By Antonio Sanguino, EL ESPECTADOR, November 11, 2024
https://www.elespectador.com/opinion/columnistas/antonio-sanguino/pegasuandose-nuestra-soberania/
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
Everything about Pegasus smells bad. The more silence they exhibit, and the more justifications they offer, the more horrifying it turns out to be. Now they’re surprising us with a version proceeding from United States government officials according to which the electronic Pegasus spying software was acquired with “legal funding” from that country within the scope of “the habitual cooperation between the United States and Colombia”; and that they decided not to inform the then-President of Colombia, Iván Duque; and that its use by agencies of the two countries would be limited exclusively to the pursuit of drug trafficking organizations. Well, well, well . . . .
The Biden administration officials, in meetings with our Ambassador in Washington, and apparently, even with President Gustavo Petro himself, have traced the timeline of this mysterious spying operation. They have said that the acquisition of the software was settled upon in 2020 at the end of the Trump administration. And that it was then used for two years, exactly at the time of Colombia’s social explosion, and its campaigns for Congress and for President; and that they ended the Pegasus spying program before Gustavo Petro was inaugurated as Colombia’s President.
The White House spokesmen added that in 2021, once complaints became known around the world about inappropriate and illegal uses of Pegasus for serious violations of human rights against political opponents, NGO’s, and journalists, usage of it in the United States was stopped and was prohibited. And in 2023 President Biden, in an Executive Order, prohibited the purchase of spying programs from sellers like NSO Group, the makers of Pegasus.
Not to rain on the parade here while the uribistas are celebrating these “explanations”, but they do generate some new questions. We still don’t know why, in an operation that is legal, they would use millions of dollars In cash and transport them surreptitiously in flights without any other purpose. They haven’t told us who was operating the spying software, and in which of the installations of our security forces it was being operated. We can’t be sure about the list of those who were spied on, if they were exclusively drug traffickers, and what the results of the interceptions were. It’s astonishing, if we believe the gringos, that there were complaints about Pegasus in a lot of countries since 2019, with extension thereof and more solid documentation in 2021, yet it kept on being used until the middle of 2022.
What is clear is that the political and criminal responsibility, by action or by omission, falls on then-President Iván Duque. It’s highly unlikely that he was not aware of an operation of that magnitude. If he failed to see anything and failed to hear anything, that reveals cathedral-sized incompetence. But if he did know about it, he accepted or approved an interweaving that, far from constituting military or judicial cooperation between two governments, violated our sovereignty. Duque had sworn as Head of State that he would direct international relations in accordance with our Constitution and Laws and that he would defend their independence, the nation’s honor, and the inviolability of our territory.
Duque forgot, or never knew, that our Constitution mandated that “Colombia’s foreign relations are based on national sovereignty, respect for the people’s self-determination, and recognition of the principles of international law”. Now we have to remind him that our criminal code, Article 455, defines the crime of “treason” as “performing acts that tend to impair the territorial integrity of Colombia, submit all or part of it to foreign domination, or to do damage to the nature of a sovereign state, to divide national unity”. This conduct by then-President Duque must be rebuked, censured, and punished both legally and politically, so that we don’t continue Pegasusizing our dignity as a nation.