Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro said Tuesday that the older brother of US Senator Bernie Moreno from Ohio took part in a Bogota Cartel money laundering operation in the late 1990’s.
During a cabinet meeting, Petro took a major jab at Moreno, who has played a significant role in escalating tensions between the governments of Colombia and the United States.
Petro decried that the Ohio senator has been trying to put him and his family instead of “real” drug traffickers on the Kingpin List.
The president reminded the ministers that “I held two debates in the Congress of the Republic in 2000 about the associates of President Andres Pastrana, a friend of Epstein and a friend of the brothers of Senator Bernie Moreno.”
In this debate, Petro said he informed Congress that Moreno’s older brother Roberto took part in a land flipping racket that was “a drug money laundering operation devised by Angel Gaitan,” a Bogota Cartel boss at the time.
The conversion of protected rural plots to urban terrains multiplied their value from 50,000 pesos per square meters to 5000,000 pesos per square meter “with luxury condominiums where drug traffickers have always lived and, now, high-density buildings, far from the city of Bogota.”
According to Petro, Gaitan’s money laundering operation enriched the Moreno family and other members of the Bogota elite.
In the debate on the conversion of rural land into urban land in the Bogotá savannah, or “land flipping,” I discovered how powerful families in Bogotá linked to Andres Pastrana, the president at the time, from 1998 to 2002, had enriched themselves through the purchase and sale of the San Simón estate, 30 hectares located in the northern rural outskirts of Bogotá on the border with Chía, amassing great fortunes and obtaining, with the signature of Pastrana’s environment minister, the conversion of the estate into urban land on the outskirts of Chía.
President Gustavo Petro
The president additionally reminded the ministers that another one of Moreno’s brothers, Luis Alberto, played a major role in the plundering of the Banco del Pacifico in Ecuador, also in the 1990’s.
Petro published a book about this scandal, “The Case of the Banco del Pacifico,” in 2005.
The Ohio senator is a major ally of former President Alvaro Uribe, a former associate of the Medellin Cartel and a political adversary of the president.
Petro’s investigations into ties between politics and drug trafficking paramilitary groups in Colombia led to criminal investigations that resulted in the imprisonment of more than 75 congressmen and governors.
