Rodolfo Hernández, a businessman who jumped into Colombian politics in recent years and He even disputed the presidency with the current president Gustavo Petro in 2022, died on Monday after suffering from colon cancer, the hospital where he was hospitalized reported. He was 79 years old.
Hernández announced in March 2024 that he had terminal cancer during a hearing in which a judge convicted him of corruption when he was mayor of Bucaramanga (2016-2019), a city in northeastern Colombia. Hernández appealed his conviction and always insisted on his innocence.
“I have terminal cancer… I was thinking of everything except ending up prosecuted for things I didn’t do,” he lamented, sobbing in the hearing.
The businessman was in the intensive care unit of the International Hospital of Colombia in Bucaramanga after undergoing surgery on his liver, an organ that had also been affected by cancer.
The hospital said in a statement that Hernandez died “due to complications from his metastatic neoplastic disease of the colon.”
Hernández was born in 1945 in Piedecuesta, a town near Bucaramanga. His father was a tailor and his mother owned a tobacco factory. He managed to study Civil Engineering at the National University, a public and reputable university.
He made his fortune with the company Constructora HG, managed by his wife Socorro Oliveros, with whom he married in the 1970s and had four children.
The real estate magnate burst into the 2022 election campaign, achieving national resonance with his only electoral experience as mayor of Bucaramanga a few years earlier. Thus, he became the surprise of the elections, reaching the runoff with an anti-corruption speech.
President Petro sent a message of solidarity to the politician’s family from his X account, formerly Twitter. “I regret the death of Rodolfo Hernández after a long battle against cancer, a hug to his family.”
After losing the runoff, Hernández briefly occupied a seat in the Senate, which he was entitled to by coming in second in the presidential elections. However, he resigned from Congress because he considered that it was not the ideal setting to exploit his abilities as an executor of public works.
He then ran for governor of Santander —whose capital is Bucaramanga— continuing with his anti-corruption banner and one step above the mayor’s office. However, his aspiration was cut short by three disciplinary sanctions from the Attorney General’s Office, one of them for hitting a councilor when he was mayor.
Hernández devoted himself to taking care of his health and defending himself in the criminal process for corruption that he faced until his death for allegedly directing a consulting contract in 2016 for about $8,500 to implement new technologies in the management of waste from the landfill of the city he governed.
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