There is nothing new in saying that Roy Leonardo Barreras is an incoherent, a liar, a cheater and without any ideological foundation.
Throughout his eventful career, he has walked with total shamelessness through all the parties, because at the end of the day his thing is not ideology but business.
Politics was a wonderful mechanism for Roy to stop being a middle-class doctor from Cali, to become a man of fabulous fortune.
What is the origin of it? Obviously it is not the salaries he has received in the last 14 years as a congressman, first as a Chamber Representative and then as a Senator.
His first two terms in Congress coincided with the government of President Álvaro Uribe Vélez. Between 2006 and 2010, Barreras was in the Chamber of Representatives.
In 2010, he made the leap to the Senate campaigning fiercely for uribism. This portal got to know Barreras’ spot, in which he invited his electors to vote for him and for the continuity of ‘Democratic Security’.
“You, who believe in the work of Uribe’s government, the Uribist people know that I am going to the Senate to defend this work head-on to finish the task. I need them mobilized, active; it is you who will build the consolidation of the democratic security policy in March, with a victory in the congressional elections… We defend the work of Uribe’s government, because we know that the democratic security policy must be consolidated. We need the Uribist people who know that Colombia must defend this government work head-on, with the president that is what we are going to do in the Senate of the Republic”.
That publicity piece, whose publication today upsets Barreras, was enough for that petty politician to obtain 81,339 votes, the result of one of the largest political fraud operations in our recent history.
All the voters of Barreras in 2010 were brutally defrauded. Once he came to the Senate, that individual flipped. Not only did he not defend the ‘Democratic Security’, but he also became Santos’ accomplice for its burial. Colombia ceased to be a country that fought against terrorism and drug trafficking and became an ally of these phenomena. Illicit crops grew exponentially and members of the Farc, which are the largest drug traffickers on the planet, were benefited with a de facto amnesty. All with the determined support of Barreras who, as the country well remembers, forged a space in the peace process against the will of the Santos negotiators.
But the ‘flip’ was not pro-bono. Two entities were co-opted by Roy’s lieutenants: Caprecom and the Superior School of Public Administration, ESAP.
Things must be called by their names: both ESAP and Caprecom were vulgarly looted during Santos’ 8 years and in that embezzlement, Roy Barreras served as the brain and, of course, beneficiary.
It is time for the senator’s front men to be brought to justice in Colombia and begin to speak and tell how this theft of the public coffers took place.
Is there not a restless advisor of the congressman through whose bank accounts, large sums of money have been moved? Will there not be a major purchase of properties by that fiery official? Will there not be transactions between her and the parliamentarian? Between heaven and earth there is nothing hidden and, in contemporary times, all these kind of money movements leave their trail.
But there are also the testimonies of people who at some point were approached by Roy’s delegates for the purpose of demanding bribes. All this will surely end up being known and the senator who previously was a militant on the right and today flirts with the extreme left, will have to use his eloquence not to evade responsibility, but to give the explanations that justice and Colombian society will demand.
