Former Ecuadorian presidential candidate andres arauz announced that it will denounce Colombia’s attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, before the accusations commission of the House of Representatives of the Colombian Congress for “abuse of power” for allegedly “improperly” interfering in the 2021 Ecuadorian elections.
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The candidate will resort to this political instance, as well as end the judicial channels and take him before the Inter-American System of Human Rights, before the inaction of the Prosecutor’s Office itself to the complaint that it has already had in its possession since 2021.
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“At the end of January (2021) an aggressive disinformation campaign and interference in the Ecuadorian elections began with an absolutely false and tendentious publication, accusing me of allegedly having received money from the ELN to finance the campaign“, denounced Arauz in a press conference this Tuesday in Bogotá.
Added to the complaint of abuse of authority “by an arbitrary and unfair act” is the alleged crime of “procedural fraud” and the alleged “denial of justice due to investigative omissions” in the case of the accusations against Arauz, winner of the first round in the presidential elections of that country and that he lost the second against the current president, Guillermo Lasso.
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For now, the Colombian prosecutor has referred to the announcement.
Background
The origin of the tensions resides in 2021 when Prosecutor Barbosa traveled to the Andean country to deliver the evidence showing that the Arauz campaign allegedly received a contribution of $80,000 from the guerrilla of the National Liberation Army (ELN)..
These data were collected from the documents of the confiscated computer of alias “Uriel”, ELN guerrilla leader, who was killed in 2020 during a military operation in the Colombian department of Chocó (west).
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As explained by the plaintiffs in a statement, Barbosa and his partner in Ecuador, Diana Salazar, accused Arauz in February 2021 despite a tax report concluding that “in the expert opinion carried out on the electronic devices of alias “Uriel”, there is no reference to such financing.”
Arguments of the accusation
The legal representative of Arauz in Colombia, Eduardo Montealegre, explained that The action will be based on five central arguments to demonstrate that “the report where the ELN supposedly financed part of the campaign is false.”
Montealegre, who was also the attorney general of Colombia, assured that there is an intelligence document from the “Colombian public force” where “it is expressly stated” that “false evidence was planted in Uriel’s computer.”
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“Why Iván Duque (then president of Colombia), head of State intelligence (…), allows a nation’s attorney general to present false evidence to disrupt an electoral process?”, claimed the lawyer as a question that The commission will have to respond.
Reaching out to the Inter-American Human Rights System
These facts, according to Montealegre, were criminally denounced before the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office for the alleged commission of the crimes of “falsification of a private document, abuse of authority (…) and procedural fraud”, in March 2021.
However, the former prosecutor denounced that “Currently the investigation is stopped due to the repeated refusal of the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate”, which denotes a “zero willingness to seek the truth”. Consequently, another of the legal actions that Arauz will file will be to “reiterate” the request for investigative proceedings in the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office in relation to this complaint.
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Montealegre also announced that “if these omissions persist” that affect the “right to honor and effective judicial protection” of his client, once all avenues of the Colombian Justice have been exhausted, they will file a lawsuit before the Inter-American Human Rights System. against the Colombian and Ecuadorian states.
EFE
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