In the first week of June, the mayor of Santa Marta, Carlos Pinedo, has been involved in multiple cases that have generated criticism in the country. The first of them, after the announcement of a series of incentives that would be given to police officers who were in successful operations against crime.
Added to this, on June 6 W Radio revealed some photographs in which Pinedo was in the company of César Gustavo Becerra Gómez, better known as alias Camilo, commander of the Conquering Self-Defense Forces of the Sierra Nevada (Acsn), which was captured in April 2024.
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According to the aforementioned media, the images were from a meeting that had been recorded in February 2024, for which multiple political figures, including President Gustavo Petro, accused Pinedo of supporting paramilitary groups in the region.
“They follow the echo of the old paramilitary model and seek for the gangs to control voters and collect money to convert into votes and illegal campaign financing. Embracing the criminal while the gang commits crimes is an empowerment of crime against citizens“, indicated Petro from his X account in this regard.
In his defense, Carlos Pinedo indicated to W Radio that he had been “held” by the paramilitary group and that he had no knowledge of the identity of those people.
“I was detained on April 2 in La Tagua by an armed group of six or seven men with rifles. They took my phones and disarmed my escort. I was not clear who the character was, they began to tell us that they wanted to be linked to Total Peace and that that was the message they wanted to send to President Gustavo Petro. “The people who held me were recording me.”
Likewise, Pinedo assured that there was a complaint filed with the Prosecutor’s Office about this incident, in which he indicated that the armed men had detained him so that “he could send a message to the Government.”
The version (of this meeting) is the complaint that is in the Attorney General’s Office. We were in a political campaign and we were detained by armed men carrying rifles. It is evident that I am not a friend of these characters,” Pinedo declared.
The journalist Lina María Peña shared on her X account a copy of the complaint that Pinedo filed with the Prosecutor’s Office, which was registered on April 2, 2023, months before the Regional Elections in which he was elected mayor of Santa Marta.
In the statement that Pinedo delivered to the authorities, the mayor of Santa Marta stated that he had attended the La Tagua village, in the Minca district, with the aim of collecting signatures from citizens.
“In the area I arrived at a place known as “Estadero donde Tico”; this in order to share closely with the population, listen to their needs, concerns and proposals.”
After exposing the same version that he gave to the aforementioned media, On that occasion, Pinedo asked for guarantees for his safety and indicated that his bodyguard, identified as Óscar Enrique Mendoza, was a witness to the events he reported..
“I am allowed to exercise my right to choose and be elected within the national territory and in the same way I am provided with the necessary security guarantees,” it is stated in the petitions part of the document.
Outside of the aforementioned interview, the mayor of Santa Marta has not commented in any other way on the controversy, while on social networks they have taken advantage of his statement to make references to the song El Secuestro del Zabaleta Monkey.
“Let’s escape and if they ask you, you say that they kidnapped you, that they tied you up, that they bandaged you, that you didn’t even know where they took you,” is part of the lyrics of the success with which multiple Pinedo memes have been made on social networks.
