A senator of Colombia’s Liberal Party lashed out at political opponent Alvaro Uribe on Thursday for putting the cousin of slain drug lord Pablo Escobar on the former president’s senate candidate list for the 2014 elections.
Senator Juan Manuel Galan, son of assassinated presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, spared no superlatives to reject the candidacy of Escobar’s cousin and Uribe’s former president adviser Jose Obdulio Gaviria.
The Liberal politician compared Gaviria’s influence on Uribe to that of Nazi Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who orchestrated Adolf Hitler’s antisemitic campaign that eventually led to the death of millions of Jews during Wold War II.
“The country knows what the role and the presence of Jose Obdulio Gaviria in the government of former President Uribe meant since he was [like] the minister of propaganda in Hitler’s time, Joseph Goebbels, carrying out the most hateful propaganda scheme,” Galan told press.
According to the Liberal politician, the candidacy of the cousin of Colombia’s most famous drug lord ever is a slap in the face of victims of Escobar who ordered the assassination of thousands who opposed his rule over the South American country’s underworld.
“The kinship of Pablo Escobar and Jose Obdulio Gaviria is an unpleasant remembrance for those who were victim of the former capo of the Medellin Cartel,” said Galan, who’s father was killed by one of Escobar’s assassins in 1989.
“We have always found it serious that this type of attendances in the highest echelons of power,” the Liberal politician added.
Uribe, himself facing ongoing accusations over his proximity to Escobar and the paramilitary umbrella organization AUC, put Gaviria in the first ten of Senate candidates of his Democratic Center party.
MORE: Uribe Heads Democratic Center’s List Of Congressional Candidates
Escobar’s cousin is under criminal investigation for his alleged presence at a 2008 meeting in the presidential palace between paramilitary representative “Job” and a number of close aides to the president.
According to preliminary results from a Prosecutor General’s Office investigation, the presidential officials and the paramilitary were conspiring to wiretap the Supreme Court in order to discredit the country’s highest judicial body that was in the middle of investigating ties between the AUC, and lawmakers and family members of the former president.