The Socialist Party is in trouble from today that five testimonies of women were published against the mayor of Cerrillos Arturo Aguirre, whom they accuse of sexual harassment and abuse. The party’s directive, according to Ciper’s report that made the facts known, became aware of the complaint that is already in the hands of the prosecution and the IPO, but dismissed it as a “deformed” investigation, i.e. the Public Prosecutor’s Office has not officially informed Aguirre, that he is charged with a crime.
With this justification, the collective headed by Senator Alvaro Elizalde, decided to keep Arturo Aguirre’s candidacy for re-election in the mayoral part of Cerrillos. In this line the mayor himself defended himself by ensuring that it is a maneuver to discredit him, in the electoral context, of one of his officials, the director of Municipal Works. also a PS militant, Sergio Castillo.
However, the police report containing the testimony of women whistleblowers, while acknowledging Castillo’s potential vested interests in her testimony as a witness, also states that women’s accounts “are consistent” and “would account for a common behavioral pattern of the accused, who would be according to the testimonies of the interviewees, a sexual harasser“, the report says.
The background contained in the report, account for touches, kisses by force, night calls and even sexual intercourse under threat of losing the job.
As soon as the facts were known, the waters within the PS were stirred. One of the first to speak was the party’s presidential candidate, Paula Narváez. “In this situation you always have to be on the side of the victim, you always have to believe the victim, you always have to pay attention to what they are raising and it seems to me that in this institutions have to act from a gender perspective to investigate and to judge,” he said during a press guideline in El Bosque. But Narváez also directly pointed to a definition of the party. She said she hopes the party’s Supreme Court will “make the appropriate decisions consistent with having declared a feminist party”
Carolina Garrido, a candidate for the PS Constituent Convention by District 8, reacted in the same line. “I ask the Socialist Party, which has declared itself feminist and anti-patriarcal, to rule on whether or not she had a history of the case and whether she had them, which were the reasons for supporting the candidacy of the mayor of Cerrillos,” she said on her Twitter account.
Something similar was requested by Deputy RN for the district that includes Cerrillos, Camilo Morán. The MP pushed the PS to “know if they condemn or endorse this and what action they will take.” He also stated that it is a “very serious denunciation and the statements of the current mayor’s team that this is a political montage in the midst of the municipal campaign are worse.”
Cerrillos’ legal director, Mauricio Muñoz, who replaces Aguirre during the election campaign, is close to party president Alvaro Elizalde. The senator told The Third that “because of the seriousness of the allegations, as a board of directors we have asked the Supreme Court (TS) to launch an investigation into it. Under the law of political parties, this is a competence that falls to the TS.”
This is a new problem that comes from the municipal world. Three years ago, the relationship of the mayor of San Ramón Miguel Angel Aguilera was uncovered, with some close drug traffickers and former officials of the municipality, prompting his expulsion from the party. However, Aguilera has some of his close to him in the party structure, such as his chief of staff Eduardo Bermudez, secretary of Social Organizations, of the collective. In addition, the PS was omitted by not submitting nominations to compete with Aguilera. The mayor’s structure gave a good number of votes, 1,405 to the candidate for governor, who nevertheless did not win the primary.
Yesterday, the D.C. candidate from the
