Former Colombian president Andres Pastrana lashed out on Thursday against the Conservative Party for losing its base.
Pastrana criticized the current director of the Conservative Party, Jose Dario Salazar, saying “the chairman of the party changed our flags for sheets; sheets from motels that we know have been given to the chairman’s family by the National Narcotics Directorate.”
Salazar responded in an interview with radio station RCN saying that it was Pastrana who “took the flags of the order, muddied them and handed them over to criminals in the distension zone where the FARC kidnapped, cultivated drugs and killed many defenseless Colombians.”
According to website Vanguardia, Pastrana stressed the importance of reforming the party, saying that after the October 30 elections it will be known what Colombian conservatism is “a party that will cease to be alternative, increasingly losing more vocation, mayors and governors… we need to reform back to what the Conservative Party used to be.”
Pastrana was Colombia’s president from 1998-2002 and later became the Ambassador to the United States during President Alvaro Uribe’s term in 2005.