The meeting takes place in a secret place, at the end of May. Marelbys Meza arrives wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest, escorted by three armed agents. Since she reported in March 2023 that she was subjected to a polygraph in a basement of the Casa de Nariño, the presidential residence, Meza became a protected witness. For this case, Gustavo Petro dismissed, two months later, his number 2, Laura Sarabia, and the political strategist who managed to bring him to power, Armando Benedetti, who at that time was ambassador to Venezuela – the two later returned to office. positions of trust of the president. The Marelbys revelations produced the biggest credibility crisis for the Petro Government, upon which suspicions of corruption and illegal financing suddenly arose.
“My life is over, they destroyed it,” he says in a room with a bare table and two office chairs. Meza, since 2022, was the nanny of Sarabia’s newborn son, Alejandro. One night at the end of January 2023, a briefcase with a large sum of money disappeared from the house of Petro’s most trusted person. The exact amount has never been revealed: there is talk of 4,000 to 30,000 dollars. The main suspect, for the owner of the house, was Marelbys. The police officers in charge of Sarabia’s security also believed this, and the next day they took her to some government offices to subject her to a lie detector test.
Meza stopped working for Sarabia immediately, and from that moment on the police followed her, intercepted her phone and investigated her closest relatives. His brother, a taxi driver, was questioned to reveal where the money had been hidden. The nanny has always declared herself innocent, but when speaking she lets it slip that “suspicious” briefcases arrived at Sarabia’s house and at the apartment in Bogotá from which Petro’s campaign was directed – before being Sarabia’s employee, she was Benedetti’s – They passed from hand to hand. Because of statements like that, the Prosecutor’s Office investigating the case considered that Meza’s life was in danger. “I know a lot, I saw everything, I witnessed everything that happened,” says the nanny in an interview that took place on May 25 of this year.
The scandal shocked Colombia for weeks. The pressure on the Government was maximum. Petro demanded that an investigation be carried out to determine responsibilities, one that ran parallel to that of the Attorney General’s Office. One of the suspects of having interrogated Meza was Colonel Óscar Dávila, one of those in charge of security at Casa de Nariño, who was called to testify before the authorities. Dávila contacted a lawyer to defend him, Miguel Ángel del Río, but he never testified: on June 11, inside his car, he committed suicide using his service weapon.
For now, two police officers have been sentenced to 10 years in prison for having tapped Meza’s phone illegally. Alfonso Quinchanegua and Dana Canizales passed the employee off as the cook of one of the leaders of the Gulf Clan so that a court would authorize it. “They are the least important thing,” explains Meza. “The real perpetrators have not been convicted, they are powerful people who I fear, I will not be able to sleep peacefully again,” he adds.
Meza’s lawyer is Iván Cancino, a well-known criminal lawyer who handles pro bono media cases like this one. Cancino, upon meeting Meza, understood what Petro was referring to when in his electoral campaign he spoke of “the nobodys”, the people who have not been taken into account throughout the history of the country, whom Petro intends to vindicate. in his mandate. Because she was a “nobody,” she was invisible, no one noticed she was in the room. In this way he heard the secrets and intimacies of the politicians who now govern this country. Cancino assures that Meza wrote many of these revelations in a notebook that he still has.
“I don’t know to what extent the president knows, but his people do,” she insists. Last week she left the custody of the Protection Unit, with whose leaders she has had more than one argument, and is now hiding on her own. Since he has not been able to work in this time, Meza finds himself without money and, he believes, with little chance of finding a job: “Who is going to hire me? “They will be afraid.” His family and some friends lend him a hand so he can survive, now that he is without the guardianship of the State. Was it worth it for you to tell what happened and get fully involved in this judicial process? “No,” he says, while adjusting his black vest, hidden over a coat of the same color.
The mess in which Meza found herself involved is worthy of an opera. She worked for a long time for Benedetti, a well-known senator in the country. He practically raised the two children that the politician had with Adelina Guerrero, his wife. Meza was also then suspected of the theft of expensive clothing and was subjected to a polygraph which, although it had no scientific basis, concluded that she was innocent. Benedetti, who had previously supported Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos -in that order-, had a revelation at the end of 2021: Petro could be the next president of Colombia. He, with his contacts, his cunning, his experience, could help you achieve it. He proposed it to Petro, and Petro said yes. Then an adventure began that culminated in the victory of the first clearly left-wing president in the history of the nation, on June 19, two years ago.
Benedetti’s assistant was Sarabia, 28 years old at the time. I had worked with him for six years, he was his shadow. In the campaign she was also Petro’s and won the heart of the president. Benedetti hoped to be a minister. However, after the victory, Petro preferred to send him to Caracas to be in charge of resuming relations with Chavismo. In the meantime, Sarabia gave birth and asked Adelina Guerrero to recommend someone she trusted to take care of her son while she worked at Casa de Nariño. Guerrero had the one: Marelbys Meza.
Benedetti did not take kindly to being sent to Venezuela, it seemed like a minor mission after having been vital for Petro to conquer power. On the other hand, the president appointed Sarabia as chief of staff, at his side, as de facto number 2. Out of jealousy, out of misunderstandings, out of the poison of power, Benedetti and Sarabia distanced themselves, although that would be an understatement. Some audios came to light in which he insulted her in his own way, with Caribbean outbursts, which is where he comes from.
The breakup between former boss and employee was inevitable. Then Benedetti prepared his move: he found out that Meza had been subjected to a polygraph and gave that story to Vicky Dávila, the then director of the magazine. Weekwith which Benedetti had coincided when he was a journalist in his twenties, on a radio channel. Week He revealed what happened and the case started. Meza recounted “the ordeal” to which, according to her, she had been subjected. The Government began to tremble, this was the type of issues that Petro assured that he was going to banish from his side, unlike previous governments.
Sarabia has always declared herself innocent; she says that she did not ask the employee to take a polygraph. Meza has a different version: “I think I did know.” This mess, one of the biggest that Colombia has experienced in these two years of Petro’s Presidency, has put it in a spiral from which it does not know how to get out. His entire life has been turned upside down. She finds herself in no man’s land, disconnected from reality, even though she consumes hours and hours of news on her cell phone. He has barely seen people in more than a year: “No one can live like this, you drive yourself crazy.”
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