Gustavo Petro announced that the lawyer Alfonso Prada will be his Minister of the Interior.
“He has been a Councilor and Representative to the Chamber. He will be responsible for relations with the legislature and for drawing up policies on human rights, citizen participation and territorial planning,” the president-elect wrote on his Twitter account.
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Prada was born in Bogotá on October 6, 1963. He was private secretary of the leader Luis Carlos Galán during his presidential campaign for the New Liberalism movement, who fell to the murderous bullets fired by the Medellin cartel. Since then, he says, he has insisted that the country have another destiny.
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He was a Bogotá councilor for three terms since 1998 with the support of the Liberal Party, where his colleagues named him the best councilor in Bogotá on three occasions based on the evaluation carried out by the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce, EL TIEMPO and the Corona Foundation.
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Alfonso Prada, head of debate for Gustavo Petro.
Cesar Melgarejo / TIME
In 2010, he was launched as a representative to the Chamber for the capital of the country with the endorsement of the Green Party, in the period between 2010 and 2014, the year in which he coordinated the re-election campaign of Juan Manuel Santos in Bogotá.
In fact, Santos appointed him director of the Sena and in March 2017, he also appointed him as secretary general of the Presidencya demonstration of the personal closeness he has with the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
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Between August and October 2016, Prada took a leave of absence to work on the campaign for the Plebiscite for Peace, the issue that he is most passionate about. And that he considers one of the great shortcomings of the government of President Iván Duque.
In the recent presidential campaign, Gustavo Petro, now the president-elect, named him his head of debate. After winning the elections on June 19, Prada set himself the goal of seeking peace with the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army, Eln.