It is curious that Daniel Quintero, after being suspended from office for 42 days, the first thing he did when he resumed his duties as Mayor of Medellín was to go to Bogotá.
Perhaps he understood that although he had supported Gustavo Petro and had played hard for him, the candidate of the Historical Pact had not achieved an outstanding result in Medellín. Petro’s vote did improve compared to 2018, but not enough for Quintero’s bet that he took out half of his cabinet to make him campaign and even had himself sanctioned by the Attorney General’s Office.
Rodolfo Hernández, who was a candidate from outside the city, for whom practically no one campaigned in Medellín, almost doubled Petro’s votes.
Quintero then went to Bogotá to claim his piece of the slice in the National Government. He got up early on Wednesday to do media rounds. He went to the stations. He repeated the usual script. He not only went through Blu, the W and Caracol, but he added other more popular ones like Tropicana.
He stuck out his chest for Petro’s triumph. And above all, he applied to be the “bridge” between the Antioquia business community and the Petro government. Néstor Morales questioned how he was going to be an intermediary with the businessmen whom he always treated as gangsters. And the analyst Héctor Riveros later said that the relations between the businessmen and the president were supplied through the unions.
In fact, by that time, the Medellín businessmen, via the Chamber of Commerce and the Interunion Committee, had welcomed President-elect Gustavo Petro and had expressed their willingness to work with him.
On Wednesday afternoon they saw him at the El Nogal Club with Alfonso Prada, the liberal who was Gustavo Petro’s head of debate. Prada ended up becoming Quintero’s interlocutor with the new government.
As this newspaper was able to establish, Quintero asked for a game for Esteban Restrepo, his former Secretary of Government, and for his wife Diana Osorio. He even mentioned that he would like her to be in the ICT Ministry.
Osorio was up in the air for now. And what happened with Restrepo was made concrete by naming him as one of the delegates for the junction in Antioquia. However, Restrepo will not be the only one. The incoming government is going to have a kind of delegates from the regions, at least in this first stage, and former liberal senator Luis Fernando Velasco has been in charge not only of Cauca, but also of Antioquia and the coffee region.
In fact, that same Wednesday night, Velasco had a meeting with textile companies from Antioquia about tariff issues. “It is clear to us that the Mayor cannot be the only interlocutor,” someone from Petro’s close team told this newspaper.
Quintero also went to the National Electoral Council. It is not clear if he went to find out about the ultimate goal of his recall. The truth is that Judge Abreu, who had his case, said that he did not see it. On Thursday night, the mayor returned to Medellín.