Francisco Barbosa, the chameleon

Francisco Barbosa closes his stay in the Attorney General's Office in the same way he arrived, surrounded by controversy and at the center of national discussion. In 2020, the newly appointed prosecutor — “the second most important position” in the country, as he himself warned — caused noise due to his extreme closeness to then-president Iván Duque, his best friend from his university years, due to doubts about his ability to act. in an independent way. And now, upon his departure, accusations are raining down on him for politicizing the institution, when he himself has declared that he has carried out “the best prosecutor's office in history.” Most Colombians will remember him, for better or worse, for his management in these last four years. Typecasting doesn't work on him. He was one before becoming a prosecutor, another in the first part of his mandate and one more in the final stage. It is impossible to predict whether that mutability will persist, especially when he has not denied the rumors of his presidential aspirations.

The Supreme Court of Justice, in January 2020, elected him after several rounds of voting. It was no surprise. For days before, his name had been gaining strength, despite being the least recognized of the shortlist that, two months before, the then president had sent to that court. He prevailed over more experienced lawyers who held better positions in the Government. María Clara González was the legal secretary of the Presidency and Camilo Gómez directed the National Legal Defense Agency of the State. They did not add a single vote. Barbosa, appointed by Duque in 2018 as his high advisor for Human Rights, obtained the support of the 16 judges who made up the Court at that time. On the day of his inauguration, two weeks later, he took it upon himself to remember it. “I assume the position of attorney general of the Nation as a challenge, not only for being the youngest attorney general in the history of the country, but for having been unanimously elected by the Supreme Court of Justice,” he stated minutes after taking office. oath.

Throughout his tenure he would make clear how much he valued his image. He predicted Week, a few months after taking office, he was already leading “the best prosecutor's office in history”; he justified his choice before Snail News saying that he had the “greatest training” among his contemporaries; He left commemorative plaques in his name at the entity's headquarters throughout the country; and a few weeks ago he had 5,500 books printed that detail his time at the entity. And it was not just a matter of projecting his omnipotent image: he used his escort body to walk his pets and took her daughter on institutional trips when the country was confined, in the first months of the pandemic.

When he took office, his main letter of introduction was his academic career. After joining Duque at the Law School of the Sergio Arboleda University, she studied a specialization, two master's degrees and a doctorate at the University of Nantes, in France. Later he combined his work as a legal advisor to public and private organizations with teaching and research, teaching at the Externado University and the University of Los Andes, two of the most prestigious educational centers in Colombia. Lawyer Ramiro Bejarano, professor emeritus at the Externado, remembers that Barbosa tried to gain the appreciation of Fernando Hinestrosa, the all-powerful rector of the university until his death in 2012, so that he would designate him a position as a teacher. “He was not one of those teachers that the students stood out for, but he was very prone to trying to make friends with everyone,” he tells EL PAÍS. From his Sunday column in El Espectador, Bejarano has been very critical of Barbosa's work in the Prosecutor's Office, including the most recent one, in which he denounces having been the target of surveillance by the prosecutor's subordinates “without knowing why and without being notified.”

Barbosa was a professor at the Externado from 2010 to 2018, when Duque assumed the head of state and incorporated him into his Administration. That octennial, when he began to become visible as an academic and opinion-maker, is the most paradoxical and ambivalent phase of his public life. Initially he was a faithful defender of the negotiation with the FARC, a controversial issue of which Duque and his party, the Uribista Democratic Center, were opponents. His columns in Time They are proof of what Francisco Barbosa thought at that time. “Opponents of peace must understand that submission is not the formula to achieve it. The only alternative to putting an end to this gruesome war is to understand once and for all that, beyond political conflicts, peace and prospective justice must go hand in hand, allowing reconciliation. It is the only way,” he wrote in October 2015, laying the foundations for the contradiction that he would lead three and a half years later.

And in 2018 he accepted the position of advisor to Iván Duque, a president who based his narrative on disapproving the agreement with the guerrilla. In fact, in March 2019, he was appointed spokesperson for the objections that the Duke himself presented to Congress against the law that regulated the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the transitional justice court that was born with the Peace Agreement. . It was the biggest legal attack on the implementation of the Agreement. The objections were unsuccessful but Barbosa's disagreement came to the fore. In addition to his publications—including a book titled Transitional justice or impunity? whose prologue was written by Humberto De La Calle, the head of the Government's negotiating team in the peace process—his failed application to be a judge of the JEP was recalled. It was thus confirmed that a new Barbosa had been born.

Their positions were adjusting along with the winds of change that were blowing in the upper echelons of power. Another Externado professor, who asked not to reveal his identity, recognizes his talent for adapting and carving out a place for himself in closed social spaces, such as academic and political circles. “He reads the national panorama well and clearly identifies what people want to hear, even if they are controversial things,” he says.

Already steeped in the Uribism thesis, his friend and boss, the president, nominated him to be attorney general. Nobody predicted then what was coming with his election, when he came to occupy a privileged position before the most emblematic judicial case of the last two decades. In August 2020, former President Álvaro Uribe, Duque's political boss, resigned from his seat in the Senate, in the midst of the investigation that the Supreme Court of Justice was carrying out against him for bribery of witnesses and procedural fraud. After his resignation, the process passed into the hands of the Prosecutor's Office. In his first semester in office, the eyes of the country turned to Barbosa.

The file did not last long on his desk. He quickly assigned it to Gabriel Ramón Jaimes, head of the prosecutors delegated to the Supreme Court, who proceeded to request the closure of the case, considering that there was insufficient merit to attribute criminal conduct to Uribe. A Bogotá judge denied the request. Jaimes stepped away from the case and, since then, Barbosa has entrusted the task to four other prosecutors. The justice system, on three occasions, has refused to grant the request for preclusion. The handling of the process has sparked criticism of the outgoing attor
ney general, who is accused of favoring his friends. “He had a Prosecutor's Office with an agenda to persecute people who were not to his liking, people who were uncomfortable for the Government. Furthermore, he also turned a blind eye to many matters that he should have processed,” says Ramiro Bejarano. One of the determinations that Barbosa is most questioned about was the file of the scandal known as 'ñeñepolitics', regarding the alleged purchase of votes in favor of Iván Duque during the 2018 presidential election.

From the right, on the other hand, they see his management with different eyes. For María del Rosario Guerra, former senator of the Democratic Center, Barbosa's work was characterized as “decent.” “It was a Prosecutor's Office that sought to speed up many difficult and important processes, such as the one currently underway against the son of President Gustavo Petro,” he says in reference to the investigation being carried out against Nicolás Petro, the current's first-born son. first president, for illicit enrichment and money laundering. The investigations also revolve around alleged contributions of money by drug traffickers to the 2022 presidential campaign.

Depending on which shore you ask, Barbosa's assessment will change. According to figures from the Prosecutor's Office itself, in this four-year period, 6,689 members of criminal structures were captured and prosecuted; Dairo Antonio Úsuga, alias Otoniel, chief of the Gulf Clan; and 3,579 convictions were obtained for acts related to corruption. Others remember, however, that no great progress was made in landmark cases, such as Odebrecht. For criminal lawyer and former prosecutor Camilo Burbano there is an additional issue that transcends the ability of any attorney general to influence and that must be taken into account when evaluating his performance. “There is a structural problem, for several years, linked to judicial congestion and inefficiency. It would be necessary to see if, from his position, a prosecutor can improve that. It is evident that there is still a long way to go,” he adds.

Bejarano, Guerra and Burbano agree on one thing: Barbosa let his temperament get to him. “He was arrogant at times,” admits the former congresswoman. The last example of this trait took place on February 5. At a Prosecutor's Office headquarters in Tunja, Boyacá, the maintenance and repair of the bathrooms was carried out. A metal plaque recognizing the tiny work was screwed to the wall of the place. “During the administration of the Attorney General of the Nation, Francisco Barbosa Delgado, this headquarters was managed and adapted,” the sheet states.

The summary of Barbosa's time in the Prosecutor's Office would be incomplete without mentioning his frequent clashes with President Gustavo Petro, of whom he became a clear critic, and not only an institutional counterweight. Although it would be unfair to blame all the confrontations on the outgoing prosecutor — the president has blamed him for seeking a coup d'état — he has been openly confrontational. Although on some occasions he used institutional channels to express his dissent with Petro, such as when he expressed his criticism of the Total Peace law, he also lowered the debate to unprecedented levels. He compared the president to Pablo Escobar and called him a “dictator,” among other statements. Sergio Guzmán, director of the consulting firm Colombia Risk Analysis, sees a calculated maneuver in this attitude of dispute. “It is a positioning of his figure, his name, as part of the opposition. That is not right in a democracy. The prosecutor did not waste opportunities to make headlines, to talk about what a president is and should do, when many could say that before Petro he did not have those same attitudes.

Barbosa does not deny, but neither does he confirm that he has electoral aspirations. “Every time I speak they say that I am in a political campaign when what interests me is fulfilling my role as prosecutor and I will do so until February 13,” was the response he gave to Snail Radio. If he decides to be a candidate, his actions in the Prosecutor's Office will be a determining factor when Colombians evaluate him. Your ability to adapt to circumstances will come to light, again.

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