By Jaíro Gómez, SEMANA, November 18, 2020
https://www.semana.com/opinion/articulo/nhmn-embajador/202022/
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
Only an evil human being could come up with the idea of setting a trap to annihilate a Peace Agreement whose admirable purpose was to save lives, recover the dignity of millions of victims, and restore to the country the confidence and peace of mind it had lost during more than five decades of war.
The idea of designing a plan to tear the Peace to shreds and go back to war could only fit in the mind of a psychopath. Unfortunately he partially accomplished his goal. Nearly two thousand former combatants of the now-defunct FARC went back to their weapons because of that macabre plan, and they have been producing destruction and killing of innocent campesinos, men, women, and children. Amen to the humble soldiers and police who have died confronting this useless battle.
Yes, we’re talking about Néstor Humberto Martínez Neira (NHMN), the former Attorney General of Colombia. The former Minister of all of the governments, allied with the bankers and with big capital. That gentleman arrived at the Attorney General’s Office with one purpose only, to destroy the Peace in Colombia; that was his declared enemy.
NHMN, when he was debating the bill that created the Integrated System of Truth, Justice, Reparations, and No Repetition (SVIRNR) while he was Attorney General, opposed the transitional justice system and used every legal sophistry to prevent the ordinary legal system from losing jurisdiction over the cases of the insurgents who had negotiated the Peace, with the conviction that this would imply the imminent break-up of the Peace Agreement.
His attack, aimed at weakening the Agreement, was so fierce that he succeeded in gaining a ruling that civilian third parties who had supported crimes in the war would not be required to appear before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), in order to cover for the country’s decadent ruling class, represented by the traditional politicians, cattle ranchers, industrialists and economic groups allied with the paramilitaries and financiers of the war in Colombia.
Not content with that achievement, he opted for something loathsome, a conspiracy. He worked with DEA agents, backed by the Embassy of the United States, an ally in stitching together an entrapment that would lead to the extradition of two leaders of the FARC who had signed the Peace Agreement: Jesús Santrich and Iván Márquez (their aliases). To do that, as revealed by EL ESPECTADOR, after listening to more than 25,000 hours of telephone wiretaps, NHMN’s prosecutors, together with two DEA agents, put together a frame-up with cocaine and millions of dollars at its center, to implicate the two negotiators and blast the Peace Agreement into a thousand pieces.
How vicious! How disproportionate, for God’s sake! Not only were the guerrillas to suffer from the sophisticated entrapment, but people who had presented a vision of support for the Peace Agreement, like the former Senator and defender of human rights, Piedad Córdoba, and the Vice President, General Óscar Naranjo, were also going to suffer. It’s noteworthy that they were also wiretapping General Naranjo, who is recognized around the world for his battle against illegal drugs and who was a signer of the Peace Agreement, as was pointed out in the newspaper article. In this case, NHMN ought to explain if he was following somebody else’s orders and trying to smear the former Vice President. For now, the former Senator has already announced a lawsuit against the person she referred to, without any euphemism, as “a crook”.
That’s Néstor Humberto Martínez Neira, the brand new Ambassador of Colombia to the court of Spain, the country where he owns an apartment worth 3 million euros in the most exclusive part of Madrid, without having reported that to Colombia’s tax authorities.
We, the democrats of Colombia, implore President Pedro Sánchez and his foreign ministry to keep in mind the wrongdoing of this individual who preferred the war to the peace, and by whose fault we now are entering a new spiral of the violence that had diminished significantly after the signing of the Peace Agreement. That gentleman does not represent the Colombian people; he represents Iván Duque, Álvaro Uribe and their other allies who are tearing the Peace Agreement to shreds. We hope that Moncloa will investigate in depth before it gives its blessing to this undeserving aspirant to be our Ambassador there.