Infoebae, January 11, 2023
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
The President reacted to the possible wiretaps of his presidential campaign by the Police, according to a newspaper investigation. The country has already been convicted of “chuzadas”[1] by Gustavo Petro and his family.
Revealed in fragments since June 8, 2022, days before the runoff between Rodolfo Hernández and Gustavo Petro, the so-called “petrovideos” shook the final stretch of the election campaign for the presidency. Although it was thought that the controversial chapter was over, new information has the President talking about a possible Watergate.
TWEET:
Gustavo Petro
@petrogustavo
Governmental representative in Colombia
With the confirmation of this investigation, we are looking at another “Watergate”. An administration spying on the opposition, interfering
with its communications and in the midst of an election campaign.
I will ask the Attorney General’s Office for a thorough investigation of
the wiretaps conducted in my campaign.
TWEET:
NOTICIAS UNO
@NoticisUno
#NoticiasUno Investigation Noticias Uno: Petro campaign
was “chuzada” by Police cyberintelligence
(photo)
7:19 PM, Jan 10, 2023
The videos of private meetings of Petro’s campaign team, using the ZOOM platform, were obtained by the newsmagazine SEMANA, allegedly through an anonymous source. The reaction of the Historic Pact Party right now was centered on determining whether there was a leak by a member of their team, or if it was a case of interception by some government or independent intelligence agency.
The political movement that brought Petro to the Presidency was inclined toward the theory that the campaign had been wiretapped by the administration of Iván Duque, and the revelations from the investigation by NOTICIAS UNO appear to confirm the Historic Pact Party’s suspicions. According to the newscast, in the first half of 2022, several Police officials distinguished for their cyberintelligence skills were selected for the mission of infiltrating Gustavo Petro’s campaign for President, and they were successful. The videos that were leaked of private meetings were the product of that operation.
The officials were attached to the Intelligence Command of the National Police (Dipol in Spanish), then headed by General Norberto Mujica Jaime. He had been the Director of Inpec (National Penitentiary and Prison Institute) and had had four different positions in Dipol before he became the Director of Intelligence.
Mujica was one of the officials who left the Police with the arrival of the new command staff appointed by President Petro in August of 2022, along with General Jorge Luis Vargas, Director of the Police at the time of the alleged wiretaps. He had also been Director of Intelligence in the Juan Manuel Santos administration, and had worked closely with former Attorney General Néstor Humberto Martínez when he headed the Criminal Investigation and Interpol Command.
Paradoxically, just hours before the NOTICIAS UNO investigation was to be published, former Senator Gustavo Bolívar told the news magazine SEMANA how a private investigation had learned of the existence of an “apparatus” put together from the Office of the President of Colombia. Specifically, the President’s Council for National Security was dedicated to wiretapping and “sophisticated hacks” and had the capacity to record the screen of any device. He didn’t blame the news media, and pointed to the Duque administration.
Between 2018 and 2022, two officials passed through this high-level Council. The first was Rafael Guarín Cotrino, appointed in August of last year by decree of former President Iván Duque to be in charge of Bogotá’s Notary Office #64. Guarín had been Vice Minister of Defense in the Juan Manuel Santos administration, and had defended tooth and nail Álvaro Uribe’s second re-election in the referendum, which was subsequently halted by the Constitutional Court. In his opinion columns in SEMANA at that time, Guarín criticized the high Courts severely, the same Courts that were wiretapped illegally by the now-defunct Administrative Department of Security (DAS in Spanish).
“The Álvaro Uribe administration proposed a structural reform of the judicial branch, not a moment too soon. In the light of the government’s social and democratic legal theory, not only the clash between the Courts, as well as the one between the Supreme Court of Justice and the administration, have consequences: structural problems in the Constitution, says part of a column by Guarín titled ‘A Judiciary Out Of Control’, published December 17, 2009, two months before the Constitutional Court said no to the referendum.”
Guarín’s opinions have also been openly opposed to Gustavo Petro. In May of 2021, when he was still a government official, he wrote in his Twitter account that Petro “stimulated” the massacres. The post was deleted by the Counsellor at the time because of the controversy it had aroused.
TWEETS:
Rafael Guarín
@RafaGuarín
Petro, the instigator: Like when he was in the M19, he dreams of massacres, he loves them, he longs for them, he stimulates them. The
Armed Forces have been ordered to carry out their constitutional mission with absolute respect for human rights. That is the rule in the Rule of Law and in a democratic regime.
Gustavo Petro
@petrogustavo
You, Duque, have ordered the massacres.
Twitter.com/Iván Duque/stat . .
12:03 p.m. May 18, 2021
Guarín also had to go out and provide an explanation because one of his cousins was involved in the assassination of the President of Haití, Jovenel Moise.
In January 2022, Juan Camilo Restrepo Gómez relieved Guarín as High Counsellor for National Security. Restrepo was the Legislative Assistant to the Minister of Defense, was Vice Minister of Interior, High Commissioner for Peace for Iván Duque, and now is one of the Conservative Party’s shots for the Mayor’s Office in Medellín.
In the case of the National Intelligence Command (DNI in Spanish), the entity that replaced the DAS, it was commanded by Retired Vice Admiral Rodolfo Amaya Kerquelen throughout the Iván Duque administration. Amaya was the chief of the Casa Militar[2] at the time of Álvaro Uribe.
The shadows of the “chuzadas” now over Petro
The illegal wiretaps are nothing new for President Petro. In 2020, the Cundinamarca Tribunal ordered the government to indemnify Gustavo Petro in an amount greater than 500 million pesos (roughly USD $175,000 at today’s exchange rates). It had determined that he had been the victim of “chuzadas” by the DAS. The decision held that not only the now-defunct Department of Administrative Security, but also the Administrative Department of the President’s Office (Dapre in Spanish) and the Unit for Financial Information and Analysis were responsible for the illegal wiretaps.
The decision concluded that the DAS, the UIAF, and the President’s Office worked together to carry out the illegal stalking of Petro and his family in the years between 2006 and 2009. A decision by the same Tribunal in March 2021ordered the monetary compensation to Petro’s sons to be increased. Each of them received 72 million pesos (roughly USD $15,500 at today’s exchange rates) for the harm caused by the wiretaps.
Several officials in the Uribe administration were convicted: César Mauricio Velásquez, the former press secretary; Bernardo Moreno, the former Secretary-General of the President’s Office; Edmundo del Castillo, former legal secretary, and María del Pilar Hurtado, former Director of the DAS. Also former officials Jorge Alberto Lagos, former DAS Director of Counterintelligence, and Retired Captain Fernando Tabares, who was the DAS Intelligence Director between 2007 and 2009.
Ever since he became President, Petro was careful to appoint people he trusted to the government’s intelligence agencies that had spied on him in earlier times. The management of National Intelligence is now in the hands of Manuel Alberto Casanova, a former M19 guerrilla, and the National Protection Unit will now be managed by Augusto Rodríguez, who once was also part of that group of armed guerrillas.
[1] “Chuzadas” is a colloquial expression meaning illegal wiretaps.
[2] Casa Militar is the Presidential Guard Battalion of the Colombian Army.