corporate taxes, a fact that has been criticized by other Member States.

That country argues that it is a “general tax, not something that has been invented for Ukraine” and that part of what is collected serves precisely to help Kiev with its weapons needs and to support refugees.

The sources specified that the tax revenues generated in Belgium by those profits will continue to be allocated to Ukraine in its entirety.

The corporate tax is 25% in Belgium and applies to all companies, according to the sources, who insisted that it is impossible to eliminate it.

However, they recalled that in 2022 Belgium decided to allocate all those extraordinary corporate tax revenues to support Ukraine and that in 2023 they created a specific fund for it.

For the fiscal year of 2024, an amount of 1.7 billion euros of national corporate taxes is expected from immobilized Russian assets, of which about 1 billion have already been allocated to Ukraine.

The new legislation will apply to the remaining extraordinary benefits after this mandatory taxation, according to the sources.

The ambassadors of the Member States decided that the rate that Euroclear will charge for handling the assets will be 0.3%.

Some States such as Austria, Ireland, Malta and Cyprus are reluctant to buy weapons for Ukraine because of their policy of neutrality and Hungary has repeatedly said that it does not support the idea.

Irregular migration intercepted by Mexico has tripled in the first quarter of the year to almost 360,000 people in the midst of growing operations, although the Government affirms that the migratory flow has decreased.

The Mexican authorities detected 359,697 “people in irregular immigration status” between January and March 2024, an increase of 199.68% compared to 120,029 in the same period in 2023, according to the statistics available this Saturday from the Migration Policy Unit of the Ministry of the Interior.

In just three months, the Government of Mexico has intercepted almost half, 46%, of the record of 782,176 irregular migrants it detected in all of 2023, when this flow rose by 77% annually.

The main country of origin of migrants is Venezuela, with 89,718 registered, almost one in four of the total, 24.94%.

It is followed by Honduras (37,323), Ecuador (36,956), Guatemala (36,934), Colombia (21,534), Nicaragua (18,711), El Salvador (17,720), Haiti (16,791) and Cuba (10,464).

The figures are disseminated after a joint statement by the presidents of the United States, Joe Biden, and Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who agreed to “work together to immediately implement concrete measures in order to significantly reduce irregular border crossings.”

As a achievement, López Obrador said last Thursday that the capture of undocumented people have fallen by more than 50% on the border with the United States, which reported about 12,000 daily in December and in April it fell to an average of 5,812.

The tension over migration has increased this year because the presidential elections of Mexico and the United States coincide, but the Mexican president denied that he tightens controls due to pressure from the United States.

“No, it’s just that I don’t let myself be pressured by anyone, Mexico is an independent country and the president of Mexico acts freely, he is not a scoundrel of any foreign government,” he said.

Tapachula, the largest city on the southern border of Mexico, still suffers from the phenomenon, although some activists point out that the number of migrants on the streets has decreased.

Gerver Bermúdez, administrator of the Jesús el Buen Pastor shelter in Tapachula, considered that the presence of foreigners has decreased, but they have not stopped arriving in the city, where they are four or five days and follow their route because the authorities are not giving them transit permits.

“The shelter is always full and the goal is to support everyone who comes as an immigrant. We have handled between 800 and 900 people of different nationalities such as Hondurans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Ecuadorians,” he told EFE.

On the other hand, Cecilia Izaguirre, human rights defender in Tapachula, stressed that the presence of so many foreigners is no longer very visible.

“People no longer stay in Tapachula, because they came to be here to do their Comar procedure (Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid), but now they are passing by, it has decreased a little, but it has not stopped or has not decreased by a large number,” the activist said.

The Cuban Felipe Martínez, who works informally parking vehicles, explained that now the migrants “walk” from the southern border in the face of the action of the Mexican authorities.

“They go by caravan because they delay the papers a little, they fall into a state of anxiety because they want to be established in one place with their relatives, they despair, emigrate and continue to look for new horizons,” said the migrant, who is waiting for the Comar to resolve his asylum application.

On the other hand, Jorge Cruz, a Honduran who is in the Jesús el Buen Pastor shelter, considered that migration remains normal because “a lot of them always arrive every day.”

“There is always, I see that there are more people who go up and up, it has not come down, a lot of people enter, a lot of people also enter the shelter, there are children and women, who are supported come and go,” he said.